The
fourteen episodes of Armando Iannucci's brilliant BBC show The
Thick Of It appeared on Hulu a
couple of weeks ago, and the upcoming fourth season will stream there
as well. I am having a bafflingly hard time convincing even my most
devoted Anglophile friends to watch it. Maybe the pace and intensity
are off-putting: it's a show that demands your full, rapt attention
to decipher its rapid-fire dialogue (and British accents, if that's a
difficulty for you). Maybe the unrelenting cynicism is discouraging
for my starry-eyed friends (I know a LOT of Aaron Sorkin devotees).
Maybe the Westminster setting is daunting to Americans who assume
that familiarity with the ins and outs of UK politics is a
prerequisite, when in reality all a non-Brit would miss are throwaway
jokes about odds and ends of British culture (Mark
Kermode's flappy hands, anyone?). Whatever it is that's giving
people pause, I wish they'd overcome it, because this is a really,
really good TV show.
As
a cynical comedy about the relationship between a hapless government
minister and a Machiavellian civil servant, The Thick Of It
is naturally a spiritual
successor to excellent 1980s sitcom Yes Minister
– but it is a very 21st-century successor. The archly
satirical wit of Yes
Minister isn't
wholly absent from from The
Thick Of It,
but it is rather overshadowed by, well, the gloriously colorful and
endlessly creative obscenity. A viewer conducting even the most
casual compare-and-contrast of the two series will notice two
interesting trends:
1.
Twenty-first-century Westminster is no less white than 1980s
Westminster. This, unfortunately, is a reflection of reality: people
of color currently comprise 4%
of MPs (a figure that was significantly lower when The
Thick Of It began
in 2005), and Parliament's own website admits that even though “[t]he
House of Commons is more reflective of the population it represents
than ever before […] it remains the case that more than 400 MPs,
62% of the total, are white men aged over 40.”
2.
There is a far wider variety of accents, and a hell of a lot more
swearing, in the newer show. This is something that cannot be
explained without a brief discussion of the deeply complex question
of class in British politics, so please bear with me. UK politics has
always been an old boys' club. The traditional track to Westminster runs through a
private school, ideally Eton, and a top-tier university, ideally
Oxbridge. That same Parliament webpage notes that over a quarter of
current MPs went to Oxbridge, and over a third went to private
schools. This is vastly disproportionate to the general population –
but it is an
improvement over the past. In 1982 Yes
Minister could
include lengthy
rants about Greek and Latin quotations and jokes mocking a minister
who attended the LSE; one suspects that that simply wouldn't fly
today.
The
delicate subtleties of regional accents in the UK are far beyond my
capacity to explain; suffice it to say that, first, regional accents
are historically the marker of a working-class background, and,
second, they are much more acceptable in politics and media today
than they were 30 years ago. There is, then, a more or less explicit
class dynamic at play in The
Thick Of It between
the RP-accented
ministers and the very Scottish Peter Capaldi, who stars as very
terrifying government spin doctor Malcolm Tucker.
Good God this man is terrifying. |
Malcolm
is the core of the show, and he is a wonder to behold. In creating
Malcolm Tucker, Iannucci seems to have drawn from both his own
Scottish heritage and from the well of “terrifying Scot”
archetypes that populate the British imagination: from Wallace
bellowing “FREEDOM!”
to Miss
Jean Brodie to Professor McGonagall to the monstrous Manda in
Alan Warner's The
Stars In The Bright Sky (get
a copy; you'll thank me later), echoed in US pop culture through
figures like Groundskeeper
Willie and Shrek. An explosive hurricane of Caledonian fury,
Malcolm tears through Westminster, bullying, threatening, effing,
blinding, and occasionally punching anyone unfortunate enough to
oppose his will. He's the kind of villain who's an absolute joy to
hate, reveling in his own evil machinations and spouting quotable
profanity like it's going out of style.
Not that the other characters lack for memorable quotes. The writing
for this show reminds me of Oscar Wilde (in a potty-mouthed,
21st-century kind of way): all the characters essentially speak with
exactly the same voice, but it's such a very funny voice that nobody
really minds. And, of course, a great strength of this style is that
the women characters sound as though they were written to be
characters first, women second. Our culture is swimming in female
characters who sounds as if they were written by someone who, at
best, has never actually interacted with a woman, and, at worst,
genuinely believes women to be a completely different species than
human beings. Armando Iannucci's women are not like this at all, and
it's depressing how refreshing that is.
In
my opinion, The
Thick Of It only
really hits its stride with the introduction of Rebecca Front as
Nicola Murray, MP, in the third season. (The first two were only
three episodes each, so that's still more than half the show that
she's in.) This was a matter of necessity, owing to Chris
Langham's ignominious fall from public grace, but it gives the
show a dynamic it really needs. When Langham's Hugh Abbott was the
hapless minister struggling to hang onto his job in the face of
mockery from special advisers Glen and Ollie and relentless terrorism
from Malcolm, the cast was just too
homogeneous. Nicola has to deal with not only the pressures Hugh
faced as an overworked, underprepared, perpetually outgunned minister
trying desperately to be relevant; but she also has to cope with the
specific challenges of being a woman in a job that is still 78%
male-dominated. Dubbed a “glummy mummy” by the press, Nicola is
caught in the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't position of the
woman in the high-pressure job – expected to prioritize her work
while simultaneously being the World's Greatest Mother, in a way that
men are simply never expected to do. Being at the nexus of such
impossible expectations never overwhelms Nicola's character or turns
her into a straw person of any kind, but it is a constant presence in
the dynamic of her interactions with others, to the point that even
the ferocious Malcolm appears to have a little sympathy for her.
Poor Nicola. |
Iannucci
seems to have recognized how interesting this dynamic is, and
attempted to replicate it this year in his HBO show Veep,
starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a (once again) hapless vice
president. Veep is
an intriguing attempt to transplant the magic of The
Thick Of It to
a US context (foreshadowed to some extent in the transatlantic
hijinks of 2009 alternate-universe spin-off film In
The Loop),
but I'm not yet convinced that it's a fully successful one. For one
thing, the US televisual landscape is so prudish that even on HBO the
swears don't roll off tongues as organically as on British TV. For
another, the lack of a truly nefarious Malcolm Tucker figure, while
an understandable artistic choice to create distance from The
Thick Of It,
in my opinion undermines the show's cohesiveness. And I question the
wisdom of choosing to piss away a potentially
really interesting pregnancy subplot offscreen.
My
reservations notwithstanding, I will be watching Veep's
second season, because it's pretty funny, and because I trust Armando
Iannucci. But I'm much more excited for The
Thick Of It season
four, and it would be nice if the rest of America cared
too.
Thanks for a post that inspired me to watch some comedy after a mental bang your head against the wall day.
ReplyDeleteArmando Iannucci is indeed pure awesome sauce! The Thick of It is ace and probably his most grounded and accessible work. However my favourite shows of his are the ones which display his comic genius as completely unhinged, such as Time Trumpet and The Armando Iannuci Shows. These are very strange and very very silly. Sadly these are not to everyone’s tastes, but in my book they're as cool as a shark jumping out of the ocean and eating a plane!
P.S. I had a few too many drinks when I wrote this.
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