The Thick of It

You avoid shows about politics. Fair. The last decade has made real politics unwatchable, so why watch a fake version of the same misery? And it’s swearing, isn’t it — you’ve heard about the swearing. Everyone has. The Malcolm Tucker clips. The fourteen-word sentences that are eleven words of profanity. You assume it’s a one-joke show and the joke is the f-word.

The joke is not the f-word.

The joke is a government that has no idea what it’s doing, and the machinery it built to hide that fact from itself. The Thick of It (BBC, 2005–2012, created by Armando Iannucci) follows the fictional Department of Social Affairs — a dumping ground for every policy nobody senior wanted — and its minister, who changes roughly once a series because they keep getting eaten. The actual antagonist is Malcolm Tucker, the PM’s enforcer, played by Peter Capaldi with the coiled menace of a horror villain who happens to communicate exclusively in abuse. Yes, the swearing is spectacular. But it’s not decoration — it’s percussion. It’s the rhythm section of a show about people who communicate purely through fear because sincerity would mean admitting something has gone wrong, and nothing can ever be admitted to have gone wrong, because that becomes the story.

That’s the actual subject: not politics, but machine behaviour. How a press release announcing a policy nobody has drafted becomes a policy that must exist by Thursday. How the honest answer and the survivable answer are never the same answer. How the people in charge aren’t evil, they’re just permanently underwater, and every day they swim a little further from the shore and call it strategy. It’s the cynical mechanics-level analysis you already enjoy, except it’s funny — genuinely, achingly funny, in a way that doesn’t need a studio audience to tell you when.

And if you’ve seen Veep — good show, America’s remake of the sensibility — this is where it came from. Iannucci made this first, sharper, and with lower production values that somehow make it funnier: offices that look like real offices, corridor conversations that feel like they’re actually happening, dialogue polished to sound improvised. Jesse Armstrong and Simon Blackwell wrote on this before making Succession. You can draw the line straight through.

The bridge you didn’t ask for: if you only know Capaldi as Doctor Who, you are not remotely prepared. It’s one of the great television performances, and it’s happening in a show where the visual style is “handheld camera pointed at a frightened man in a bad suit.”

It’s four series and some specials. It’s on iPlayer. You’ll finish it in a week and quote it for a decade.

You avoid shows about politics. Watch this one anyway.