Bill O'Reilly today announced that the allegations of 'sexual harrassment' against him are only the latest part of a publicity campaign by Fox News to draw in more viewers. In this, the first of an exclusive two-part interview with the actor who plays O'Reilly, we discuss his character on the show and his future with Fox.

Brainsnap: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us, Dean. The Bill O'Reilly character you play on 'The O'Reilly Factor' is not known for his subtlety of mind. Condescending, rude and slightly to the right of Attilla the Hun, O'Reilly is nonetheless more than your cardboard cut-out stereotype of Right-Wing bullies.

Dean Livingston: Right. When I was first approached to do the show, I said to the producers that I didn't want him to be simply a scum bag. I wanted to portray in Bill a wide range of personality issues that men like Bill O'Reilly have. Men like these are monsters of their own ego. In portaying Bill, I've been careful not to make him a crude caricature. To a certain degree I feel some compassion for him, because he's locked out of a world he can barely comprehend, for all his strutting and showboating. His downfall, that will be played out like a media reality show over the next few months, is a logical extension of all his other foibles. No one who watches the show is very surprised to discover O'Reilly is also a pathological misogynist.

Brainsnap: You started out as a comedian. How much of your work is improvised on 'The O'Reilly Factor'?

Dean Livingston: A lot is improvised, but drawn from ideas. We sit down with the show's writers and do a lot of guess work. 'The O'Reilly Factor' is a collaborative effort. One of our writers, Dave, for instance, dreamed up the use of 'shut up', which I've used over two hundred times on air. He also insisted, when Outfoxed came out, that I should go around everywhere denying it and saying it only happened six times. We felt it was important that the character of Bill should be openly delusional about what he was doing. It's still funny on the set - I mean a few hundred times shouting 'shut up' or 'cut his mic' and then saying to everyone 'it's only six times' is one of our catch-phrase clues that we're a crypto-satirical show.

Brainsnap: Tell us a bit more about how your career started. You seem very different from your character - mild mannered, attentive. Before we sat down you quoted Marcel Proust...

Dean Livingston: (Laughs) I don't quite enjoy talking about myself as much as my character, Bill O'Reilly. But I grew up in New York. My mother is French Canadian writer Ruth Reynolds - my father is TV actor Donald Livingston. I grew up in a cosmopolitan liberal household, full of books and ideas. It was a happy childhood - and, yes, I speak French.

Brainsnap: Right, cause Bill O'Reilly openly hates the French.

Dean Livingston: That was a personal touch of my own. An insensitivity to 'foreigners' - or I should say 'blame' - is an essential ingredient to right-wing philosophy, if we could call it that. Obviously I couldn't work up into a lather against Jews, so I chose the French. Mostly because of all the European nations, I think France is most like the US. And, well, it just seemed so ironic...

Brainsnap: When the show was starting, did you ever have any idea how popular it would become?

Dean Livingston: Not at all. You kinda hope. I mean, Fox also has the Simpsons - one of the most leftist pieces of satire of America that the world has seen on TV. I knew that [Fox News owner] Rupert Murdoch was keen to get another, more subtle piece of news satire on the network and we had his support and go-ahead but... you never want to assume anything.

Brainsnap: Why do you think Rupert Murdoch was so interested in this format?

Dean Livingston: By the late eighties, it was already apparent that the American media was in trouble. Our aim on the show was to ridicule how much CNN and other news shows were mouthpieces for the Administration. Some of these people are really nuts after all and there was a feeling that it would be fun to ridicule them. Then we heard that Rupert Murdoch had seen the pilot and loved it. Here was a man who got the joke. Orders came down from Murdoch to keep amping it up, and thats what we've been doing for the past five years.

Brainsnap: Mr Murdoch, the Australian owner of Fox News, says he is 'tickled pink' by Fox's success.

Dean Livingston: Coming from a foreign country gives one a marvellous perspective on America. I mean, here was this crazy, gun-crazy, flag-worshipping country that believed it was entitled to rule the world. And Murdoch has made a great deal of money playing on that.

Brainsnap: Obviously, he's your boss, but what do you think of him?

Dean Livingston: Well, he's a nice guy. Honestly. I know he's earned a bad reputation world-wide. After all, here's a man that practically invented the tabloid press in the UK. He's behind those newspapers with bare-breasted women that you see on street corners in the UK. On the other hand, Rupert is more complicated than that. While primarily being a ruthless business man out for world domination, he's also a closet Bolshevik. At Oxford, he had a bust of Lenin on his mantle, you know. That's a fact, look it up anywhere. His vision encloses making a lot of money while exercising his sense of humor while playing off the right-wing loons in Washington. He's also able to quote just about anyone. For instance, he once told me a quote by Goebbels, the Nazi Party's chief propagandist, that I've gone ahead and memorized to tell people at dinner parties. It explains what we do on 'The O'Reilly Factor' so well.

"Why of course the people don't want war. But it is the leaders who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Brainsnap: Wow.

Dean Livingston: Yep.

Brainsnap: What's the worst part of playing Bill O'Reilly on Fox?

Dean Livingston: Some people come up to me in the street and don't realize that Bill is just a character in a sketch. Sometimes the spookiest part of my job is having strangers approach me and thank me for the great job my character is doing. What started out as a brief excursion into the kookiness of far-right extremism has become the role of a lifetime, which I'm grateful for. But it's not an easy job to leave at work - a few too many nutjobs want to think you're for real.

Brainsnap: How hard is it to portray a character that you personally find to be loathsome?

Dean Livingston: Well, playing a TV bigot isn't the easiest thing to do in the world. I'm not like Sascha Cohen's Ali G who, I think, has some redemptive qualities. There is very little about my character to like. Bill is a mean-spirited, nasty little man full of pomposity and pretence. So there's been an immense challenge bringing such an unsympathetic character to life in a well-rounded way. The last few years of throwing tantrums in front of a camera and abusing people have been hectic. It's been a lot of fun but that sort of personality can wear you down. I'm definitely looking forward to a vacation.

Brainsnap: Up close, what do you think the difference is between Bill O'Reilly and the next guy?

Dean Livingston: I think the chief difference between left-wing people like my parents and the real life Bill O'Reillys out there comes down to 'a perception of nuance'. Your right-wing thinker doesn't want to sift through all the issues - he wants to hold a principled stance and congratulate himself for being the smartest person alive - the only person with enough commonsense to hold his simplified beliefs. They believe that inflexible, hard-and-fast rules can cover every scenario, and they castigate those who get in their way. I think liberals appear soft to them because liberals try to engage in the topic with discourse, and try to debate on an even ground. To a far-right thinker, the person who wins the debate is the one who shouted the most. To a liberal like my mother, it's whoever offered the soundest, most well-reasoned and nuanced view who wins the debate. Another difference I'd like to add is that liberals are more willing to change their mind if necessary. This befuddles far-right zealots, because they cannot fathom anyone changing their mind about anything once they've gotten hold of an idea. When they see it, they're astonished, scream 'flip-flop' and cheer for themselves.

Brainsnap: Your show has been making fun of the right for years. What made you step up to the plate?

Dean Livingston: The desire to show them at their own game. In the early stages of playing O'Reilly I decided I'd throw out any sort of subtle thinking and make him a very impatient minded sort of guy. The show's producers and I realized that all fanatics are fundamentally lazy-minded. The last thing they want to do is sit down and weigh up any sort of complex problem. They mistrust ambiguity. It's far easier for them to blame minorities or foreign countries and scream 'boycott France!'
Rather than engage with discourse as a civilized man, I make O'Reilly shout them down, tell them to shut up. Or I challenge their patriotism, as Goebbels recommends.

Being able to show a right-wing pundit in that way, and appear credible at the same time, is why I was so keen to take the role.

Brainsnap: Do you still enjoy the satire of Fox News or 'The O'Reilly Factor'?

Dean Livingston: I do but I think I'm getting too old to play a character who throws tantrums all the time. My heart is just not in it.

Brainsnap: How did you feel when they announced how they'd be retiring you?

Dean Livingston: When I found out that Bill would be going down for 'sexual harrassment', I just lost it. It's a master-stroke, the perfect curtain call for one of satire's most dastardly fiends.

Brainsnap: At the end of the year, what do you think you'll be doing?

Dean Livinsgton: There's one of two charities I'd like to invest my time in. But mostly, I'm looking forward to taking it easy. I may be coming back to Fox for a stint in 2006 in another guise, but one thing is for sure, I won't be playing a villain any time soon.