Abigoliah: Welcome to All British Comedy Explained. It is the podcast where I, Abigoliah Schamaun, finally learn about all the British sitcoms I have been missing out on. And to guide us through this comedy labyrinth is my good friend and writer, Tom Salinsky.
Tom: Hello there. The labyrinth feels a bit more like a rainforest.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Because this is going to go out in the autumn, but we’re recording it in August. And it’s close. It’s close.
Abigoliah: Speaking of which, something we haven’t talked about of recent, but I believe when this goes out in October, your play will be going.
Tom: Oh, yes. Very true. Yes. That’s right. Link in the show notes. The Gang of Three, my play about the Labour Party. So if you’re interested in British politics and satire and so on, this — I wouldn’t call it a satirical play — but it is a little look at the way that individual personalities can sometimes get in the way of what seem like pretty straightforward decisions. Something we will also be seeing when we watch The Thick of It very shortly.
Abigoliah: Something that I see often when I turn on the news.
Tom: So it’s called The Gang of Three. It will be going on tour, starting at the King’s Head and then going to Richmond and then, in some order, Oxford, Cambridge, Guildford and Chichester. And the link to buy tickets is in the show notes.
Abigoliah: Please go check that out.
Tom: All right. We’re going to watch The Thick of It.
Abigoliah: Oh.
Tom: You’ve heard of this.
Abigoliah: Into the thick of it. That was a meme on TikTok, like, right when TikTok started. And I have no clue what that is. It’s not from The Thick of It.
Tom: It sounds like Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim.
Abigoliah: It’s not. Into the — into the woods. Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum. Yeah, this was a little different. But anyways, that’s how we differ in what we know about TikTok sometimes.
Tom: Yeah, yeah.
Abigoliah: Hey, excuse me. Majoring in musical theatre. I know Sondheim. You know British sitcoms. I know memes from the early 2020s.
Tom: So, yeah, you’ve never actually seen The Thick of It.
Abigoliah: No. And it’s a sitcom.
Tom: It is a sitcom.
Abigoliah: It’s a satirical sitcom.
Tom: Yes. And I would say that it is much more satirical than Yes Minister. I think there is — and we’ll come to Yes Minister in a minute — but I think there is a fundamental difference of approach in what they’re trying to say.
Abigoliah: Well, before we turned on the microphones, I was saying I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a satirical sitcom. And you said Yes Minister, but I cannot, in my mind, find a satirical sitcom that’s American.
Tom: Veep.
Abigoliah: Veep. Of course. Yeah.
Tom: And there’s also a relationship between The Thick of It and Veep, which we’ll come to.
Abigoliah: Oh, this is the Yes, Prime Minister-to-Veep pipeline.
Tom: Kind of, yes.
Abigoliah: Is this the one that — what’s his name? — did The Thick of It because he used to like Yes, Prime Minister?
Tom: Exactly.
Abigoliah: So, yes. Yeah. Okay. This is that story. All right. Go. Go off, king.
Tom: The Thick of It was first transmitted in 2005.
Abigoliah: Oh my gosh.
Tom: Yeah. Coming much more up to date than quite a lot of things we’ve seen. Is this the most up-to-date thing we’ve seen?
Abigoliah: I think so. I mean, we watched Ab Fab, which had shows in the 2000s, but that’s not—
Tom: The Office started in 2001, I think.
Abigoliah: Yeah. This, I’m going to go ahead and say, is the most recent as far as, like, the first air date.
Tom: I think you’re probably right. It’s the year that Doctor Who returned after a 16-year absence from our screens.
Abigoliah: Oh, wow.
Tom: 16 years, with one one-off TV movie in the middle.
Abigoliah: I never knew that there was a time without Doctor Who.
Tom: Oh yes. We called it the Wilderness Years.
Abigoliah: How did you get along?
Tom: There was — there were — there were original novels. There were audio dramas.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: We coped. Oh, it wasn’t easy.
Abigoliah: I’m glad you got through it.
Tom: Yeah. There’s a missing generation that didn’t grow up with Doctor Who being on the television.
Abigoliah: Oh, yeah.
Tom: It’s also the year that YouTube was launched.
Abigoliah: Wait a minute. Back up. If 2005 is when Doctor Who rebooted, that’s David Tennant’s—
Tom: Christopher Eccleston was the first to do it.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: He did it for one year. And then David Tennant took over and did three seasons over four years.
Abigoliah: Okay. All right. That makes sense, because he’s the one that, like, everyone my age—
Tom: Is in—
Abigoliah: Love with.
Tom: And for good reason.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Go on. Yeah. YouTube was launched this year by three former PayPal employees.
Abigoliah: You know why they launched it?
Tom: No. Why?
Abigoliah: Because there was a little Super Bowl halftime show where Justin Timberlake ripped off the garment of Janet Jackson, which she got in trouble for, which — she’s not the one who freaking showed her titty on. He did it.
Anyways, my point is, when that happened, it obviously went out live and these guys were like, how is there a way to watch this again or share it? And so YouTube was invented.
Tom: Yeah. Sharing video before YouTube was horrible.
Abigoliah: And I love the fact that, like all things in media, it starts with porn. Like, why — why did the—? Because they needed to see one woman’s breast.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Like, okay.
Tom: Yeah, yeah. But porn drove all sorts of things. It drove internet video. It drove—
Abigoliah: VHS.
Tom: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tony Blair wins a historic third general election for Labour this year.
Abigoliah: And then after this one is when he leaves in a flame of glory.
Tom: Yeah. And George W. Bush is sworn in for a second term in America.
Abigoliah: I remember that. I lived in New York. And so I didn’t live in New York when Trump was elected both times, but I did live in New York when George W. Bush won his second term. And I woke up the day after the election, and I’ve never seen a whole city quiet.
Tom: Yeah. It’s like grief.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: It was really intense. And I wasn’t there for, like, the huge tragedies in New York. If some people are like, what about— Like, I wasn’t there for, like, 9/11 and stuff. But yeah. Oh, I remember that.
Tom: Anyway, we’ve touched on this story before, so I’ll do a fast version. In 2004, the BBC launched a series to find Britain’s best sitcom. They commissioned short films from various luminaries to champion each of the finalists. Armando Iannucci directed the Yes Minister piece, and then he started wondering, like, why isn’t anyone doing this now?
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And what would it look like if you did? And so he started talking to insiders, and what he realised was the balance of power had shifted.
Abigoliah: Go on.
Tom: Well, in the seventies and eighties, the tension was between the permanent members of the civil service and the ministers, who would be transitory. They would spend some time running this department and then they’d be moved on to something else or relegated to the back benches. So the permanent staff was always there.
Abigoliah: Was Sir Humphrey, like, permanent staff?
Tom: Yes, exactly. Yes.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Yeah. Now, in the 2000s, the tension was between ministers and prime ministerial enforcers and special advisers.
Abigoliah: What’s a prime ministerial enforcer?
Tom: It’s the guy that the Prime Minister has to make sure that his will is enacted.
Abigoliah: So for Keir Starmer, was it Angela Rayner?
Tom: Somebody like that, yes. But crucially for Tony Blair, it was Alastair Campbell.
Abigoliah: Who now has a podcast.
Tom: He does, yes. Alastair, if you want to come on and have a chat to us, we’re more than happy to have you.
Abigoliah: But, just… sometimes… okay….
Tom: So there’s a couple of things going on here. So one is very powerful spin doctors like Alastair Campbell—
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: —who just gets to dictate what the stories are. But then also, suddenly everyone is surrounded by SPADs.
Abigoliah: What’s a SPAD?
Tom: Special adviser.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And the point is, some of the special advisers are in their twenties and this is their first job.
Abigoliah: And so a special adviser, is it basically like a PA?
Tom: No. It’s somebody who, as a politician, you employ personally to give you advice about policy or about media. And so it’s not a party appointee and definitely not a member of government, if you’re the governing party, but it’s somebody that you employ to give you advice.
Abigoliah: I think I met one of these once.
Tom: I wouldn’t be surprised.
Abigoliah: There I was at a comedy club, and there was a guy there who was like, “I’m a politician.” And he worked for an MP.
Tom: Yeah. Exactly right.
Abigoliah: But he wasn’t an MP, but he — he did kind of say he was a politician. It took a while to get it out of him. It was a very interesting conversation. But in their twenties?
Tom: Often. So Frank Weasel — Weisel — in the first series of Yes Minister was Hacker’s special adviser.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But they weren’t as commonplace and they weren’t as clueless, because everything’s getting younger. It used to be the case you’d spend 20 years as a lawyer or running a business or something before you entered politics. But now people stand for council in their twenties and get elected MP in their early thirties, and are on the front bench in their late thirties or early forties. So everything’s just got younger.
Abigoliah: Which I’m not against.
Tom: Yeah. No, nor am I. But then when you want to employ somebody younger than you to give you fresh ideas, you’re basically now employing graduates.
Abigoliah: And that’s why politicians are now on TikTok.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: It all — into the thick of it.
Tom: But Iannucci had no interest in doing another show that was just like Yes Minister, but with a younger cast. And he started thinking about what would make this feel different. And there was a fly-on-the-wall documentary about Alastair Campbell.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And that made him think, oh, what if we shot this in, like, a documentary style? Now, obviously, post-The Office, this is very much in the zeitgeist.
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: Of course. But what he did was — so he managed to get a commission from BBC Four, which meant he had no money, but he kind of made it work for him.
Abigoliah: But if you’re shooting documentary style, you don’t need money because it can look shitty.
Tom: Exactly. So it’s a loose style. It’s very improvisatory. They do multiple takes of the same scene. They use only natural light, only handheld cameras.
Oh, another influence was — did you ever watch The Larry Sanders Show?
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Well, I’ve seen clips of it. I haven’t watched it, of course, all the way through.
Tom: Yeah. Because you don’t watch comedy. But that just finished its run on HBO and had been one of those things, again, where everybody thinks it’s this enormous hit. It’s so influential, but only about, like, four people and their dog watched it.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: But everybody loved it and was talking about it. So that was another influence.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And again, a big team of writers. Armando often works in collaboration and is good at running big teams and getting the best out of them. So Jesse Armstrong was one of the key writers. He’d just finished the first series of Peep Show.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: A sketch writer called Simon Blackwell. Another one called Tony Roche.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: A couple of stand-up comedians that you may have heard of, Will Smith and Chris Addison.
Abigoliah: Yes. Yes, yes.
Tom: And Armando Iannucci had read a website where a guy called Ian Martin had done a sweary online spoof of Hansard. Hansard is the official record of what’s said in the House of Commons.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And this guy had imagined, what would it be like if they actually said what was on their mind?
Abigoliah: That’s fun.
Tom: And he employed Ian Martin on The Thick of It as swearing consultant.
Abigoliah: I like that.
Tom: So, for example, when the script read, “He’s useless,” Ian Martin rewrote it as, “He’s about as much use as a marzipan dildo.”
Abigoliah: I mean, that invokes an image.
Tom: Exactly. And a lot of those writers—
Abigoliah: You know what they’re doing with that? You know what Ian learned is how to rough and plump.
Tom: Yes. Rough and plump.
A lot of those writers went on to work with Armando Iannucci on Veep, and then with Jesse Armstrong on Succession.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Did you watch Succession?
Abigoliah: Yes, I did. Yeah, yeah. That is an upsetting watch. Like, I binged it and was like, I don’t like any of these people, yet I can’t stop watching it.
Tom: Yeah. It’s like car-crash television.
Chris Addison and Will Smith were also added to the cast, which was now kind of beginning to coalesce. The two key characters were a minister named Hugh Abbott and a terrifying spin doctor named Malcolm Tucker.
Abigoliah: And that’s who — is that who he’s based on? The Rest Is Politics guy.
Tom: Oh, yes. Yeah. That’s — yeah. Based on Alastair Campbell. Exactly. Yeah, yeah.
Now, Armando had just seen a kind of docudrama about George Orwell, and he thought that the actor playing Orwell had exactly the right kind of slightly depressed, hangdog energy for the minister.
Do you know what name I’m about to say?
Abigoliah: Hangdog energy for the minister? No.
Tom: Chris Langham.
Abigoliah: Oh.
Tom: So I had not intended this at all. There is a weird Chris Langham thread that’s running kind of all the way through this season.
Abigoliah: We did All British Comedy—
Tom: We didn’t mean to do it.
Abigoliah: He’s a—
Tom: Baddie. Yeah.
So he is the Minister for Social Affairs and Citizenship, which doesn’t exist. So just like Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn created the Department of Administrative Affairs for Yes Minister, Armando and his team created the Department of Social Affairs.
Abigoliah: Is he in jail now?
Tom: I don’t think so. But he’s not doing a lot of comedy work.
Abigoliah: He didn’t go to jail?
Tom: He was— Well, we’re coming back to this. But I think he did go to jail. But he’s not in jail now.
Abigoliah: Oh, okay.
Tom: He’s just — yeah. He’s just not doing a lot of work.
Abigoliah: For those of you just joining us for the first time in this episode, we discussed in last episode—
Tom: And we’ll be discussing him again.
Abigoliah: —that he got caught with child pornography on his laptop.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: So he’s a very problematic person. It has been acknowledged. We know that. Let’s move forward.
Tom: So yes, the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship, DoSAC. That’s where the action centres, and it doesn’t exist, but it’s a useful kind of ministry which isn’t going to be dealing with the big stuff like the NHS or defence. But it means that, in that sitcom way, little things can become magnified out of all proportion.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Like Parks and Rec.
Tom: Or Parks and Rec. Yeah, exactly.
Abigoliah: Let’s go to the mall, because then the stakes aren’t catastrophic.
Tom: But the personal stakes can still feel enormous. And that’s why we find it funny.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So Iannucci was working with a casting director called Sarah Crowe. She noticed a very promising actor in a now largely forgotten ITV comedy drama called Fortysomething. But if you go back and look at this, the cast is amazing. It starred quite-famous Hugh Laurie.
Abigoliah: Big fan.
Tom: Opposite quite-famous Anna Chancellor.
Abigoliah: Love her.
Tom: Supported by completely unknown Benedict Cumberbatch.
Abigoliah: There is a time when people didn’t know who Benedict Cumberbatch was. Did I ever tell you I once saw him in a café not far from here?
Tom: Is that right?
Abigoliah: And me and my friend — I was with Alison Spittle — and he was, like, in a corner, just on a computer doing his own thing. And I was like, I think that’s Ben— Benedict Cumberbatch.
And we used to go to that café all the time, so we knew the woman who ran it, and she just walks by and she goes, “Yes, it is.” And we just started to giggle like— He knew. We knew because we giggled like schoolgirls.
He shortly — he left shortly after we started giggling like children. Sorry, Ben.
Tom: And also in this show, as Hugh Laurie’s nemesis, a then-unknown Peter Capaldi.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: And there’s a darkness to that character. And that reminded Sarah Crowe of Alastair Campbell. So she said to Armando Iannucci, we should get this guy in to audition.
And the auditions basically involved Armando Iannucci would set up a situation and get the actors to improvise, because he knew he wanted this improvisational feeling and he wanted them to be able to improvise.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Capaldi didn’t like improvisation.
Abigoliah: See, I love doing that at an audition because I hate reading scripts.
Tom: He didn’t really understand why he’d been asked to audition when they hadn’t bothered to write a script.
Abigoliah: He’s such a classic actor, that Capaldi.
Tom: And he kind of turned up to the meeting in a really bad mood.
Abigoliah: Which worked for—
Tom: Him. It worked. Exactly. Yeah. It was exactly the energy the part needed. And of course, playing that part made him a star.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And he didn’t want it. There’s so many stories of actors who show up in a bad mood, and because they aren’t trying to be an arsehole, they just are not an arsehole, but they’re being pissy in that moment. They’re like, they’re perfect.
Tom: There’s a story — and maybe I’ll cut this out — but from Red Dwarf. There’s a character who has evolved from the ship’s cat who is incredibly vain and confident. And when Danny John-Jules auditioned, he didn’t realise he was 40 minutes late and just swaggered in confidently. And they were like, that’s our guy.
Abigoliah: That’s amazing.
Tom: And then rounding out the cast, we have Joanna Scanlan as Terri, James Smith as Glenn and a whole bunch of other actors. But those are the kind of the key ones.
And they shot three episodes. That was all they were commissioned for, just three. They shot them in ten days in a disused Guinness factory in west London.
Abigoliah: As a — as an office for a Member of Parliament?
Tom: As a ministry. So only — the only Member of Parliament is the minister, played by Chris Langham. But everyone else is either a special adviser employed by the minister or by the party, or they’re a civil servant like Sir Humphrey.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Abigoliah: And as a government building, they used a Guinness factory. Great.
Tom: The cast had radio mics, and they were told, there’s no blocking. Wherever you want to go, the camera operators will find you.
Abigoliah: How did Peter enjoy that?
Tom: He got his sea legs quite quickly, as you’ll see. Yeah.
But then they’d shoot multiple takes of the same scene. They’d basically kind of do one on script and then say, we’ll do another one where you hit those same plot points, but you can do whatever dialogue you want.
And these would be quite long-ish scenes, like four or five or six-minute scenes. And they’d just keep shooting, and they’d maybe do three or four versions. And then Iannucci and his producer, Adam Tandy, would go through all of this miles and miles of footage and try and find the best lines.
And they actually did it almost as if they were editing a radio show. They’re just cutting for dialogue and then hoping to find shots that will match, or cutaways that can cover really obviously contradictory continuity moments.
Abigoliah: That is how I edit our TikTok.
Tom: There you go.
Abigoliah: And our Instagram Reels. Please follow us on Instagram.
Tom: And apart from anything else, if you’re cutting for really good dialogue and the story is working, if the audience is going, “He had his coffee cup in the other hand,” then none of the show is working anyway.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah.
Tom: So you just kind of hope nobody will notice.
And the show did work. That first series of three episodes won two BAFTAs. Critics loved it. It was BBC Four’s most watched show of the week in May 2005, and so the BBC said, we’ll have three more.
And so everyone was really thrilled with what they were getting. And after that they ordered ten more.
Abigoliah: Three and three is so perfect because it’s a 90-minute comedy film.
Tom: Yeah, exactly. There you go. Yeah, yeah.
But after the order for a second set of ten, some problems started to arise, some of which we have already hinted at.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So in November 2005, just after—
Abigoliah: I gave this away. I didn’t know we were going to tell this story.
Tom: Just after the second series was transmitted, Chris Langham was arrested on charges of possession of child pornography. So they said, we can’t do your series of ten yet. Lovely to be offered that, thank you so much. Here are two specials, and the minister is in Australia.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And so then they try to figure out what they’re going to do next.
Abigoliah: They should have done — have you seen the second Beetlejuice movie?
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: They should have done that. They should have just killed him off.
Tom: Well, I have lots of thoughts about the Beetlejuice movie, but maybe we’ll save that for another day. Basically, I can’t understand why, having made the decision to kill Jeffrey Jones off, Jeffrey fucking Jones keeps cropping up in that fucking awful movie.
Abigoliah: He’s only in the beginning.
Tom: No, he’s not. There’s a claymation version of him. There’s a picture of him. He keeps being talked about. He will not leave that movie alone.
Abigoliah: Okay. I just remember the claymation killing him off, and I don’t remember anything else, but I can understand.
Tom: Yeah. I think he’s in some scenes as a headless puppet as well. No, he will not leave that story alone. It’s a very strange decision.
Anyway, here’s something really interesting that happens at this point while they’re trying to figure out what to do next. BBC Films noticed there’s this little team making this amazingly high-quality show on next to no money. And so they say, would you be interested in doing a version of this for cinemas?
Abigoliah: Oh, wow.
Tom: So there’s a film called In the Loop, which was inspired by the dodgy dossier which brought the UK into the Iraq War.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And because this was going to be—
Abigoliah: And that was — that’s what killed Blair.
Tom: Blair. Exactly. Because this was going to be released internationally, they didn’t want to connect it to the TV show. So, rather weirdly, it’s almost exactly the same cast playing basically the same characters, but they all have different names, except for Peter Capaldi, who’s still called Malcolm Tucker.
It doesn’t really make any sense, but it’s a really good film and it was a hit. They made it for just over £600,000.
Abigoliah: Jeez. That’s nothing.
Tom: And it took $8 million at the box office, and the screenplay was nominated for an Oscar.
Abigoliah: Can we talk about—? Let’s make small-budget good things. Because what — what are people going to cinemas right now to watch? The small-budget—
Tom: Did you say you haven’t seen The Ballad of Wallis Island?
Abigoliah: No.
Tom: You should really watch The Ballad of Wallis Island.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: It’s so good.
Abigoliah: All right. I’ll get on that.
Tom: Yeah. So we talked about that a couple of weeks ago on the AMA.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah.
Tom: Yeah, yeah. All these low-budget horror films, Backrooms and Obsession. So good.
Abigoliah: Just make — give someone £600,000 and just let them do their thing.
Tom: Robert McKee said, if you’re a young filmmaker, here’s the film you should make first: put six people in a house and chop them up.
But the thing is, you can also put six people in a house and have them annoy each other.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And that can also be really good. They don’t have to be rent limb from limb, and that also saves you money on ketchup.
Abigoliah: Yeah. That’s true.
Tom: But anyway—
Abigoliah: We’re always learning.
Tom: The BBC still wanted more of The Thick of It. And so a third series did go out in 2009. It’s been upgraded from BBC Four to BBC Two, but they need a new minister.
Abigoliah: Of course.
Tom: So Iannucci recruited someone that he’d worked with before on On the Hour and The Day Today: Rebecca Front.
Abigoliah: Oh. I like this female minister. I like this very much.
Tom: So, because it’s a small ensemble, but also versatile. I don’t know if you clocked Rebecca Front, but, for example, on The Day Today she was Rosie May.
Abigoliah: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Tom: So she plays new minister Nicola Murray. And it’s really interesting, I think, to compare Nicola Murray and Hugh Abbott as characters. I think Nicola Murray’s got a lot more depth to her, because Hugh Abbott is just trying to survive to the end of the day with his career intact.
Abigoliah: Because he has a deep, dark—
Tom: Secret.
Abigoliah: He doesn’t want anyone to know.
Tom: But Nicola Murray actually wants to do something in politics, which kind of makes her Malcolm Tucker’s worst nightmare. She eventually becomes— Well, there are two ways this goes. On the one hand, she becomes one of the only characters who can actually stand up to him.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: On the other hand, in the eight episodes that we see her in, we are watching her integrity get ground away by the system.
Abigoliah: Oh.
Tom: And that’s why I think this is satire in a way that Yes Minister isn’t. Because Yes Minister is: you thought the ministers were making the decisions. Actually, guess what? It’s the civil servants. But it’s actually about the characters. It’s about Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey more than it is about anything else.
This is about nobody knows anything. And it is quite specifically about some of the ways in which Tony Blair was choosing to govern the country. So that’s why I think this feels much sharper, much more satirical.
And in fact, one of the biggest problems they had was keeping up with events. One of the scenes we’re going to see in episode one, which is incredibly funny, is three characters in the back of a car trying to invent policy ideas to get them out of a jam.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And so, again, this is another example of plumping, because all of the writers are pitching ridiculous ideas, all the actors are improvising ridiculous ideas. Three of those ideas went on to become government policy.
Abigoliah: In real life.
Tom: Absolutely.
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: So that is — that is a big problem.
And we’re going to go only up to series three. But I’ll just give you a little — a few other quick things that happened later. So in 2010, the Labour Party lost the election. Britain had a coalition government for the first time—
Abigoliah: For the first time?
Tom: In decades.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: In living memory.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: The system is not set up for coalition governments. They happen very, very occasionally. Nobody could remember there being a coalition government.
So Yes Minister is really defined by Thatcher. Spitting Image didn’t keep going past John Major. And so it seemed as if The Thick of It is inherently about Blair. So now he’s gone, do we carry on making it?
There was a fourth series in 2012 that used the coalition as a backdrop. And one of the things that’s interesting about that is Malcolm Tucker is now working for the opposition.
So the series ends with Malcolm Tucker being the subject of a public inquiry into his actions and his methods.
Abigoliah: Interesting.
Tom: But that is where the series ended.
Abigoliah: So did it end on, like, a high, or did it fizzle away with all these changes?
Tom: It didn’t fizzle away, I think. I think people felt the fourth series maybe wasn’t quite as good as the previous three. There’s very good stuff in it, but it is — yeah, let’s quit while we’re ahead. Let’s not keep plugging this into the ground.
And like I said, it was so much about Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell. When they weren’t there anymore, it felt a bit directionless, stale.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And what happens is it kind of folds back on its own legacy, which I think you can do briefly. Do that too much and it becomes self-indulgent.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So, like, with so many of these shows. So is there a— is there a— It’s like a 30 Rock or Parks and Rec joke or something like that, you know?
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Britain’s incredibly long-running drama series, which ran for 25 years and aired almost 40 episodes.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is very much how you guys do—
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: That’s one thing that I’ve really taken away from doing this podcast, because, you know, growing up with television where you had 24 episodes and they came out yearly and, like, you know, shows ran for some ten years, five years—
Tom: Hundreds of episodes.
Abigoliah: Hundreds and hundreds of episodes. And then when we went to streaming, Americans were so mad because it’s like, you get six episodes—
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: —every two years. And it’s like, oh, Britain’s been doing this the entire time.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: It boggles my mind. It boggles my mind.
Let’s watch The Thick of It.
Tom: Let’s watch The Thick of It.
Abigoliah: Let’s do it.
Abigoliah: Okay, so here’s what I realised watching it. I don’t think I’ve ever actually watched much of Peter Capaldi in anything.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: And he is a terrifying presence in this. Like—
Tom: And he played a lot of very much more benevolent characters before this. But this really put him on the map. And then when he was cast as Doctor Who, people lost their minds, and they did play with a slightly darker version, but he’s much sillier—
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: —as Doctor Who than he is in this. But he’s just, like, pure evil.
Abigoliah: It’s — I mean, it is a comedy, but he’s playing it like a drama through and through.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: He’s, like, really scary in it, in a brilliant way. I understand why — why this is what broke him and made him so famous. And it’s one of those where I can’t imagine anyone else doing it.
Tom: Yeah. We’ve talked before about the way, in a good sitcom, there’s an alchemy that takes place, and the writers figure out what the actor is bringing, and the actor figures out how to truly embody the words. And this sort of flywheel effect takes place. And yeah, you can absolutely see it here, not least because there’s so much improvisation.
Abigoliah: Yeah. So that’s something that I wanted to clarify, because you said there’s a lot of improvisation, but there is a script. How much of it are they making up?
Like, you know the scene where they’re at the lunch for The Guardian and the one guy is, like, drawing notes of, like, “Smile” and “Don’t eat with your mouth full” and stuff like that. Is that written in, or did they find that? I mean, you don’t know that specific thing, but how loose was the script?
Tom: Things like that, which require specific cameras to be in specific positions, would almost certainly have been in the script. But it’s not impossible they would have been invented on the day.
But this is not Curb Your Enthusiasm, where no dialogue exists, right? There’s a complete script written out just the ordinary way. And the first thing they would do is shoot the script. So the actors learn the lines, they turn up on the day of filming and they do the script as written, but they do it in long takes. Whole scenes captured without pausing.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And then they’re just told, we’re going to do this two or three more times, and the script is now a guide. So we do want to get these plot points across, and there’s nothing that stops you from saying the lines as written. But if you want to come in a bit early, if you want to say something in a different way, if you want to rephrase something, that’s now up to you.
Abigoliah: And as far as blocking, they could even shift around their blocking.
Tom: And you can see when scenes have been cut together from multiple versions of the same scene, sometimes the continuity just goes totally out of the window. They cut from Malcolm Tucker to Malcolm Tucker in a totally different position. And you don’t care. You don’t notice.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Well, here’s the thing. I’ve never been a real continuity queen. I don’t, like — you know, when people are like, “You’ll notice that the cup is in the right hand.” I am someone who can just watch something, and unless it’s, like, you know, unless there’s a purple dinosaur and then not, I don’t usually notice it. So, like, all the continuity stuff—
Tom: I had an idea for a sketch years ago, because typically — maybe it’s different now because cameras are so much cheaper and lighter — but it was typically the case that if I was coming to your place to do an interview with you, I’d only bring one camera. So we’d do the whole interview on you, and then afterwards we’d film my introduction, and then we’d film what are called noddies.
Abigoliah: Oh.
Tom: Just me sitting there going—
And when I was a teenager, I had an idea for a TV sketch where every time you cut back to the interviewer, the noddy is against a different background.
Abigoliah: I think that’s a really fun idea.
Tom: He’s in the right environment. Then he’s in an office. Then he’s in a park. Then he’s on a roller coaster. And the shot’s always the same, but the backgrounds are always different. Hilarious stuff if you’re 15 years old.
Abigoliah: I think that’s a great sketch now. I think you should film that. You should — you should totally do it.
I loved the cold open, and then it cuts to the title card, but I like that there was no music.
Tom: You know, partly that’s virtue out of necessity. When you’re doing something on such a low budget, you don’t want to spend £6,000 on theme music, which you could use for one more extra in the background. You know, not an extra costs as much as £6,000 for one day, but you know what I mean.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: You want to put it all up on screen. So, yeah, why bother? But it adds to that documentary style. It’s that feeling of immersion. Like, this could actually be happening.
Abigoliah: And like I said when we were watching it, because I kind of only know Alastair Campbell as this, like, cuddly—
Tom: Avuncular podcaster.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Podcast pundit guy. And I know his history now and I’ve heard people say things about him, but now I’m like, is that really what he was like? Because you said Armando went and did research.
Tom: Yes. So, like, his temper was — was legendary. Terrifying.
Abigoliah: Well, not that I imagine that everything was a much nicer behind-the-scenes of the politics, or even that a more efficient way. But part of me is like, I kind of now just think this is what it’s like. It’s this ridiculous—
Like, more so than The Office, I had to keep being like, this isn’t real. This is — this isn’t real. It’s fine. It isn’t real. They didn’t lose — they didn’t lose all the immigrants’ data. It’s fine.
Tom: It’s fine. Have you heard Deborah talking about me watching the Fyre Festival documentary?
Abigoliah: No.
Tom: Clutching a clipboard for security. Like, “But they did have enough toilets, right? They did have enough toilets, didn’t they?” It was like watching a horror film for me.
Abigoliah: No. No, they didn’t.
Tom: I know they didn’t.
Abigoliah: Oh my God.
Tom: It was like, they didn’t have enough toilets. If they had, there wouldn’t have been a documentary about it. But that’s, like, my worst nightmare.
This is — yeah. It’s fine.
Abigoliah: Just — just the government falling apart.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Like, do you know the kind of research Armando did? Like, what access he had to—
Tom: I think, if anything, it was probably easier for him than it was for Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, because I think people were more open. I think government is more accessible, is more porous. So I don’t know who he spoke to specifically.
And I think by the time they got into the swing of things, they kind of — the show had its own momentum.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I mean, it’s brilliant. I didn’t laugh out loud as much as I have at other stuff, but I was absolutely captivated. I definitely want to watch way more of it.
But again, so, I don’t know if you remember me telling you this, but my little sister tried to watch The Office, the UK version, when she first started watching the American version, just to see. And she couldn’t handle it.
Tom: And this is — this is not comfort watching.
Abigoliah: I don’t think — I mean, I’m watching a comedy, but I’m not having a nice time.
Tom: The laugh kind of catches in your throat.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And not since Reggie Perrin have I been so confused.
Tom: I think I touched on this before, but the message of Yes Minister ultimately is quite reassuring. Because the message of Yes Minister is somebody does know what’s going on.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: You might not always like their agenda, and they might sometimes be using their power for their own selfish ends, but there are grown-ups running things. Sir Humphrey and his ilk do know what’s happening. And they are right most of the time.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And so that’s a — that’s a delicious truth, that the ministers and the government actually are not the ones in charge.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: But The Thick of It tells us something a bit more disturbing, which is that nobody knows what they’re doing. And most policy is made up on the hoof to get out of a tricky situation.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Up to and including Brexit, which was David Cameron’s answer to a slightly awkward moment in Prime Minister’s Questions. Yeah. Not to mention the farce of Covid.
Abigoliah: I feel off-kilter now.
Tom: Yeah, I’m not surprised. You know, you can see why Malcolm Tucker became so legendary. Just as — and just in the same way that Humphrey Appleby became somebody who was mentioned in the House of Commons, so too did Malcolm Tucker become a kind of byword for this method of controlling the press by fear and threat.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And like I said before, because I’ve seen, you know, pictures of Peter Capaldi in The Thick of It — you know, the kind of, like, the DVD cover or the poster or whatever — when I’ve been cutting together our socials, and I’m always like, it looks like a drama.
And now I’m like, I think it is drama. It’s just short. That’s why everyone thinks it’s a comedy.
Tom: Oh, all the shows on my drive. It’s almost next door to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the John le Carré, and the cover artwork is very similar.
Abigoliah: Oh, really?
Tom: White men in suits looking gloomy in, like, half-shadow.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Yeah. It’s one of those where I’m just kind of like, oh, okay.
Tom: You ever think—? I’ll tell you a little bit more about what happened.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Tell me.
Tom: They did try an American version in 2007 with Christopher Guest directing.
Abigoliah: Love that.
Tom: Armando was involved, but he was, like, kicked upstairs to be executive producer, so I don’t know how much influence he actually had. Because that wasn’t — it didn’t get past the pilot stage.
Abigoliah: Okay. Oh, that’s a shame. I would have been really curious to see that.
Tom: But In the Loop is all about Anglo-American relations. So after making the film, Armando Iannucci had a bit more of an idea about how to take that energy of The Thick of It and move it to the other side of the Atlantic.
So HBO then approached him, maybe not realising that ABC had already had a go with this.
Abigoliah: Oh, really?
Tom: And said, how would you do it? And then he got the idea of, oh, you make it the Vice President.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Because the same thing. You kind of — you feel like you ought to matter, and actually—
Abigoliah: You don’t.
Tom: You don’t.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And then when they got Julia Louis-Dreyfus on board, I think it all took off quite quickly. Armando Iannucci looked after the first four years, but it ran for seven.
Abigoliah: And Veep is a lot softer.
Tom: Oh, would you say? Is it?
Abigoliah: Is it?
Tom: I don’t think so. No. I think it’s — it’s — it’s — it’s, in many ways, it’s just as dark.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And it’s an HBO show. It’s not an ABC show.
Abigoliah: Yeah. That’s true. That’s key. That’s true.
Tom: I did smile at Capaldi saying, “It’s all gone HBO back there.”
Abigoliah: Yeah. I thought that was fun.
Tom: A lot of the writers went on to huge careers on shows like Veep, Succession. Will Smith is showrunner of Slow Horses, which has been a huge hit for Apple.
Armando Iannucci continued his film career with The Death of Stalin. Have you seen that?
Abigoliah: Yes, I have.
Tom: And it’s very much the same energy.
Abigoliah: Also with Paul Whitehouse in it.
Tom: Yes. And he did an adaptation of David Copperfield. He brought Doctor Strangelove to the West End with Steve Coogan. And he’s been announced as writing Paddington 4 with Simon Blackwell.
Abigoliah: Oh, really? I didn’t know that.
Tom: And obviously Peter Capaldi went from Number 10 to all of time and space—
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: —when he took over from Matt Smith as Doctor Who in 2014.
Abigoliah: Yeah. How long was he Doctor Who for?
Tom: Again, I think it was — I think it was three seasons over four years. That was very much typical until Jodie Whittaker and Covid and other problems.
Abigoliah: And then, yeah, it all got weird.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I — I think I am going to have to not put this on the Shelf of Fame.
Tom: Okay.
Abigoliah: However, I reserve my right to make a different choice at the season wrap-up.
Tom: Okay.
Abigoliah: Because I — this is one, like, now I understand why Joe was like, oh, I don’t know if two episodes are enough. Because it is enough that I get it and I know I like it, but I want — I don’t understand it in a way that when you look at Not Only… But Also, it’s like, I know — I know what this is. I could just see two episodes and be like, I now completely understand this show.
Whereas this one, I’m like, I need to sit with it some more. And also, strangely enough, I’m now like, I now need to go and read, like—
Tom: Alastair Campbell’s diaries, or—
Abigoliah: Yeah. Or biographies of him. I don’t think I want to read it from him. I think I want to read it from other people.
Tom: You don’t want the audiobook?
Abigoliah: Yeah. Well, I want — I want, like, a Guardian reporter’s tell-all, investigative journalist—
Tom: Would that be on the record or off the record?
Abigoliah: Oh. Yeah, yeah. I want whoever was following him and then got their — their arse handed to him when he figured it out.
But I really did enjoy it. By not putting it on the Shelf of Fame right now, I’m not saying that it is not good or that I didn’t like it, because I really enjoyed it.
I feel like I need more time with this one. You know, even Spitting Image, I’m like, I understand what this is. Whereas this one, I’m like, I don’t — I don’t.
And because it’s right at the edge of kind of before I moved here — you know, I moved here in 2014 — so, I mean, it’s still, like, what, ten years apart? However, I feel like politics does go in a ten-year cycle almost. And so it’s right on the edge of my knowledge in a way that other things we’ve watched has been far enough back that I’m like, it doesn’t matter that I don’t completely understand Thatcher’s run.
Although I probably know, in some ways, more about Thatcher than I do about Blair, because she’s been covered in so much stuff historically.
Tom: And do you agree with me that this is satire in a way that Yes Minister isn’t? Or does that need to be unpacked even more thoroughly?
Abigoliah: Yeah. I think the fact that, like, as you said, this shows that no one is in charge. Whereas, at the end of the day, I still love Paul Eddington, who played Jim Hacker.
Tom: Jim Hacker.
Abigoliah: But with this one, I mean—
Tom: This feels more critical to me. That’s — that’s — that’s the difference, I think. Yes Minister is telling you a slightly uncomfortable truth, but it’s saying, look, ultimately it’s fine. Like, you probably all suspected something like this was happening, and it is, and fine. And the wheels will keep turning.
This is saying, oh, this is actually bad.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: This should not be run like this. And it is, and you should be alarmed, and you should want to change it.
Abigoliah: I think one thing that satire can do is it can make you laugh, but it can make you realise certain things.
Whereas, I mean, this does just make Yes Minister look comfy. This makes Yes Minister look like The Good Life.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Whereas, like, even the other satires we watched so far, Spitting Image and That Was the Week That Was — I love the people. Those are obviously sketch shows. I love the people in them, but the characters are pointing something out and saying something. Same with The Thick of It.
Whereas Yes Minister is, let’s watch these cool people, these — these — these lovable characters find their way in the world.
Tom: And would you call this a sitcom?
Abigoliah: I don’t know.
Tom: It doesn’t feel like a sitcom, does it?
Abigoliah: Like, I have — like, this is why I find it a little baffling, is I’m like, I have had to keep being like, it’s not real. It’s not real. I think this is how people felt when they first saw Spinal Tap.
Tom: Yes. Yeah. Very likely.
Abigoliah: Which, I know that people now see Spinal Tap as, like, a funny mockumentary, but I remember once watching it with my mom being like, “Do people know this was fake?” And she goes, “No, it really confused people when it came out because mockumentaries weren’t a big thing back then.”
Tom: Woody Allen had done one called Zelig a few years before.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: But that wasn’t disguising its true intentions in quite the same way.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Woody Allen is always going to have, like, a sheen of, like, this is performative on it. I haven’t seen that one.
But — and I love the supporting cast, by the way. I just, like — what’s her name who played the next minister?
Tom: Rebecca Front.
Abigoliah: Rebecca Front was great, but also her cast around her was so good. And what you can do as a supporting cast member who’s also playing, like, low status. So, in some ways, they didn’t have a lot of, like, lines or stuff to do, but they had everything to do. And I thought that was really satisfying to watch.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: I thought it was great. I — it’s not real. Is it real? It’s not real. It’s not real, is it?
Tom: But it’s very close to reality, which is what’s so uncomfortable about it.
Abigoliah: I don’t — I don’t know, man.
Tom: All right. So what you would like is just, like, a good old-fashioned three-walled set, five cameras, a studio audience and people falling over.
Abigoliah: I mean, I—
Tom: If you do, I’ve got you covered.
Abigoliah: Yeah. What’s the next thing?
Tom: It’s The New Statesman.
Abigoliah: Oh, with my boyfriend.
Tom: Your boyfriend, Rik Mayall. Exactly right. So if you want to do—
Abigoliah: Riky.
Tom: Riky, Riky. If you want to do homework, we’ll be watching series one, episode six, and series three, episode five.
Abigoliah: I have been looking forward to this since we watched The Young Ones, and I have — I have behaved myself and not gone forward and watched this without you. But God, have I been waiting. So I can’t wait.
Tom: It should be a good one.
Abigoliah: All right, guys. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. We’d love for you to throw us some support. A couple ways you can do that.
One, go into your podcatcher app, leave us a five-star review. We’re also on YouTube. You can follow us there. Or you can become a patron, where we do special episodes once a month where I teach Tom about American comedies.
Tom: Turnabout is fair play.
Abigoliah: And in November we will be covering The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Tom: Fantastic.
Abigoliah: Yeah, I think—
Tom: I always associate with Remington Steele.
Abigoliah: Really?
Tom: Because Remington Steele was an MTM production.
Abigoliah: It’s also the name of a famous porn actor. So we — we — we just picture two very different things. I was like, how did he come into your mind?
But yeah. Is there anything else to—
Tom: I don’t think so. Just thank you all very much for listening, and we’ll see you in a couple of weeks.
Abigoliah: Yeah. We look forward to it. Bye.
Tom: Cheerio.