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.'

Loop's upside your head

IT’S been a testing time at Miscellany HQ recently with work and other issues meaning there's been no writing but we are back in the journalistic saddle today with a glorious two films/ two cinemas/ eight cups of coffee day.
First up was the second viewing of Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop which is a veritable feast of spot on satire and inventive verbal filth. There’s lots of lubricated horse cocks in purviews, policies being fisted to death and the best abuse of a fax machine by the angriest man in Scotland in any film of the year.
In terms of tight plotting and sub plotting there’s not a great deal of depth, it is an extended version of the TV show that spawned it The Thick of It, but in characterisation it is superb.
Peter Capaldi as the astoundingly foul mouthed spin doctor Malcolm Tucker really comes into his boggle-eyed own, bullying Government ministers, ambassadors and journalists in an almost show stealing turn. Chris Addison and the ever wonderful Gina McKee as Government information officers Toby and Judy also qualify for honourable mention.
US improv veteran Zach Woods as the incredibly ambitious and obnoxious Washington state department junior staffer Chad is another revelation, his portrayal of an arse licking, backbiting Ivy League ingrate is spot-on.
Paul Higgins as Jamie, the aforemention angriest Scot, may just reprise his show stealing iPod hating spin meister, but he's still brilliant at it.
However, Tom Hollander as the hapless, ambitious career (New Labour) politician Simon Foster, is the real star of the movie. A vacillating eejit over promoted to Secretary of International Development who helps start a war by spouting metaphoric platitudes on Eddie Mair’s PM programme on Radio 4 is so realistic that it shows that as a satirist Iannucci remain’s the market leader in Britain.
Unable to deal with either his constituents or world leaders, he is an idiot who doesn’t recognise how his ambition to schmooze at the highest levels of the power structures is slowly killing his career.
But then, with Iannucci, his long term collaborator Tony Roche and Peep Show creators Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, this film was always going to be a wonderful, tightly scripted pitch perfect denunciation of the political classes.
The elected politicians are ineffective idiots bullied by unelected spin doctors and in the current climate of Smear-gate followed by Expenses-Gate, surely no film can have come out at a better time. Man oh man, but its prescience would be laughable if it weren’t so serious.
GM has seen this film twice in a week and there may be another visit in the not so distant future.

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.