'Spinal Tap' star to play Nixon

'This is Spinal Tap' star Harry Shearer is to play disgraced US President Richard Nixon in a new show based on secret White House tapes.

'Nixon’s The One', which will be shown on Sky Arts later this year, is drawn from more than 2,000 hours of tapes secretly recorded by Nixon while he was in power.

Shearer, who has voiced dozens of characters in The Simpsons (including Mr Burns and Ned Flanders) and played bass guitarist Derek Smalls in the spoof documentary about the failing heavy metal band, said: “Having grown up in LA, I’d had Nixon in my brain my whole life and it recently struck me that the current portrayals of the man were leaving out the wonderland of his emotional complexity.

“To me, the key point of the comedy was that these conversations were being held, usually during working hours, by what was then usually described as the most powerful man in the world.”

Nixon fought and won two US presidential elections but was forced to resign after the Watergate scandal revealed an array of dirty tricks carried out against his opponents by his political allies.