2005 - 2012
The Thick of It ran on the BBC from 2005 to 2012. Four series, a handful of specials, and one feature-length spin-off film (In the Loop, 2009). Armando Iannucci created it after a long run making radio comedy and The Day Today-era news satire, and he built it around a question almost nobody had bothered to ask on screen. What does British government actually sound like when the cameras aren't on?
The setting is the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship. DoSAC for short. In the show's internal history it used to be plain old DoSA, then picked up an extra letter after one too many scandals. The running joke is that nobody outside the building is entirely sure what the department does. The people inside the building aren't sure either. They are too busy firefighting a tabloid story, rewriting a press release that was leaked twelve minutes ago, and trying not to end up in the back of Malcolm Tucker's Jaguar.
Malcolm is the reason the show exists. Peter Capaldi plays him as a Glaswegian blood pressure spike in a dark suit, a Number 10 enforcer loosely modelled on Alastair Campbell. He spends most of his screen time kicking doors, explaining what hell looks like to a junior minister, and improvising profanity that Ian Martin, credited onscreen as the show's "swearing consultant", had polished that morning.
The first two series centre on Chris Langham as Hugh Abbott, a hapless minister for DoSA trying to survive week to week. Langham was written out after a 2007 conviction for a real-life offence, which the BBC dealt with by simply not bringing the character back. The show pivots into Rebecca Front's Nicola Murray from series three onwards, a new minister with her own brand of anxious incompetence and a running terror of Malcolm's mobile phone.
The DoSAC civil service team is where most of the best material lives:
Series three and four introduce the opposition benches, with Roger Allam as Peter Mannion, a Tory grandee slowly realising his party no longer speaks a language he understands. Vincent Franklin plays Stewart Pearson, the New Conservative comms guru who talks like a TED Talk with the sound slightly delayed. Paul Higgins returns as Jamie McDonald, Malcolm's even more violent Glaswegian lieutenant. The whole thing is a revolving door of panicked faces in bad meeting rooms.
Joanna Scanlan
Terri Coverley
Chris Addison
Ollie Reeder
Rebecca Front
Nicola Murray
Vincent Franklin
Stewart Pearson
Paul Higgins
Jamie McDonald
James Smith
Glenn Cullen
Roger Allam
Peter Mannion
Alex MacQueen
Julius Nicholson
The surface pitch is "Yes Minister with swearing", and you can see why the comparison sticks. It's lazy though. Yes Minister is a show about process, about the quiet war between elected ministers and the permanent civil service. The Thick of It is about something different, which is the 24-hour news cycle swallowing policy whole.
Every crisis in the show is a media crisis first and a governance crisis second, if at all. A minister misspeaks on the Today programme. A document leaks. An intern tweets the wrong thing. By lunchtime the department is in full containment mode, by dinner time the minister is doing a doorstep apology, and by the time anyone asks what the actual policy is the question is already three news cycles behind. Iannucci is showing you a government with no time to govern because it is too busy looking governed.
The language is the genre's other lasting contribution. Malcolm's monologues are baroque, biblical, cruel, and funny in a way that British TV comedy hadn't really allowed before. The f-bomb count is legendary, but what actually carries the scenes is rhythm. Long sentence, long sentence, obscene punchline. The improvisation on set is extensive, but it's scaffolded by scripts Iannucci and his team had been working on for months. You can tell because the jokes always land.
Shot handheld. Often a beat too close to the actors. The camera wanders round meeting rooms as if the operator wasn't sure which conversation was about to become the story. That docu-vérité grammar was unusual for British sitcom in 2005 and it is now the template for every political satire that has followed. Veep, Iannucci's American spin-off for HBO, borrows it wholesale. Succession borrows it more selectively and tilts it toward tragedy. Even Iannucci's later sci-fi comedy Avenue 5 keeps the same queasy, over-the-shoulder feel.
Production design is drab on purpose. Beige carpets, strip lighting, water cooler, standard-issue whiteboard with half-wiped scrawl on it. The whole point is that these rooms look boring so the detonations inside them land harder.
It won the BAFTA for Best Situation Comedy twice. It picked up an International Emmy. Veep won seven Primetime Emmys off the template it established. In the Loop was nominated for a screenplay Oscar. Peter Capaldi rode Malcolm Tucker straight into the Doctor Who TARDIS in 2013, which is one of the odder casting pivots British TV has ever produced. Beyond the awards shelf, the show's influence is everywhere. Alpha House tried to do a softer American version before Veep landed and arguably made it redundant.
The best political comedy of the century, and one of the few shows that genuinely deserved a place next to Yes Minister rather than merely standing in its shadow.
More interestingly, it changed what real political reporting sounds like. The number of Westminster journalists who now describe spin doctors as "Malcolm Tucker types" is mildly embarrassing. Life imitating art, art imitating Alastair Campbell, the loop closes.
The reason the show holds up, fourteen years after the final episode aired, is that it refuses to pick a side. Labour get it in series one and two. The incoming coalition-style New Conservatives get it in series three and four. The civil service get it throughout. The media get it worst of all. Iannucci's camera treats everyone as equally ridiculous and equally cornered, which means there is no hero to age badly and no obvious political target to date the show.
It is also, full stop, the funniest thing the BBC has put out this century. I would put it ahead of The Office UK on pure joke density, which is not something I say lightly. If you have somehow not watched it, start with series one, accept that the first two episodes will feel strange because of the pacing, and then keep going. By episode three you will be hooked and by series three you will be quoting it at people who have never seen it and wondering why they aren't laughing.
Olivia Poulet
Emma Messinger
Chris Langham
Hugh Abbott
Peter Capaldi
Malcolm Tucker