Review: The Thick of It, Episode 2

'Could you pull in over here? And take out that cyclist, I think he is shadow cabinet.' Malcolm Tucker
SOMEONE once said that the glory in Richard Pryor's comedy was that in between the laughter and the tears you say, 'That's so true'.
The Thick of It is the best example of this in modern TV.
It redefines the genre of political comedy as, and, hey, wanky film theory phrase ahoy, it tears up conventional ideas of verisimilitude. It appears so real, draws so closely on news narratives and satirises them to such an extent that it renders all politics absurd.
Tonight, new social affairs minister Nicola Murray (Rebecca Front, pictured right), already in trouble with the press because of dodgy family links to PFI and private schooling, has to meet the Guardian with her department having lost the details of thousands of immigrants.
Before she gets there we see her office staff in a frenzy shedding documents and trying to hide the gaffe. The self-preservation instinct of the weasel civil servants is evident in the next scene:

Minister Murray: 'Someone has done a huge poo on my desk. Who is going to clear it up?'
Press kingpin Terry: 'My bum is clear of that.'

But its tremendous glory is in the probably pitch perfect depiction of the ad hoc craziness of political spin doctors formulating crisis policy, media strategy amid the incredibly elitist and closed realm of the Westminster reporting.
It's at a private lunch at the Guardian to define key policy and trying not to let slip time bomb scandals in a department that is clearly in crisis, that Murray lets slip to a visiting freelancer that a department in crisis has a media time bomb ticking.
Media management is the whore everyone involved is subservient to. Policy, such as it is, is always formulated and seen through the filter of how it will appear on the political pages of newspapers and TV news reports.
A government in crisis which once steadfastly and ruthlessly controlled the agenda can no longer do so. As junior policy merchant Olly (Chris Addison) and the apoplectic Malcolm try to intimidate the freelancer (Zoe Telford, with the story to make her career) to ditch it, it is apparent they can no longer control or frighten anyone. Their goose is cooked, their time in government is ticking inexorably down.
But, ultimately TTOI is now (as it always was) the Peter Capaldi Show. Malcolm's melt down in the taxi after Nicola discloses the 'hemorrhaging of data' was absolutely pricessless but his summation of the crisis was his best insult of all three series and the film spin-off:

'E-fucking-nough, you have laid your first egg of solid fuck [...] and spewed it out of your arse at 300 miles an hour.'

The horrible beauty of The Thick of It, and Malcolm Tucker's pointless tirades in support of a government facing impending destruction, is that they are so true of real political life that they go beyond comedy and render the whole process of modern governance absurd.

Tucker's (bad) luck:The Thick of It returns

'You were a relatively late appointment which didn't give me the time to fuck the I's and fist the T's.' - Malcolm Tucker (pictured right)

MALCOLM Tucker, superbly played by Peter Capaldi, is back bullying junior ministers in the era-defining political comedy The Thick of It.
This time Nicola Murray played by Rebecca Front, the incoming social affairs secretary, is the one dropping a whole heap of cack on Malcolm's lap.
In a hasty reshuffle she gets the social affairs portfolio despite the fact that her and her husband have potentially devastating links to a prison private finance initiative and a daughter who is going to a private-fee paying school.
Her appointment is indicative of the collapsing Government, once a highly functioning control freak with a vice-like grip on the news, it's now not taking care of the simplest of media vetting.
It's always good to see the self serving, back stabbing, neurotic spin team of Olly, Glenn and Terri who are cowed and bullied by Malcolm. While their incompetency was once not a problem for the Government - now they are implicit in its hasty implosion.
After the feature film spin-off In The Loop, reviewed here some months back, creator Armando Ianucci chose to build this, the first show of the third and final series, around an old fashioned sight gag.
In perhaps the greatest gag of any of the three series - a complicated set up saw Murray answer questions about her 'corruption' while doing a photo op where she is manoeuvred over the phone by hapless spin doctors to stand in front of a sign bearing the phrase 'I am Bent'.
It was tremendous to see such an old fashioned gag unravel.
It also said much about the cynicism of modern political discourse in the media. As Malcolm said in the show's sign-off 'Right, I'm away to wipe my arse on pictures of Nick Robinson, I 'm getting good at giving him a quiff.'

Lubricated horse cock in your perview

PETER Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker, the foul mouthed Glaswegian government spin doctor is one of the great British or Irish comedy characters of the last 20 years and he's back in his big screen debut, In the Loop. (And he's not, repeat not, anything to do with Alistair Campbell, so either come the fuck in or fuck the fuck out.)
And just as the Miscellany has been bigging up US satirist Jon Stewart and lamenting the pitiful, rictus grinning husks of light entertainment that masquerade as cutting edge comedy in Britain (Brigstocke, Rufus Hound, Mock the Week et al) we have to salute Armando Iannucci for the finest political satire of our times, by all reports.
The Thick of It, upon which In the Loop is based, was superb television and got to the media obssessed dark control freak heart of the New Labour dream, but to transfer it to the world stage and have the Brit liberals overwhelmed by the hard hitting Yanks as we plunge headlong to war is genius.
The oft-cited cliched measure of how good a comedy really is, is how many times you see the truth in any given routine or show. Given the current Smeargate controversy which is beseiging New Labour and its blogging spinners, The Thick of It must be very, very good as it flagged it up two years ago.

In the Loop's clip of government minister Tom Hollander trying not to justify war with a series of ever more ridiculous and cryptic metaphors will probably be worth the entrance price alone.
Pete Bradshaw, a notoriously difficult critic to please, gave it 5 stars in the Guardian and even the good Doctor Kermode says its hugely clever if not funny all the way through.
Anyway until the GM review next week, make do with the above trailer and (below) the funniest expose of the bullying nature of spin doctor culture in Whitehall. I think this lad loves Jolson.