The Thick of It is almost 15 years old but remains top of the class for political satire. Discover it in this week’s Deeper Cut.
Before Peter Capaldi was The Doctor, he was the stuff of nightmares. The Thick of It, Armando Iannucci’s black comedy about the tailspin of politics, first premiered in 2005 and brought with it a modern-day bogeyman. Thirteen years later, not much has changed and it’s still painfully funny.
Politics and comedy have been tied together for eons. As long as there have been public servants, there have been people poking fun at what they do, don’t do, say or don’t say. It’s the single most common topic on every late-night show. But it’s also a bit of a minefield: Go too far and you’ll be skewered, don’t go far enough and you’ll be holding back a deserved skewering.
The Thick of It never held back. With guns blazing and expletives flying about, Iannucci gave TV viewers the anti-West Wing.
Leading the charge was Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker, the fiercest character in British comedy. His official title was Director of Communications, but in reality he was the enforcer keeping everyone else in line and on message. If he showed up in your office, you did something to bring him there and you were never going to forget it.
Tucker’s tirades were delivered with a surgical precision and no small amount of profanity, which became one of the show’s defining characteristics. The characters never censored themselves, but the expletives served a purpose. There was a hilarious irony to the fact that these people who had to be so perfect and put-together in public, were so difficult and neurotic in private.
The Thick of It made clear that politicians, and those in political service, were really just lying to the public—but also to each other and even themselves. And that’s what made it funny; it wasn’t just showing the harsh reality of modern politics, but outright laughing at it.
Underneath the constant moments of floundering hilarity, though, The Thick of It also worked as a biting social commentary. It wasn’t just firing off jokes and throwing in a few expletives and calling that funny. It was legitimately pushing the envelope with its storytelling, performances and how it set up its characters.
Malcolm Tucker was the prime example of that. He was this incredibly feared operator, but he was also a self-made man who worked his way up to achieve that status. He worked hard in every episode (granted, in part because other people made his job harder).
He wasn’t just some talking head yelling at people; he had real depth as someone who fought to get where he was and in turn, despised these people who had climbed to their positions yet seemingly couldn’t do the most basic of tasks. It was the character who came from not much, who became the one with all the power.
The other characters, while nowhere near on Malcolm’s level, had their own stories as well. The first episode of The Thick Of It season 4 involved Peter Mannion (Roger Allam)’s team developing a new technology initiative called “Digital Playgrounds.” Although he didn’t create it, didn’t work on it, and stated repeatedly that he has no idea what anyone is talking about, Mannion was shoehorned into publicly unveiling the program at a local school.
Surprising no one, he stumbled over almost every word that came out of his mouth and created a huge backlash when he made it sound like they’re trying to turn British students into an unpaid workforce. By the end of the episode, “Digital Playgrounds” was deader than a doornail. And there was plenty of blame to go around, because it could all have easily been avoided.
The Thick of It also introduced TV viewers to Terri Coverley (the excellent Joanna Scanlan), who was so bad at her work that she tried to get made redundant and still couldn’t manage it. And Nicola Murray (Rebecca Front), who was really an overworked and under-appreciated mother and wife who just happened to wind up in politics. And Ollie Reeder (Chris Langham), who seemed like such a nice guy except for that he was the most scheming and morally bankrupt of them all.
So many excellent characters existed, until of course everything came crashing down on their heads in the final episode. But even that was memorable. After four seasons and two specials of utter disaster, TV fans wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
Another note that makes The Thick of It stand out is that it got a feature film; but it wasn’t just a box-office adaptation. In the Loop existed in the same universe as the series, and featured nearly a dozen of the same actors—but only four of them reprised their roles from the TV show. The rest played new characters in an entirely different, but still tilted, story.
Tom Hollander (of The Night Manager and more recently stealing scenes in Bohemian Rhapsody) was positively brilliant in the film as Simon Foster, a cabinet minister who made the mistake of giving his honest opinion.
His fumbling declaration that war was “unforeseeable” put Foster in the middle of an international argument over whether or not to declare it in the Middle East, and the poor man—who has good intentions but little social skills—was soon in well over his head. In the Loop is The Thick of It on a global scale, with lines like “I’m standing my ground…on the verge.”
Foster couldn’t even take care of his own business; he learned about a constituency wall that’s on the verge of collapsing into an elderly woman’s yard, and couldn’t manage to get it fixed. That’s in part because he was too distracted by being yanked into a global debacle, but it’s still an oversight he shouldn’t make. When he can’t repair his own backyard (literally), he’s certainly not qualified to be trapped in the middle of a war campaign, batted back and forth like a cat toy.
Then there’s Foster’s explosion at an advisor who left him holding the bag in a meeting with U.S. officials, which turned out to be just a warm-up for Hollander’s brief but memorable cameo as a psychopath in The Thick of It.
Nearly a decade and a half later, that scene is still hilarious. It also still has a ring of truth to it. While hopefully there isn’t a real Cal Richards or Malcolm Tucker lurking somewhere, their honest frustration with the state of things can be identified with almost more now than back then. They just want people to make sense, and politics still doesn’t make sense.
Iannucci went on to find success in U.S. television with Veep, which pokes fun at the White House, but it’s nowhere near on the same level as The Thick of It. The former plays more for laughs, while the latter is an scathing trip to the office and that’s what makes it funny. Add in the deadpan way it’s all laid out by wonderful actors (who improvised some of their lines, so this is their wit too), and Capaldi ruling over the whole show like his own sort of dictatorship, and it’s classic comedy that can never quite be touched.
Anyone who’s feeling frustrated with the state of the world, or anyone who likes their comedy to bite back, ought to revisit The Thick of It. Once you get into it, you’ll never look at comedy the same way again—and you’ll probably have a few nightmares about Malcolm Tucker.
The Thick of It is streaming on Hulu and Amazon Video; In The Loop is available on Blu-Ray, DVD and digital. Find the next Deeper Cut every Wednesday in the Entertainment category at FanSided.