Steve Braunias' Secret Diary of 2015

Key presented himself as a steadier target all throughout the year. Photo / File

The year after election year ought not bring forth funnier and more desperate acts of foolishness in public, but it did, it so did, and I was fair swept off my feet trying to play catch-up in my role as satirist on Saturday.

My weekly Secret Diary series - now in its dotage, with seven years on the clock - seldom lacked for material. The trick, as ever, was to write believable fantasies of people who had done something unbelievable.

Exhibit A: John Key and the ponytail. This sort of thing just doesn't happen, but there it was. I never thought of the PM's relentless pranking of the waitress as anything resembling a sackable offence but it was certainly outlandish behaviour even for the Prime Minister of a milk republic buried somewhere in the South Pacific.

How best to approach it as satire? I wasn't equal to the task. I wrote a few lines on the affair and wished it would go away. There is sometimes something terribly humourless about satire; it doesn't cope terribly well when life imitates parody.

Happily, Key presented himself as a steadier target all throughout the year. It's difficult to take him seriously as he goes about his business in New Zealand. It's impossible when he's out of the country, and strides the world stage like a nobody.

There he was this year in the Middle East, where he was explicitly on a trade mission, and then at Apec, where he was implicitly on a trade mission. Let him through! He's a milkman.

Key topped the chart with six diaries devoted to his doings. Andrew Little was a long way behind - he doesn't do much that's notably foolish, perhaps because he doesn't seem to do much at all.

Fortunately, Trade Minister Tim Groser kept himself and the Secret Diary very busy in 2015. His bumbling, self-important pursuit of the pot of gold at the end of the TTP rainbow was a comic turn that lasted all year.

Politics, politics. There was always something going on, always someone to jeer. But satire cannot live on politics alone. Fortunately so many other people in public life made themselves available, chiefly Mike Hosking.

He made numerous appearances in the Diary, sometimes just in cameo roles - a little bit of Hosking goes a long way, a lot of Hosking is going too far. I included him on a panel to discuss one of the year's most dramatic cultural announcements: "I was lying next to the Prime Minister when the news came through that One Direction might be going their separate ways ..."

To write as a satirist is to invite suspicion when you also write as a journalist.

One reader was astounded that I reported from the Mark Lundy trial; she didn't think it proper that the paper should send a satirist. It was actually the ideal venue for a satirist, especially when the Crown introduced its star witness. He was known as witness X, a jailhouse snitch of ridiculous appearance who gave comical evidence.

In any case, I practise other forms of writing - journalism, reviewing, speeches - and regard them all as the same thing. Tell a story, tell it well.

The easiest part of writing the diaries is right at the start, when I always know I can at least write one word without hesitation: MONDAY. Each diary attempts to tell a story in a five-day period from Monday to Friday. They're narrative-driven, and sometimes it's at the expense of just wanting to be, you know, funny. Sometimes the diaries were just plain hard work to write, and no doubt even harder work to read.

But I always felt at ease with one particular character. He was so ridiculous that it was a breeze to move him around the page. I devoted five diaries to his doings, or undoings - Mark Weldon, the TV3 supremo who axed Campbell Live and 3D, and replaced the shows with a gossip site nobody looks at.

Villain, obviously; wrecker, plainly; but like Key, he was impossible to take seriously, with his terrible ideas and his brazen sale of his own awful Terra Sancta wine to TV3. He'll exit the stage of public life one day. The soundtrack will be one long, loud raspberry; I'm just getting in early.

Season's greetings, then, to Key, Hosking, Weldon and all who kindly gave their time to the Secret Diary this year. I hope to see many of them again in 2016.

Genuine thanks and best wishes to readers who got in touch and said kind things about the diaries. They gave me strength to get beyond that first, useful word, MONDAY.