A few months ago, articles about Veep led me to In the Loop, which I loved, especially the explosively foul-mouthed Malcolm Tucker (for some reason for a while I confused Peter Capaldi with Michael Sheen; makes no sense, I know).
And now Netflix has the series that the Malcolm Tucker character first appeared in, The Thick of It. (The movie is but isn’t quite exactly a spinoff of the series.) Love this show! Fantastic! It’s said to be an update of Yes, Minister, and I agree wholeheartedly.
And now I discover another factoid, that the original lead character of the series, cabinet member Hugh Abbot, had to be written out after six episodes and a raft of awards because of actor Chris Langham’s arrest and conviction for possession of child pornography. I can’t believe that I am learning this for the first time, seven years late.
Anyway, I do have a specific question about this show. During the episodes that are supposed to parallel the resignation of Tony Blair and his succession by Gordon Brown (“Tom Davis”), there is a lot of talk about his being a “nutter” and whether certain members of the cabinet or parliament or the political staff are “nutters.”
I felt like I was kind of missing something. Was or is “nutter” a term for a faction of the Labour party that Gordon Brown got support from? Or is it just something that the show made up? I didn’t quite get what a nutter was. My first guess was that a nutter would be from the extreme left wing of the party or something, but they didn’t seem to show much in the way of policy disagreements between nutters and other people.
I know that, but it doesn’t seem to make sense in context. It seemed to be used in a much more specific sense, because anyone who might be supporting Tom Davis was labeled as a “nutter.” It seems like it’s being used (pejoratively, of course) for a specific faction of the party. That’s why I surmised that it might be the extreme left wing of Labour, but that didn’t seem to make sense in context either.
I think Armando Iannucci was just making up this specific usage but it was a meme during the period of Labour government that Gordon Brown was not entirely in control of himself - given to ranting and shouting when thwarted. I seem to remember it was the sort of briefing that Blairite acolytes gave to the press when the Brownites were getting uppity.
I just watched the first episode of Season 4. I was afraid that it would be difficult to recreate the brilliance three years later as well as the change in government, but even without a single Malcolm Tucker scene, I loved it. Stewart is a fantastic contrast to Tucker and the squabbling between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats is fantastic — and Mannion is a surprisingly compelling character — “I’m bored of this! I’m getting a Twix!”
Just chiming in to confirm that it really was a non-specific label to allow the viewer to know where the competing elements stood. Rather like “wets” of the thatcher years or “Blairites” “Brownite” and other such eloquent terms.
We don’t really get too much of a feeling for the character of the PM or his opponents to know whether “nutter” was chosen in a more pointed way but…it is Armando Iannucci, and Gordon Brown was in the ascendancy at the time (if he actually had such a period) so I wouldn’t be surprised.
So there you go, glad you found the series Acsenray and you are enjoying it. Hopefully the extra knowledge we’ve passed on will help. As Stewart would say “knowledge is porridge”
I think we can all learn from that!
Have you watched all of the the last series yet with Nicola Murray as DoSAC head?
Armando Iannucci is quite simply a comic genius. I’ve loved the guy’s work ever since the 1994 series The Day Today where he worked with another comic genius, the great Chris Morris.
I think I’m right in saying it was Alisdair Campbell - Blair’s chief spin doctor and generally agreed to be the model for Malcolm Tucker - who told the press Gordon Brown was “psychologically flawed”.
Blair was Prime Minister then and Brown was his Chancellor. Brown believed for years that Blair had stabbed him in the back by reneging on an agreement to step down in his (Brown"s) favour and seemed determined to obstruct Blair in any way he could. It got to stage where he refused to tell Blair what was in his own Government’s Budget speech.
When Brown did finally get Blair’s old job, he proved himself horribly unsuited to it, and quickly got a reputation for checking telephones at any aide daring to tell him bad news. A good man with a tragic flaw of almost Shakespearian proportions.
There was also a continual rumour that Brown was on some kind of medication - not alcohol, but actual medication - on account of his mood swings and occasionally bloated appearance. Big-eared adultering superinjunction-ing journo Andrew Marr even asked him about this on live telly.
Lord Mandelson accused “extreme right-wing” figures on the Internet for spreading rumours about Mr Brown’s health, adding it was “absolutely ridiculous” to suggest the PM had a problem with pill use, and blamed politically motivated bloggers for raising the possibility.
“We have seen out there on the Internet, the blogosphere, all these extreme right-wing people trying to put these smears and rumours about, all completely groundless,” he said.
In context, this came a short while after Brown had been forced to disband and sack his own smear team, who were attempting to attribute the death of David Cameron’s six-year-old disabled son Ivan to a sexually transmitted disease Cameron had picked up whilst he was at university.
Yes, I’ve caught up and watched the first episode of season 4 on Hulu. I especially like the two “special” episodes. I thought Malcolm was a fantastic character, but put him together with Jamie and it’s even better. Two foul-mouthed belligerent Scotsmen. I can’t stop giggling:
Tucker: Jamie’s gonna stay with you, okay? He’ll be by your side until the interview’s over. Even if you take a dump.
Jamie: Even if I take take a dump, right? And I shit a lot. It’s uh smoking and a fast metabolism.
Ben Swain: Well, fantastic. We’ll spend the day defecating together. It’s the glamour of this job that I so much enjoy.
Just making sure — When Murray said that she had a 16-year-old daughter who was a pregnant, heroin-addicted porn actress, she was joking, right?
A question about terminology. I always thought that “secretary” and “department of” was American-style. I thought that Her Majesty’s government stuck with the traditional “minister” and “ministry of” language. But it’s the “Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship,” not the “Ministry of Social Affairs and Citizenship.” Is minister/ministry no longer current in British lingo?
If I recall, this was when she was under pressure to put her daughter into a state school, and that was the outcome she feared. (I could be wrong though). Her daughter did risk expulsion at one point but It wasn’t for anything quite so exotic.
Not sure what the history is behind the nomenclature but it is a bit of a mixture of “ministries”, “departments” and “offices”. There is a nice little run-down herebut I haven’t read further to find out any history.
In the case of DoSAC, I’m pretty sure it is just Armando conjuring up the most dopey, dorky acronym that still sounds plausible.
She said it pretty much as soon as she met Malcolm and he asked her how many kids she had. I think she was concerned that the school thing would come up and was trying to preemptively change Malcolm’s perspective. It didn’t work of course, because as soon as she mentioned an 11 year old daughter, he jumped right on it and told her she would have to go to state school.
I’m trying to shoehorn “Malcolm” and “perspective” into my brain at the same time.
Incidentally, I thought one of the genius parts of series three was when Malcolm was usurped and he titted around like a fanny in a trance for the best part of an episode, interview at the BBC etc. before being reborn like a bad Gandalf again.
)