Twenty years ago this month we were plunged straight into the middle of an omnishambles. It was a moment in time when petrified politicians lurched from crisis to crisis, scrambling desperately to control the narrative as their endless gaffes derailed even the vaguest attempts to change this country for the better. But am I talking about the tail-end of the Blair years or the televisual tour-de-force that was Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It?
It could be either. It could even be right now – such was the show’s prescient genius. This was a satire that didn’t just mimic the government’s calamities but seemed somehow to foresee them. Over its seven-year run, The Thick of It came up with farcical policies that the government went on to adopt (pet asbos, anyone?), coined new words in the dictionary (the aforementioned omnishambles) and, in Malcolm Tucker, created one of the great malevolent forces of British comedy. Here’s how they did it …
Armando Iannucci, creator: The idea for The Thick of It came after I’d done a 2004 documentary about Yes Minister for the BBC. I rewatched every episode and realized that all the topics it covered were still relevant: Europe, the threat of terrorism, austerity … everything! But I also noticed that the power dynamics had shifted. In the mid-Blair years it felt like it was less about the minister being thwarted by their senior civil servant and more about the ministers coming under constant pressure from No 10 and its enforcers to stick to the agenda.
Adam Tandy, producer: For a while it was just called “Westminster-based Comedy”.
Iannucci: I got in touch with politicos, ex-ministers, former civil servants, political journalists, insiders, outsiders. I said: “I’m not here for scandal, I want the boring stuff!” I wanted to know who gets in first, who’s last to leave, what is the relationship with civil servants, who would take a call from the Daily Mail? And the big revelation for me was how much the country was being run by 22-year-olds. Cabinet ministers were bringing in these junior spads because they thought they were so clever and bright but actually they were just confident. They’d never fixed a car or bought a house or really done anything complicated. Which is why you’d get a lot of these ideas that only sounded good on paper like “beacons of excellence” and “hospital clusters”.
Jamie Cairney, director of photography: Armando’s opening gambit was: this cannot be like a traditional BBC comedy. He wanted to forget all of the Hollywood drama conventions. One of his reference points was The News from Number 10, a documentary about Alastair Campbell which was really messy because everything’s running at a million miles an hour. And another reference point was [Danish drama] Festen, the first Dogme 95 film. He even said: “I want you to try and adhere to the Dogme 95 vows of chastity” – things like “cameras must be handheld” and “you can only use natural light”. Very anti-establishment stuff!
Iannucci: BBC Four had a small budget, I think less than $140k. They said: what can you do with it? The constraints of the budget actually helped. It forced me to be quite experimental.
Ian Martin, swearing consultant: I was doing a satirical website with my brother Paul called martian.fm, and one of the things I wrote every week was this thing called Hansard Late. It was written in the style of the proceedings of the House of Commons, but it was also very sweary, like “I would respectfully ask the Honourable Gentleman to shove it up his cock” or whatever. I got an email saying: “Hi, I’m Armando Iannucci, your stuff makes me laugh, want to do some stuff for me?”. Obviously I thought it was a spoof!
Iannucci: I wanted something that felt like you were eavesdropping on something you’re not meant to see. That’s how we came up with the title: you are really in the thick of it.
Peter Capaldi, played director of communications Malcolm Tucker: It was hard to get any details about it. I asked if there was a script and they said no. That doesn’t give you very much confidence, does it? What are we supposed to do if you don’t have a script? Armando said just improvise. OK, well, I hated improvising because generally improvising means that the person with the biggest ego gets the biggest part. The only reason I hung on in there was because I really liked Armando’s previous work.
Sarah Crowe, casting director: I’d worked with Armando before on Partridge and so whenever I’d see people try out for other things like theatre or commercials, I’d make a little note to say “Armando would like”. The cast came from all different places: kids’ television, theater, standup … I’d even cast Alex McQueen, who played Julius, in an Utterly Butterly commercial! I’d seen Peter in a sitcom; it wasn’t a very good one, but I remember thinking he was quite Mandelson-esque.
Iannucci: We hadn’t written Malcolm as Scottish, we’d just written someone trying to keep his aggression in and then when he’s prodded too many times it bursts out. I actually had Peter down as a very gentle kind of soul, as he is in real life. But, as he tells it, he turned up in a bad mood that day.
Capaldi: I met Armando and Adam in a little studio in Soho. I was pissed off when I went in. It was not a good period for me. I’d gone to an audition at Television Centre that morning for a little part and I knew everybody in the room. I thought, why am I going on tape with all of you people that I’ve worked with before?
Tandy: When Peter came in, I think he was on the verge of giving up acting. We were running slightly behind schedule and Sarah Crowe, our casting director, actually had to pop out of the casting session to try to persuade him to stay.
Sarah Crowe: Peter kept saying “I’m terrible at improvisation. I’m going to embarrass you, I’m going to embarrass myself. I had to really cajole him to come in. But he wasn’t alone in being reluctant. I remember someone actually walked out, saying “call me back in when you bother to write a script.”
Iannucci: I said to Peter I will be a cabinet minister and your job is to persuade me to go … and then at some point just stop being nice. He did it and it was frightening. I thought: “There’s Malcolm Tucker”.
Capaldi: I remember very clearly the moment where I “got it”. The minister said: “Well, can I come back?” and I said, “It’s not fucking Coronation Street, you can’t come back!” I thought: Oh, that’s what it is.
Iannucci: Peter channelled Harvey Weinstein and lots of quite lippy LA agents. It wasn’t meant to be Alastair Campbell. It was more about this group I’d heard about called “the enforcers”. They would fan out from No 10 and go around the ministers saying: “This is the line, this is what you can say, this is not what you can’t say.”
Joanna Scanlan, played director of communications Terri Coverley: As I understand it, Armando invented the character of Terri after our audition. He hadn’t thought of her before so I must have talked myself into an entirely new character. Most of what I created as Terri was from when I worked at the Arts Council England. There were people there who’d move from job to job within the arts without ever understanding what it was they were trying to create.
Iannucci: I saw Chris Langham do a docudrama about George Orwell and it was such a nuanced, humane, believable performance – but with this slightly hangdog feel to it. I thought he would be perfect to play the minister [Hugh Abbot].
Martin: Armando sent me the first three scripts for The Thick of It and said: “Look, just sprinkle your shit everywhere.” I didn’t know what to do. The writers were Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell and Tony Roche – massive, massive figures in the world of comedy. I just stared at the script for about half an hour thinking: “You can’t improve [Peep Show and future Succession creator] Jesse Armstrong!” Especially not if you’re some flailing wanker. The breakthrough was when I changed a line of Malcolm’s from “Don’t bother he’s fucking useless” to “He’s about as much use as a marzipan dildo”. I said: “Is that the sort of thing you’re after?” And Armando said: “Yes, very much so.”
Scanlan: I always got very frustrated because Terri had to have a blow-dry in the morning. And I’d be watching all these blokes [male members of the cast] descending on Armando as soon as he walked on the floor, like petitioning for their lines or ideas to go into something. I’d want to do the same but be there thinking: “I’m stuck in this fucking chair!” I felt really irritated by that.
Cairney: On the first day of filming, Armando came over and said: “Move the camera more, make it more messy.” I thought I was being messy! So some of the messiness was deliberately overdoing it. It took us a few days to get there. Ben Wheeler, a brilliant DOP who was operating the other camera, turned to me and said: “Well, we’re never going to work again after this.”
Tandy: I could only afford to give three and a half days to each episode. That’s not a long time to shoot half an hour. And so everything was shot in the old Guinness factory off the A40 in west London.
Scanlan: The building was derelict. There was no funding. It felt guerrilla, like Armando was trying to get away with something the BBC wouldn’t necessarily have sanctioned.
Iannucci: I wanted to try to lose all those traditional grammars of filming. So it was like a news crew turning up at a cabinet meeting. They’re not going to let you film it all again – it’s up to you to find the footage.
Capaldi: Filming is a very traditional process – you do a master shot and then the closeups. Armando threw all that out of the window. He said: “You come on to the set, it’s lit, you can go wherever you like, we don’t rehearse, off you go!” The cameras had to follow us. They didn’t have any preparation. They wouldn’t know where anyone was going. A scene would tend to go on for ages. When they said cut, you’d be exhausted. But it was a fabulous experience. I think all of us who worked on the show never looked back from that because that way of working was so radical.
Iannucci: We filmed it on the fly: handheld cameras, radio mics, no leads attached. I said to the cast: even if you leave the room we’re still recording you, we can hear what you’re saying, so you’re never off. There was nowhere to hide.
Tandy: For the first series I’d heard about a device that they’d been using in the States, this five-channel sound recording device. It meant we could mic up all of the actors and record all of the conversations happening in an office at the same time. That device was probably the thing that made The Thick of It possible.
Cairney: Armando would edit the sound first – the words were the most important thing for him. Then the editors would throw some pictures in and see what stuck with the audio. If you go through the episodes with a magnifying glass there’s some extremely bad continuity there. Hair will change, coffee cups will suddenly be refilled, but Armando didn’t give a shit about any of that. And nobody noticed which proved that it didn’t actually matter!
Capaldi: Armando was great at finding these moments in the character’s eyes and faces that conveyed the chaos and the stress and delight of what they were going through.
Scanlan: Before getting the role I had a Saturday job at an estate agency in Dulwich. My boss there told me one day that if I wanted to earn a bit of extra cash I could join these focus groups. She said: “You’re an actress, just say you are who they’re looking for! Say you’re a married housewife with three kids at Dulwich College or something.” So I went and did it and got my 50 quid. I mentioned the focus group to Armando. He was laughing and ended up turning the story into the second episode.
Martin: There was this synchronous thing going on where we would float a policy and then literally the next week one or other of the parties would announce the same thing. I think how it happened was that the spads and the writers of The Thick of It were trying to work out the exact same problem: the money’s run out so what can we say that won’t cost anything but will sound good and keep us in the headlines?
Iannucci: In the first series there’s that scene in the back of a car where they’re trying to come up with policies on the way to make an announcement. We were actually in the back of the car going to the next location so I said: “Why don’t we just film you trying to come up with new policies?” Three of them which made it into the final cut actually became law within a couple of years! James Smith [who played Glenn Cullen] came up with “Why doesn’t everyone have to have a plastic bag of their own?” There was pet asbos, which I think happened quite soon after. And Chris Addison [who played Olly Reader] came up with the national spare room database, which became the bedroom tax. I remember James Purnell, who was culture secretary at the time, saying to me: “I’ve been in the back of that car”.
Tandy: After the first two seasons, which were only three episodes each, Armando came to me with a plan to do an extended run. We got a commission to do 10 more episodes.
And then it started to go wrong.
Part II of this story will be published on Saturday, May 31
Tim Jonze is the associate editor at Guardian Culture
