When it comes to UK political sitcoms, there’s no doubt that Yes, Minister and its sequel Yes, Prime Minister, by Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay, broke enormous swathes of new ground, while remaining at their core, traditional BBC sitcoms – a small central cast, a handful of usual sets, not least the office of the main protagonist, Minister/Prime Minister Jim Hacker, played by Paul Eddington, and a power dynamic as old as PG Wodehouse, with the notionally powerful minister having regular rings run around him by his supposed servant, in that case avatar of the civil service, Permanent Secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby (Nigel Hawthorn).

So far, so funny, and with Derek Fowlds as go-between Bernard Woolley rounding out the triangular dynamic, the scripts were tightly controlled, depicting the central struggle “between the political will and the administrative won’t” that existed at the heart of the UK’s Westminster government in the post-war period, as recorded by actual former ministers in their diaries.

So acute were the scripts and performances in fact that legendarily humourless Prime Ministerial ghoul Margaret Thatcher let it be known that it was her favourite TV programme.

Despite what should have been that kiss of death, the show was actually really good – witty, truthful, and in the great tradition of British sitcoms that prick the pomposity of supposed authority figures.

Intertwined Comedy DNA

We know what you’re thinking: why spend so many words talking about one show while reviewing another? Because the DNA of Yes, Minister and The Thick Of It is intimately intertwined, and the latter makes more sense if you understand the structure and achievements of the former. 

Armando Iannucci famously got the idea for The Thick Of It after making the case for Yes, Minister in a “Best Sitcom” poll on the BBC. 

And the bones of the central idea remain consistent between the two shows – hapless minister in a mythical ‘super-department’ that allows the set-up to tackle issues from across the political sphere, authority figure thwarting their every move, lackeys in the middle whose career prospects depend on pleasing both sides just enough but never too much.

Squint really hard and the two shows look very similar.

But while Yes, Minister was a fairly accurate portrayal of political reality in the years before Thatcher decimated the civil service and filled the gaps with idealogues, by the time The Thick Of It hit screens, Tony Blair had been in power for more than half of his era. 

The Rise of the Spads

The nature of government had shifted, with the Prime Minister and a small cabal of spin doctors and so-called “spads” wielding far more control than the traditional civil service did. 

Power, in all its venal and sometimes idiotic whimsicality, came from Downing Street, and behind-the-scenes figures like the always-infamous self-proclaimed “Prince of Darkness” Peter Mandelson and bruising, invective-fuelled battler Alastair Campbell were on hand to make sure ministers toed the line, the whole line, and nothing but the line. 

Meanwhile, the rise in confident but inexperienced junior advisors added a brittleness to the effectiveness of government, directly in conflict with that top-down approach. While sharing a lot of central satirical DNA with the formalised relationships of Yes, Minister, The Thick Of It wanted to reflect that modern tension, rather than re-running the conflicts of a previous political era.

The Comedy of Cringe

Additionally, sitcoms like The Office had recently been sweeping audiences and award ceremonies before them with their more cinema verite approach to storytelling. Locked-off sets and intricately scripted dialogue, as seen in Yes, Minister, were old hat, replaced by a real sense of danger and energy that came from the feeling that the audience was witnessing actual events as they “just happened” to be captured on camera. The comedy of cringe hit home in the early 21st century.

Iannucci used that newer format to give viewers the sense of peaking behind the curtains of an ongoing, evolving Whitehall farce, with roughly 80% of each episode following a script, and 20% of the dialogue being improvised by the cast either in rehearsal or performance.

That added an extra dangerous edge to The Thick Of It, as it encouraged not only the development of glorious car-crash phrases to summarise situations (the word omnishambles lives on to this day), but also the deployment of rich, fruity, and utterly foul language, which rang true from the likes of Mandelson and Campbell, and which was most devastatingly delivered throughout the show’s history by Glaswegian actor Peter Capaldi as leading spin doctor Malcolm Tucker. 

And finally, The Thick Of It developed a determination early on to show a truer picture of Westminster life than Yes, Minister had done. There would be reshuffles, elections, coalition governments across the history of the show, meaning more than one ministerial career could be shown, rather than disaster always being averted to maintain the reliability of a core cast.

Audio Translation

The Thick Of It then was a more urgent, dangerous, sweary depiction of life in the corridors of power than its progenitor, revealing a very different political reality and some much more fragile conflicts of interest. 

So how does it work in an audio format?

Weirdly well.

Weirdly because the whole vibe of the show was visual as well as literate – facial reactions carried a lot of the drama, the pathos, and the approaching chaos. The set was often very open plan, meaning without either any visual clues or any tip-offs from an external narrator, you can never especially know where conversations are taking place. 

And yet, The Thick Of It stands up clearly on audio – more clearly, for example, than the recently released Red Dwarf soundtracks, which frequently relied on listeners to have seen the TV version and to “know” the gags that were not made evident by narration in the purely audio versions. 

The Thick Of It, in contrast, belts along with power and pace, the situations evolving clearly enough in audio to not only give you the sinking feeling of approaching disaster when ordinary things go spectacularly wrong, but also the thrill of anticipation and satisfaction when (most usually) Capaldi’s Tucker brings the wrath of the dark political god that is the Prime Minister down on the heads of hapless minions who somehow delude themselves that they’re important.

A Series Set Free

It’s a tribute to Iannucci’s scriptwriting that despite seeming to depend heavily on place and location in the TV version, once you remove the visual clues to those locations, the stories of The Thick Of It still fly – if anything, feeling faster and sharper and more natural in the audio-only environment.

Throughout the course of four series and two specials, The Thick Of It manages to keep its central relationships and issues intact, despite for instance ditching minister Hugh Abbott (Chris Langham) during a reshuffle (which overwrote Langham’s real-life imprisonment on child pornography charges in 2007!), bringing in Rebecca Front as Nicola Murray, and then eventually ditching her in favour of Roger Allam’s Peter Mannion due to the election of a coalition government. 

Similarly, while there can be no doubt that one of the main reasons you pay your money for The Thick Of It is Peter Capaldi’s sublime gift with a string of lurid obscenities, the way the show is constructed takes you through his fall, rise, and probably-final fall as the reins of political power change hands, allowing other voices (like the Anti-Tucker, the sublimely slithery “blue skies” advisor, Julius Nicholson, played by Alex MacQueen) to also have their moment in the spotlight of transient political importance.

The audio rendering of these soundtracks doesn’t bog the listener down in too much “canon”, but allows each episode to play through your imagination on its own merits, and while the show as a whole rewards a binge-play, that lightness of touch means that – to come full circle – in unison with Yes, Minister/Prime Minister, you don’t need to worry about having heard or not heard what’s come before. The premise is powerful enough to drag you in, the characters vivid enough to make you invest in any given episode in the run.

The Pleasure of Squirm

It’s fair to say there are very few characters in The Thick Of It that come away being particularly likeable, even when the performers who give them life, like Chris Addison (Ollie the spad), Joana Scanlon (Terri the press secretary) and of course Peter Capaldi (Tucker the Antichrist), are famously affable in their real lives. 

But not being likeable has never meant not being watchable – see also Hancock, Steptoe and Son, The New Statesman, The Young Ones and any of the Blackadder clan – and one thing you get from nearly 13 hours of the audio version of The Thick Of It is proof positive that British sitcom thrives on watching unpleasant people in tight and seemingly unwinnable situations. It thrives on watching them wriggle and squirm as they try to avoid their fate – and it cheers equally loudly when they do as when they don’t.

The other things you get from it of course are half a day’s utter comic genius, and a sense of joy in the skewering, unravelling, panicking and floundering that lay behind the operation of political democracy in the early 21st century. Oh – and an earful of the most beautiful swearing that’s ever likely to cross your path, naturally.

Equally naturally, you should pick up this complete collection, because – well, look around you. If your life doesn’t need the tonic of 13 hours of skewering the people in charge of the country, you may just possibly be dead. Embrace the catharsis, and pick up The Thick Of It – The Complete BBC Soundtracks today. You’ll feel better after it.

A Sobering Thought

And just to leave you on a sombre note: Yes, Minister began transmission in 1980, and Yes, Prime Minister ended in 1987, having had one single real-life occupant of 10 Downing Street during the whole of its run – the ubiquitous iniquity that was Margaret Thatcher. 

The Thick Of It began 25 years later in 2005 and ran until 2012, encapsulating the governments of three real-life Prime Ministers (Blair, Brown, and the Cameron/Clegg coalition).

It’s been 21 years since The Thick Of It first hit screens. This year, the UK will see its Seventh Prime Minister since just 2016 (Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Starmer, Burnham, you’re welcome, just call us Politipedia). Surely it’s time for the next generation to skewer whatever passes for parliamentary government in the modern era, in whatever the successor series to The Thick Of It comes to be called?

In the meantime, this audio time machine will keep you laughing – and probably squirming – at the political insanity of the pre-Brexit 21st century.

If nothing else, it’ll be a distraction from Bins and by-elections… Tony Fyler

 

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