The Thick of It has reached the thin end. This latest series opened
with a now predictable staccato flurry of insults and bullying. It’s given
up on anything remotely resembling a plot that can stand up on its own and
lift the weight of all that wit, all that invective and manipulation. It was
as shapeless as Ed Balls’s suits. The narrative was really just a fat bag to
put the dolly mixture one-liners in. Which is all fine — plot isn’t
everything, situations can be self-sustaining all on their own. But we
really need to feel that The Thick of It is going somewhere, that there is a
point beyond the name-calling.
The point seems to be Malcolm Tucker, Peter Capaldi’s monstrous pantomime
interpretation of Alastair Campbell. The series started as an ensemble
satire about new Labour; it’s become Capaldi’s stand up and rant. Again, not
necessarily a bad thing. Capaldi is an inquisition of humorous spittle. He
has invented one of the great comic characters, as memorable as Alf Garnett, Victor
Meldrew or old man Steptoe. But there is less and less for him actually to
rail against. The rest of the cast are punchbags, happy to be objects of
derision. It’s not politics any more, it’s the Harlem Globetrotters do
Westminster. The series never really got back into its stride after the
departure of Chris Langham’s minister, who was as compelling a character as
Tucker, and a counterweight. While Armando Iannucci’s writing remains as
smart-arse as ever, the camerawork has grown very odd, along with the
editing. It dances around to a rhythm that has little to do with what is
actually happening, as if someone had told the cameraman there was a £50
note hidden somewhere on the set. You get the feeling Iannucci may be
turning into Tucker. The Thick of It looks like the work of a man who’s not
listening to anyone but himself.
What really shot this show’s Charles James Fox, however, was that the politics
it started off pillorying has left it behind. New Labour’s gone, Campbell’s
long gone, Blair’s babes are now Brown’s basket cases. All that vacuous,
empathetic, feelgood perception and spin has been mugged by events. The
Thick of It never managed or even tried to examine the truth about Brown’s
end-game bunker or the initiatives that were pushed around like phantom
armies, or the road maps that bear no relationship to the political terrain.
It’s a shame that Capaldi, the series’ greatest asset, has become what holds
it back.
Television is fearfully and cravenly bereft of political satire: there is no
Spitting Image, no That Was the Week That Was, just the occasional Bremner,
Bird and Fortune and some sorry and pathetically juvenile comic quiz shows.
The director-general of the BBC ought to be searching day and night for a
current-affairs comedy programme.
Racism was this week’s black-and-white issue on Panorama. They
sent out a pair of British Asian reporters with hidden cameras and moved
them into a grim estate in Bristol to see what would happen. Sure enough,
like Springwatch, the citizens of the city built on slavery and sherry
didn’t disappoint. They behaved with a repellent thuggery and an
inarticulate viciousness. The justification for this undercover exercise was
a statement made by Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equalities and Human
Rights Commission, to the effect that racism isn’t what it used to be, and
that the origin of your neighbour isn’t an issue for most of us. And for
most of us, that’s a perfectly obvious truth. But you can always find places
where it isn’t. Society isn’t carpentry.
As a journalist, I have real problems with the making of this programme. There
is a fundamental difference between going undercover to reveal a story and
putting yourself in a position where you might provoke one. Even if the
provocation is benign. I felt particularly uncomfortable about showing
children behaving antisocially. They may be ghastly, but they’re still
minors, and plastering their faces on TV is not acceptable or proportionate.
This story could, and should, have been made in a more cautious and traditional
way, with interviews and case histories — dull but dependable and defensible
journalism. But then we wouldn’t have got the sensational film and the hacks
in tears.
Jeremy Vine, as usual, introduced it with the shocking tease that the
reporters would be verbally assaulted, including use of the p-word. What’s
the p-word? Pitiful? Piss-poor? Patronising? Panorama? This wasn’t the old
flagship’s finest half-hour.
Hung is exactly what is says on the box set, an American HBO comedy
about a gym teacher’s penis. This dim man decides to moonlight as a
prostitute. Now, that might be funny; it might also be dirty, sexy and
allegorical. But it wasn’t. The man was a prick. Apart from that, he wasn’t
anything; he had no other character or interest apart from his willy. He was
moderately good-looking; in fact, he looked like everyone else on American
comedies. He had a lady pimp who was plain: it would immediately have been
much funnier if they’d done it the other way round, made him fat and ugly,
and her a buff babe. The sex was cartoonish and unbelievable, and while we
were shown plenty of lady bits, we were never going to be given a glimpse of
the titular star. As so often happens when American television attempts to
make something lascivious and bohemian, it manages only to underline quite
how prim, squeamish and self-conscious it actually is. All the euphemisms
and childish clumsiness of the setup were wearying, and nothing about it was
funny, because nothing about it was observational or believable. They really
ought to have made him black.
I have a theory about nudity on television. We get more of it when people feel
optmistic. Nipple counts are a barometer of how secure we feel about our
future. At the moment, almost every American cable series has tons of tits
and tasteful bottoms. It’s the Obama effect. Over here, we’ve had a long
period of buttoned-up probity. From Thatcher through Blair, there’s been a
lot of swearing, and quite a lot of violence, but a self-denying skin
censorship. Well, I predict we’re going to get more watershed flashing in
the run-up to the next election.
Defying Gravity could be a new comedy about breast implants or a Viagra
salesman. Sadly, it’s science fiction: a new space soap from America about
improbably beautiful astronauts who are so unstable and neurotic that none
of them would conceivably have passed the psychological profile for the Italian
space programme. Sort of a cross between Lost and Big Brother. There’s a lot
of intimation of bad things to come, but the bad acting, writing and
directing here and now are quite enough to stop you staying to find out what
they might be.
Whereas nudity on screen is a sign of liberal optimism, sci-fi tends to
flourish when people feel insecure and frightened. The first rule of sci-fi
is that it’s never about things to come, always about the terrors that have
already arrived. Nothing dates likes a fictionalised future. As this was
broadcast in America, they were planning to launch a new rocket for two
minutes, because that’s all they could afford. The planets are as out of
bounds now as they were for Copernicus. This drama is not about grand themes
or sagas in the way that Star Wars, or even Star Trek, was; it’s about the
self-obsessed psychotrauma of daytime chat shows. It is possibly the most
suburban, prosaic, earthbound sci-fi show ever conceived.
Without doubt, the most inexplicably out-there offering of the week was Bear
Grylls and Will Ferrell — Born Survivors. So weirdly pointless, it
was almost brilliant. Grylls, the Monty Don of survivalists, took the
American comic to Sweden and they did his usual thing — ate reindeer
eyeballs, slid down ropes, got cold, made loo paper out of icicles. Grylls
was as pointlessly clichéd and guilelessly nonsensical as ever; Ferrell
looked like someone whose children were being held hostage, or who’d just
lost a bet. Nobody ever explained why they were mucking about in the snow,
but this just may be the survival model for survival shows, which have
frankly grown so repetitively dull that nobody can be bothered to watch
them. They should take unlikely celebrities to dangerous places and put
their lives at risk. Jennifer Aniston cycles across Mongolia with Charley
Boorman, Eddie Murphy lives in a council house in Bristol, Billy Connolly
takes on Roman Polanski in a race across the Californian desert. How long
before the Polish perv hands himself in because prison would be preferable?
The Thick of It (BBC2, Sat)
Panorama (BBC1, Mon)
Hung (More 4, Thu)
Defying Gravity (BBC2, Wed)
Bear Grylls and Will Ferrell — Born Survivors (Channel 4, Sun)
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