For F---'s Sake, Watch 'The Thick Of It'

Cross-posted at Bitch Flicks, where I will be blogging every Monday for the foreseeable future. Awesomeness.

 

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.

Remembering 2002: A Very Peter Gabriel Teenhood

Did you hear? Peter Gabriel is touring North America to mark the 25^th anniversary of his great album So. Naturally I am stoked to see my favorite singer in concert for a fourth time, because I am hip and trendy and down with the kids; but I am double-stoked because 2012 is actually a personal anniversary in my relationship with So.

People who had the misfortune to know me when I was in my teens could tell you that my defining characteristic as an adolescent was my deep, borderline-obsessive love for Peter Gabriel. (Like I said: hip, trendy, etc.) The wall above my bed was completely obscured by posters, newspaper clippings, and magazine articles relating to PG, as I abbreviated him; I faithfully wore my PG T-shirt and baseball cap every weekend; I traded bootlegs online (yes, children, once upon a time we used to trade bootlegs, via snail mail); I was consistently in the top five posters on a certain PG fan forum.

At its best, being a teenager is very dull – a stretch of life you just have to wait out so you can get to the good parts. You have to latch onto something to get you through it: casual sex, illegal drugs, chess club. I was really, really into Peter Gabriel.

One of the reasons is simple timing. After a decade of soundtrack albums and thumb-twiddling, PG dropped Up, his first proper record since 1992's Us, on September 24, 2002 – which happened to be about six weeks after my family relocated from Kenya to Scotland.

I had, of course, known that summer 2002 would be our last summer in Kenya. I was careful to commit it to memory: all the safaris, bumping along dusty roads on the roof-rack of the car, dutifully penciling down every critter we saw; blissed-out days spent reading voraciously beside the pool of a coastal villa; swearing eternal loyalty to the friends I still wasn't really used to having. Plus, Peter Gabriel. That school year I had been very into the Who, Pink Floyd, Rush, and Gong, so maybe it was toward the summer that PG fever struck me. I can remember sitting in my parents' car, listening to “Big Time” on headphones, and thinking: I am IN LOVE with this album.

Acclimatizing to life in the UK from Kenya is really, really hard, even if you're not 13. Peter Gabriel's music helped me get through a rotten time in my life. My prog-rock childhood had convinced me that good music was over; but the release of a new record from my favorite musician was like a little island of sanity in the midst of that chaotic combination of culture shock and adolescence. So was something from Kenya. Up was something from Britain. Peter Gabriel offered a way of exploring new territory while still being in touch with my past.

I love So. I've listened to it probably eighty billion gazillion times in the past decade, but to my ears it still hums with the echoes of a very different part of my life – a part that ended ten years ago. It feels very weird to be ten years out of Kenya, and weirder still to be ten years removed from the profoundly, awesomely ignorant little oddball I was when I was 13. Here are five things I wish I could go back in time and tell my 13-year-old self, to ease those troublesome years of high school:

1. Read this. Try not to be a douche about your shiny megatons of privilege.

2. Gender theory, sex-pos feminism, and QUILTBAG awareness. UK sex ed in the early-to-mid-2000s is entirely contraception-centric, with the admirable goal of reducing unwanted teen pregnancy, but you will not get any of the sex and gender education you so desperately need. You'll be much happier once you deconstruct the dominant cultural framing of all sexual activity as teleological toward PIV. Learn not to worry whether you're “normal” re: gender identity or sexuality.

3. It's okay to feel things and want things. You don't have to empty it all into your fiction, and you don't have to let other people dictate who you can be. Life will never be easy, but I promise you it will one day be a million times more interesting than it is right now.

4. Mother is right more often than you think, and she is wrong more often than you think. If that sounds contradictory, welcome to having a Jewish mother. You'll never get used to it.

5. Most of all: EVERYONE IS FAKING IT. ALL THE TIME.

"Non-Belonging Is My Very Substance"

"I feel that I exist only outside of any belonging. That non-belonging is my very substance."

--Edmond Jabès, From the Desert to the Book

I was born in Scotland, I went to high school there, and my parents still live there. In the US, I tell people I'm Scottish – it's just easier. However, it's not strictly accurate. Both my parents are English, so I lack the Braveheart ancestry (which is what most people in the US mean when they say “Scottish”); I spent my childhood continent-hopping, so I lack the emotional ties, personal history, and identifiable accent of one specific place (which is how a lot of people seem to relate to a place they call “home”); and, to be perfectly honest, if my parents moved away tomorrow I doubt I'd ever go back to Scotland.

I'm not really Scottish.

At first, I tried telling people I was “British” or “from the UK,” to which if not my accent then at least my passport can attest, but nobody who's really British ever says that. People claim England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales: the place they identify as being from. The UK is a political fiction – not that any nation-state isn't; but the UK seems to be a particularly unconvincing one, at least as far as hearts and minds are concerned. I certainly don't “feel” British. I have no heart-and-mind national allegiance.

I'm not really anything.

These days, I try not to be a douche about this. It is both easy and insufferable to bang on about being “a citizen of the world, you guys” when you possess both the geopolitical privilege of a UK passport and the socioeconomic privilege to take advantage of the myriad doors that passport opens. I also try not to fall into a self-pity-party about my sense of alienation. My errant childhood may have robbed me of any place to call “home,” but it also gifted me broad horizons and an unslakable wanderlust – a tradeoff I'd not reverse for anything.

Sometimes, though, I do feel a secret wish to able to participate in outpourings of jingoistic fervor.

I've been witnessing such an outpouring from certain of my Facebook friends over queen whatsit and her diamond thingamajig. I am, as that last sentence might have tipped you off, firmly in the small-r-republican camp when it comes to the whole monarchy malarkey. Even if I somehow felt myself to be authentically British, my deep cynicism regarding autocratic headship, even of the mostly-symbolic variety, wouldn't permit me to do anything other than sneer at the whole business.

But, gosh, it looks like such fun.

I feel the same sense of alienation and frustration at international sporting events. Look at all these people, who are capable of (a) claiming a national identity without feeling like an impostor and (b) giving a rat's rear-end about the event in question! They all seem to be having SUCH FUN. I wish I could have fun.

Alas, I am a fun-killing overthinker with no ability to switch off my cynicism and no sense of belonging anywhere. But, on the upside, Salman Rushdie says I am a special snowflake.

Hello, Culture Shock, My Old Friend

I've undergone transcontinental relocation enough times to know better, but I honestly thought this time would be different.

This time, I was in my twenties – old enough to cope; not like when I was a child, trying to grow up at the same time as adjusting to new places.

This time, I was moving to from the UK to the US – a paltry cultural difference. Was I not a connoisseur of American TV/movies/internets? Had I not lived from the ages of one to seven in Alabama? Surely I was entirely prepared for all aspects of life in the States.

This time, the decision was wholly mine – not dictated by my parents (whose choices, admittedly, I don't recall ever objecting to, and sometimes actively encouraged). I'd never wanted anything more than I wanted to move 5000 miles west and take my rightful place as a grad student in ~California~.

And, of course, it really did seem that way at first. I instantly felt as though I fit in. School was everything I hoped it would be. New friends were abundant and wonderful. The weather was gorgeous. For about three months, it was like being ever so slightly drunk all the damn time.

For the past three months, though, it's been more like being ever so slightly hungover all the damn time. This is literally textbook culture shock, and it's really stupid that I wasn't prepared for it. I just... thought it would be different.

I thought it would be easy, because I was comparing it to the last transcontinental upheaval. That was when we moved from Kenya to Scotland, which is a hell of a cultural transition. That was when I was thirteen, which is a hell of an age. In comparison, this move should have been a cakewalk.

I thought it would be easy, because I imagined that I would be used to this by now. I am a third culture kid. Wanderlust runs in my veins. I crave new places. Not for me the desire to be settled. Not for me the need to feel from somewhere. Not for me the constant belittling comparisons of the new place with the vastly superior place where I last lived. Me, I positively revel in the fact that everywhere on Earth I am a stranger in a strange land. You can't feel homesick if nowhere is home.

I thought it would be easy. I was wrong.

“I Love Elections. I'm Having One Right Now”: Some Thoughts On Voting

The other night, I had a big argument with my parents. It was a family argument in the Jewish sense: a minor disagreement leading to a heated philosophical debate that gets the juices flowing, unveils deeply-held beliefs for a thorough savaging, and leaves everyone feeling warm, fuzzy, and closer than ever before. (As a general FYI, if you're the kind of person that finds big arguments upsetting rather than unifying, you probably shouldn't date anyone who can claim descent from the Chosen People. Just sayin'. From rabbinical midrash to which pages of the Pesach haggadah we can skip to whether Superman or Batman or Spider-man is the best, bonding through disagreement is in our heritage and in our blood.) (Have I mentioned before that I'm Jewish as well as Christian? Future posts will explore this further, I promise.)

The subject of our argument was feminism. I think my parents view my feminism the same way they view my being gay: they don't totally get it, but they've come to accept it as a part of who I am, and they're willing to engage with it. A lot of people believe in the fundamental tenets of third-wave feminist thought, even if they wouldn't self-identify as feminist, and my parents are no exception. But when they asked me what I think about affirmative action, or “positive discrimination” as they put it, we parted ways.

I said that I think affirmative action is far from ideal, but it's at least an attempt at redressing the centuries of imbalance and ongoing institutional bias against minorities. They said it's unfair to punish today's white men for the privilege enjoyed by their forebears.

It would be quite possible to spend a few hundred thousand words unpacking everything that's going on in this dispute, but if you're reading this blog you're presumably – unlike my parents – familiar with a lot of it, not least my feelings about white people, my feelings about privilege-denying, and OH MY GOD WE CAN'T FORGET ABOUT TEH WHITE MENZ WHO IS GOING TO TELL THEIR STORIEZ? So, yeah, there's still plenty of educating to be done (Mother, Dad, I love you, start here), but at least we agree on one thing: the system is broken.

Our world is a zero-sum game. Earth's resources are finite, so where one person gains something, somebody else loses out. Human society is broken on such a fundamental level that I don't know how to begin fixing it, and that's one of the reasons I believe in God – because I don't see how we can possibly get ourselves out of this mess without outside help. (This is also why I hope for benevolent extraterrestrials to gift us with their wisdom before we run out of resources.) As such, I'm not sure there's any such thing as unqualified Right in this life. Every attempt at a good action has bad consequences, either immediately or somewhere down the line. Does this mean we should stop trying? Surely not; that way lies despair.

Today, the UK is holding local elections and a national referendum. Voter turnout at local elections tends to be dismally low, and I'm sure that one of the reasons for this is a widespread belief that the system is broken beyond saving and that therefore there is no right choice.

That's true. There is no right choice. I've been a voter for four years now, and most of those votes I wish I could retroactively change. (Not just my conscience-defying Lib Dem vote last year - would you believe, in my very first local election I voted Conservative? In defense of my younger, stupider self, they're the most unionist party, and that was back when we feared the SNP might walk the walk of Scottish independence instead of just talking the talk.) However, there's not one of those votes I would retract altogether. I'm proud to have voted in every UK election – local, European, London mayoral, general – since I turned eighteen.

I vote because of Emily and Emmeline and Millicent. I vote because of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. I vote because of every person in world history who has ever fought or died for a right that I was gifted on a platter at birth just because of where I was born and who my parents are.

I have serious issues with the whole concept of nationality. (And I have issues with my issues, because I'm very conscious that said issues are largely a product of the oceans of socio-economic privilege that permit a comfortably transnational childhood like mine.) However I may feel about it, I own a UK passport and I benefit from that hugely, in a number of ways. When the UK government takes action, it does so in the name of the British electorate – in my name. Given a chance to influence, even in the tiniest of ways, what is done in my name, how can I not take it?

Whoever I vote for, it won't change the fundamental injustices of our world. But I have to do what little I can: when life hands you a teaspoon, you darn well use it.