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With the referendum, the resignation of David Cameron, the installation of a new PM and a Labour leadership challenge, Radio 4's topical impressions show has been on air through arguably the most turbulent period British politics has seen in a generation. As they put together the final episode of the series, producer Bill Dare and script editor Laurence Howarth reflect on reacting to the changing news, every Friday at 6.30pm.

Bill Dare: I’ve been producing topical comedy for a very long time (I produced the award-winning Fall of Rome special...) but I’ve never known a political landscape to change so quickly, and so surprisingly, as it has over the last five weeks. And I’ve never been more pleased to be doing radio rather than television – the speed with which one can react to news on radio beats TV by miles.

The cast get ready to record

Laurence Howarth: I agree, this has, for obvious reasons, been the most challenging and complicated series of Dead Ringers that I’ve ever worked on. Many of the sketches have been written at incredibly short notice – I wrote a parody of David Cameron’s resignation speech pretty much in real time – but if anything the greater challenge was trying to work out what might happen after the recording and before the broadcast of the show, and how we could cover ourselves against any eventuality. wasn’t too bad in this respect because we recorded it on the Friday lunchtime and most of the news (result, resignations, armageddon) had already happened.

Bill Dare: Yes – the post referendum show was mostly written between 4am and 11am on the Friday after the ballot – we weren’t going to take a chance by writing a script based on what the polls had forecast – not after the last election. Even so, the news changed so quickly that sketches had to be torn up or radically rewritten after the read-through.

Duncan Wisbey writes lots of songs for the show (as well as doing many impersonations) but we’d struggled to keep up with the news as it takes longer to write, arrange the instrumentation, and rehearse a song than a sketch. We had two songs ready to go, depending on the result: one was Paloma Faith singing Only Leave Can Hurt Like This, and the other was Nothing Compares EU (geddit?). The Leave song was far better, so as I saw the results come in, I couldn’t help being a little pleased that we could go with the best song. That’s what doing satire does to you.

Then, about an hour after David Cameron helpfully resigned (just as we were finishing our script) Duncan texted me the lyrics to a version of Elton John’s Goodbye English Rose ("Goodbye Number Ten") and we recorded it an hour later. Sometimes pressure is the mother of invention.

Laurence Howarth: And then we reverted to the usual pattern of recording on a Thursday evening for a Friday evening broadcast and never have those 24 or so hours seemed so long. As we were about to start recording the show that week, fresh from rewriting most of it in the light of Boris Johnson's surprise announcement at lunchtime that he wouldn’t stand for the Tory leadership, there was a fevered rumour that Jeremy Corbyn was about to resign (as if). So we had to very quickly write and record a series of patches, as it were, that would make our Labour sketches work if that did indeed happen.

A page of annotated script from episode 5 of the series

Bill Dare: The credit for keeping the show funny, topical and at times hard-hitting has to go to the fantastic writing team headed by stalwarts Tom Jamieson and Nev Fountain with Laurence as script editor together with some new young writers providing the other half of the show. Despite the advance of modern technology we haven’t found a better way to make the changes than with pen and ink. Just crossing out lines and changing them for ones that are funnier and more topical can take an hour and a half and it’s the last thing we do before the final rehearsal on mic.

Laurence Howarth: A good example of re-writes after the rehearsal was in episode 4: the second round result of the Tory leadership election was announced as we were rehearsing that week’s show, and we’d prepared two versions of our Tory sketches – one based on it being May v Leadsom and another based on May v Gove. But I’d also had this funny feeling that Theresa May’s opponent might stand down and she might end up becoming PM before the show went out the day after. So I actually wrote a spoof of Theresa May’s speech upon entering Downing Street before she’d delivered it.

On the Monday of the following week, as we started thinking about episode 5, Bill sent out an email to the writers saying, “It might be a tad calmer this week”. Two hours later, Andrea Leadsom had stood down (very considerate of her to do it on a Monday) and David Cameron was calling the removal men. So another frantic week, but at least I was able to harvest the spoof Theresa May speech we hadn’t used the previous week for that week’s show.

Bill Dare: One thing I never need to worry about is the cast. I know they’ll be able to cope with anything we throw at them – sometimes they’re reading from a script that looks like it has more scrawl on it than typed script. As long as it’s funny, everyone’s happy.

Laurence Howarth: Absolutely, the cast have been so flexible and very keen that the show be as up-to-minute as it can. I have at times over the last month or so longed for just one normal, simple news week but for all the difficulties, I wouldn’t have had it any other way. It’s been a pleasure and a privilege to be on Radio 4 in that prime Friday 6.30pm slot during this period. I’ve worked on Dead Ringers for a long time and done many, many recordings, but this is one series I will never forget.