There have been two things I’ve ended up having to explain
to various, non-British students since I started Erasmus. Firstly, trying to
make sense of British politics, and secondly, how the British swear. But if I
had wanted to save time it would have been easier for me to have just sat them
down in front of a few episodes of The
Thick of It or the film version, In
The Loop. Both contain amazing satire of British politics from the last
five years without requiring much knowledge of the context, and use some of the
most hilariously creative swearing on television (if that’s your thing). When
the creator, Armando Iannucci, asked an ex-Whitehall civil servant if the use
of profanities was realistic, he said that the only difference was that The Thick of It was too clever.
The show follows the work of the fictional Department of
Social Affairs and the staffs’ relationship with the borderline psychopathic
spin doctor, Malcolm Tucker (played by Peter Capaldi and loosely based on the
Labour “Director of Communications and Strategy” Alastair Campbell). It exposes
the inner workings of British government politics; the hypocrisy, crushing
boredom and the “power of spin”, that forced most ministers to either follow
the party line or lose their jobs. A standard episode shows the minister or one
of his civil servants getting something horribly wrong; such as arriving at a
press conference with no new policy to announce, or leaking something to the
press that they really shouldn’t have. Although Tucker usually has to sort it
out, he is also usually the one who causes it, forcing constant changes in what
is said and dictating precise wordings of statements – for instance, one
minister in confusing “The Prime Minister is the right man of the moment” and
“the Prime Minister is the right man for the moment” accidentally causes a
leadership challenge.
The Thick of It is the creation of Armando Iannucci, one of the most
influential satirists working in the British media today, so much so that in
2012 he received an OBE for his “services to broadcasting”. Iannucci is responsible
for programmes like The Day Today and
Brass Eye which he wrote with Chris
Morris and attack the various failings of news programmes and documentaries. He
then went on to front his own shows like Armando
Iannucci’s Charm Offensive and The
Friday Night Armistice, largely unscripted panel shows which mocked the
week’s current events. However, despite the large cult following of his work
with Chris Morris, The Thick of It is
probably what Iannucci is best known for and rightly so. Not only is it incredibly
funny, but it has also had a major impact on politics. The term “omnishambles”
– meaning an almost all-encompassing failure or disorganisation - was coined by
The Thick of It writers and was then
used by the Leader of the Opposition in a speech in Parliament. After Mr. Miliband
used it, several opposition politicians followed suit, and for a while it was
seen to encapsulate our current government.The Oxford English Dictionary even
gave it the title of “Word of the Year” in 2012.
Iannucci’s skill as a satirist can also be shown in that, as
well as mocking what they actually had done, he actually predicted several of
the Coalition’s actions in final series of The
Thick of It: one character says that they can’t go into First Class on the
train otherwise the newspapers would destroy them, two weeks later George
Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was caught in First Class without a
ticket. In The Thick of It, the
“junior coalition partners” (The Liberal Democrats) propose the “We-Bank”, a
community funded bank that would require £2bn funding and then the real Liberal
Democrats proposed a “business bank” needing £1bn funding. This is what makes The Thick of It so good; as well as
there being a lot of fun in listening to Dr Who swearing at lots of scared
looking people, it also echoes reality so closely that you feel slightly
uncomfortable watching it, terrified that this will be the government’s next
bloody stupid idea.
Fergus Doyle (English & American Literature
with Creative Writing, University of Kent)
