Malcolm Tucker | the m0vie blog

The Thick of It – Series III (Review)

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Darren

The wonderful folks at the BBC have given me access to their BBC Global iPlayer for a month to give the service a go and trawl through the archives. I’ll have some thoughts on the service at the end of the month, but I thought I’d also take the opportunity to enjoy some of the fantastic content.

No one forgot their first carpeting from Tucker – it was like a red hot poker.

– the BBC’s career retrospective on Malcolm Tucker

The first two seasons of The Thick of It proved to be quite the success for BBC4. Critics were raving about, the politicians it sought to ridicule were loving it. Creator Armando Iannucci even got to produce a movie with HBO using characters from the series (In The Loop) and plans were underway for a US adaptation. (In fairness, the adaptation was killed very quickly, which might be for the best given Iannucci’s opinion of it, but he’s currently working on Veep for HBO with Julie Louis Dreyfus.) So it seems fitting that the series came back to television in a big way. Fresh off two specials, with a new minister and a new slot on BBC2, the show was commissioned for eight glorious episodes. And it was great. The decision to re-focus the series on Malcolm Tucker, the Prime Minister’s advisor who thinks of himself”as a thin, white Mugabe.”

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: Armando Iannucci, bbc, bbc global iplayer, BBC iPlayer, Chris Langham, Conservative, Gordon Brown, hbo, in the loop, Malcolm, Malcolm Tucker, peter capaldi, Prime Minister, Spin (public relations), Thick of It, Tucker | Leave a comment »

The Thick of It – Series II (Review)

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Darren

My expert would totally disprove that.

Who is your expert?

I don’t know, but I can get one by this afternoon. The thing is, you’ve been listening to the wrong expert. You need to listen to the right expert. And you need to know what an expert is going to advise you before he advises you.

– Malcolm explains how advisers work to Hugh

In its sophomoric three-episode season, The Thick of It remains a shrewdly-observed and immensely funny political satire. It’s a very British send-up of the sort of idealism inherent in drama like The West Wing, a show where everything is so murky and uncertain that the script is highly improvised and even the camera wobbles. While it’s still as funny as it was in its first season, though, I have to confess that the second season didn’t quite grab in the same way. The first season represents one of the most cynical explorations of mainstream politics that I have ever seen, but it actually seems relatively optimistic when measured against this much more scornful second cluster of episodes.