Fuckety-bye to The Thick of It

From bean to cup, you fuck up

The first proper oh-my-days-I-can’t-believe-the-BBC-have-finally-come-to-their-senses-and-given-it-a-proper-run series of The Thick Of It is nearly at its end. Gone, of course, is Chris Langham’s bumbling Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship Minister, and in is the unknown and unrespected Nicola Murray, played with a degree of empathy not usually associated with the employees of DoSAC by her out of Nighty Night (‘Hiya Cath!’). You get the sense that she is a regular person, your typical Labour backbench MP with naïve ideas about how she can use her new position to improve social mobility. Or was. Suddenly under the intense glare of the rabid media, she finds herself surrounded by aides she can’t trust, desperately trying to claw on to some sense of privacy around her crumbling family situation and unable to do right for wrong with potty-mouthed spin doctor extraordinaire Malcolm Tucker breathing down her neck.

‘The Gorbals Goebbels’ is back, just as sweary as ever, but this time there’s a palpable change in the air – with the government in a right pickle, he’s cracking up, and he’s not going down without a fight. In last Saturday’s episode we saw him reveal a tiny shaving of human emotion as he revealed to Terri – the highly ridiculed and slightly annoying Civil Servant who, knowing that she would be the only person there not experiencing internal turmoil at the idea of losing her job in a brutal and embarrassing administration change, and isn’t especially bothered about playing nicey-nice – “I used to be the fucking Pharaoh, but now I am fucking floundering in a fucking Nile of shit. But I am gonna fashion a paddle out of that shit”. And when you hear him say something like that, you know exactly where this show is coming from.

Labour Ministers themselves admit that it is a cartoon version of the truth, but this series seems to have gone one further – it has a firm grip on the desperation of the outgoing Labour government, and you get the sense it is no longer such a cartoon. Tucker began as the all-knowing, all-connected Alastair Campbell of the Blair years, and now he is every Labour official still standing rolled into one hair-tearing, wide-eyed, foamy-mouthed lunatic finding himself out of the loop and out of control, claws dug into the side of a sinking ship, refusing to let himself believe that he just doesn’t have the power to save it. You don’t get the impression Malcolm is a selfish man. He doesn’t want the power for himself, although he relishes any and every chance to talk down the people that are standing in his way. What he wants is, by any means necessary, to keep his party in government. He probably doesn’t even know or believe in what they stand for any more, but he isn’t going to let that get in the way of doing his job. Poor Malcolm.

Things can only get shitter

This series has expanded upon the DoSAC team’s Opposition counterparts introduced in the excellent hour-long specials, made before the success of the movie adaptation In The Loop. Old Tory Peter Mannion, one of those types that believes in maintaining the integrity of one’s private life by doing what you want (but not dobbing each other into the papers for it), is the Shadow Minister poised to take over Nicola’s job at the next General Election. But as New Tory spinmeister Stewart Pearson revealed to Malcolm in the hilarious sleaze-off in the corridors of Radio 5 Live in last week’s episode, he’s not above putting old cows like Mannion out to the slaughter for the sake of the new party image.

Much like how Blair stomped on the Old Labour posse to reach the dizzy heights of Things Can Only Get Better 1997, Stewart brilliantly personifies the insidious, smarmy, cut-throat world of Cameron’s New Tories, even shitting on their own ‘old guard’ as they clamber over piles of bodies in the race to be first at the Westminster elections. Is this what the country wants for itself? ‘Knowledge is porridge?’ It’s meaningless, just like Cameron’s face – in the papers, detached from his roots and his party’s racist, anti-worker, anti-youth, anti-everything that’s not a briefcase stuffed full of money belonging to a CEO policies. His face everywhere, on billboards 20 feet high, telling you ‘I’ve got a plan, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Pah, and you thought you hated Thatcher!’ Imagine that when you’re trying to sleep at night. 20 years from now, we’ll lament the simple buffoonery and rib-tickling money-stealing of the Brown era, probably write it off as at least slightly better than life under a Tory government, as we cry into our milk-less cornflakes. Well, as we know, politics goes round and round in circles, making small gains and large setbacks and then doing it all over again it can never be perfect but the worst thing is that it never even tries to come close to being the right side of wrong. Imagine there was something we could do to fight back, to try and break the cycle, like, I don’t know, work together with honesty, integrity and a fucking-sense-of-humour for socialism and equality. It would be pretty neat if there were people out there trying to work towards that, wouldn’t it?

As this series draws to a close, Malcolm’s sanity teetering on a knife edge, we’ll have to wait to find out the answers to a few questions. How far will Labour fall from grace? Just how bad will the Tory government be for ordinary people? How much worse will it be for the disadvantaged many? What will Armando Iannucci transform The Thick Of It into with a new set of heavily scrutinised Ministers to take the piss out of? And where the hell is Jamie McDonald?

Well, until these answers reveal themselves, fuckety-bye for now.