Nixon comes alive in a new show from Harry Shearer

Harry Shearer is hardly the first person to mine comedy from the rich vein where Richard Nixon shines.

But no one has done it more faithfully than Shearer, who, in his new series, mimics Nixon unimpeachably while re-enacting real-life scenes as the man known to detractors as Tricky Dick - all to hilarious effect.

The creatively peripatetic Shearer's credits include This is Spinal Tap, The Simpsons and the 30-year-old humor-and-politics Le Show on public radio. Now, with Nixon's the One, Shearer dramatizes, verbatim, bizarre but actual interludes lifted from the White House recordings Nixon secretly made - those very tapes whose revelations would wreck his presidency.