The Thick of It (BBC Two)
Andrew Marr’s The Making of Modern Britain (BBC Two)
Wonderland: The British in Bed (BBC Two)
What can one reasonably expect to achieve in three minutes? It’s nothing. You
could get a pot of tea half-brewed, maybe, or go from 47th to 46th in the
call-centre queue for O2. Clean a grill pan. Dice a kilo of lamb. Shave one
leg. It’s not an inspiring list.
Compare this dawdling, Neanderthal sclerosis, then, to the first three minutes
of The Thick of It. The opening episode of the third series landed
last Saturday night, like one of those mysterious glowing objects that crash
in Oklahoma in sci-fi films, humming with advanced technology from a
superior civilisation. The first three minutes went at such a pace that it
was like someone sticking a whisk in your head and revving it until you had
brain-meringue coming out of your eyes.
For three minutes, Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi, as always, a suited Vesuvius
in full pyroclastic flow) was on the phone, shouting at people. At 00.00.12,
we learnt that Hugh Abbot (Chris Langham) had lost his job at the Department
of Social Affairs and Citizenship. Twelve seconds in! The time it takes to
tie a shoelace! It’s an admirably brisk way of covering the departure of a
key actor — forced to resign after his conviction for downloading child
pornography. After all, when the actor who played Steven Carrington wanted
to leave Dynasty they had to blow up an oil rig in the Philippines
and set fire to Steven’s face to explain why a new actor was playing him in
Season 3. Seeing how they dealt with it on Thick in just one line,
you couldn’t help but think the Dynasty option was a slight
overreaction.
By 00.00.15, Tucker comes down to the bottom line of recruitment: “We need
someone to plug the DoSAC hole. Just a mammal, with a head.” Pausing only to
chuck in the lines “I’ve got more on my plate than a spinster at a wedding”,
“Look at you — c*** the size of the Pink Panther’s tail” and “Fatty knows
too much” — “Well he doesn’t know where the Ryvita is”, by 00.02.45 the new
Secretary of State is at DoSAC: Nicola Murray (Rebecca Front), all bright
Hobbs shift-dress, one good handbag, and awkward, hissed phone conversations
with her recalcitrant husband.
“You’ve got this job because the only other candidate was my left b******,
with a smiley face painted on it,” Tucker briefs her, still leaving enough
time for “the press will be all over this like a pigeon with a chip” and the
description of a state school as having “knife-addled rape-sheds” before we
got to 00.03.00. Just three minutes.
It made you realise what engine-idling time vampires most shows are. Three
minutes into My Family, and poor Robert Lindsay would have done
little more than burn a muffin, fall over the dog, then mug.
The political disillusionment of Murray is the story arc for Series 3, and,
again, Thick doesn’t waste time. Five minutes in, Murray has learnt
that her job is essentially pointless — she’s “going to have as much power
as those two t**** who sit either side of Alan Sugar” — and that she has to
send her 11-year-old daughter to a failing state school: “It’s horrible,”
Terri (Joanna Scanlan) sympathises, “but there’s no way round it. It’s like
Dover.”
With its insanely labour-intensive production — everything drafted, redrafted,
improvised, tweaked — The Thick of It is like a Kobe beef cow
of comedy: fed on beer, massaged with saké and hugged to death. It’s a
top-quality amusement sirloin. But an idea as magnificent as democracy
deserves a satire as magnificent as Thick. I ultimately feel a bit
silly reviewing The Thick of It. It’s like a hamster reviewing a
lion. I’m so admiring of it, I feel shy saying its name. I blush during the
opening credits. A. A. Gill gave it a kicking last week, but what does he
know? His best friend is Jeremy Clarkson, and he shot a baboon, for kicks.
It’s an entirely different value system. It’s like heeding the opinions of a
man eating coal.
By God, there’s a great opening line in Andrew Marr’s The Making of
Modern Britain. Well, opening scene, really. The conceit is that modern
Britain was formed between the death of Queen Victoria and the end of the
Second World War. As good a theory as any, though it does severely underplay
the significance of GHD hair straighteners and Deep by East 17.
So one can only imagine the full-body thrill that Marr must have had on
finding that Queen Victoria died in the arms of her grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm
II. The Victorian age literally and figuratively dies in the arms of the man
who takes Germany into the First World War. It’s the kind of thing that
would happen in a really great episode of Doctor Who. Amazing.
There’s something razzy about Marr — a fact that the theme tune to The
Andrew Marr Show seems to acknowledge. The first five seconds form the
sleaziest opener in recent TV history, like the morning-glory clarinet wail
on Rhapsody in Blue, with the potent promise of some damn-hard
political questioning to come. As far as lubricious theme tunes go, it’s up
there with The Rockford Files and Moonlighting.
Marr brings this air to The Making of Modern Britain, galloping through
socio-political pivot points like a Donald O’Connor character in a screwball
1950s musical. Boer War, trade unionists entering Parliament, Charles
Stewart “Rolls-Royce” Rolls being the first Briton privileged, and
technologically advanced, enough to die from crashing in a plane — Marr
cartwheels through it all. He introduces Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree’s 1901
reformatory clarion call, Poverty: A Study of Town Life, as if he
were reading out the filthy bits from Walt Whitman’s I Sing the
Body Electric.
The best bit, however, was a quick foray into music hall that not only
revealed that Marie Lloyd was the spiritual forebear of Lily Allen, but also
had a clip of a primitive roundabout carrying six live brown bears wearing
hats — an amusement that would surely have delighted Michael Jackson, were
he not now dead.
Anyone turning up hoping for a sneaky bit of BBC-sanctioned rumpo in Wonderland:
The British in Bed would have been disappointed. This was not readers’
letters in Fiesta. The “good bits” aren’t going to turn up on YouTube
next week, lovingly spliced together by a 17-year-old boy.
Instead, Philippa Robinson, the director, found seven couples and quizzed them
about their relationships while they sat in bed. Yes, chatting in bed has
gone from Paula Yates’s novelty on The Big Breakfast to a
legitimate documentary technique. Zig and Zag quizzing Octomum can only be
months away.
There was some sex. The first question was: “How often do you make love?”
Alfred, 84, and Miriam, 74, had been married 48 years, and were as game as
the boot of the Queen’s Land Rover on the Glorious 12th.
“We had too much sex,” Miriam grumbles, elbowing Alfred. “That’s why now we’re
wrinkled in our faces.”
“I show it her every morning, and she pretends like she’s never seen it
before,” Alfred said slyly, while Miriam flapped her hands and horrored
“Stop it! Stop it!” with barely concealed delight.
Chris and Jessica, married 27 years, weren’t so easy. In a tiny pine bed
overloaded with dogs (“He crushes my feet!”), cats and old resentments,
Chris lamented how his wife goes up to the loft every night with a bag of
glass beads to make jewellery.
After a log-jam of heated accusations, Chris finally asked her why she
couldn’t sit next to him and do it “on a tray”.
“I miss you,” he said, simply.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked, looking amazed.
“I thought you knew.”
“Oh,” she said, collapsing on her pillow as if she’d been falling out of an
exploding plane for a long time, and finally landed.
The big question is: how the bloody hell do they do this? How do documentary
teams find these people just about to have a gigantic revelatory moment, yet
are clearly saying all this stuff for the first time?
I have concluded it must be down to burglary. Production companies are
breaking into people’s houses and stealing diaries. Anyone with
anything juicy will have the volume filleted as briefing notes and can
expect a knock on the door from a documentary team within the next six
months.
Indeed, a bit like when Cheggers used to surprise people in “Down your
Doorstep” on The Big Breakfast, but more emotional.
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