“I AM the loop.”
Last night’s ending to The Thick Of It was pretty
depressing, wasn’t it? Nothing really resolved, and the satirical cynicism as
sharp and cruel as ever, only even crueller now we know that everything really
is going to keep getting worse. The last two likeable characters, poor put-upon
Glenn and awesomely savage Malcolm, are departing into the wilderness (the
once-sympathetic Peter Mannion’s old-fashioned honour having long-since curdled
into raging bitterness), leaving the lunatics well and truly running the asylum
into the ground with their spiteful bickering. For a show usually so
entertaining in its creative horribleness, the sight of Malcolm Tucker, the
great survivor, departing into ignominious exile with the press yapping at his
heels was strangely something of a downer.
But let us not remember the mighty Tucker as he is, betrayed
at the last by his own cleverness, his seemingly bottomless well of gambits and
comebacks drained to the dregs, his steely exterior worn away as years of
workaholism and prolonged shouting finally catch up to him. Let us remember him
as he was; the gimlet-eyed arch-bastard of a turbulent Westminster snake-pit,
sited in a parallel universe supposedly separated from our blighted reality by
the most wafer-thin of walls. The ultimate spin-doctor, fearless, uninhibited,
decisive, steeped in the dark arts, laser-focussed in his verbal brutality, he
bestrode the Whitehall food chain of squabbling, back-stabbing mediocrities
like a gaunt, snarling colossus.
Of course, he was a bully, and by his own admission much
worse than a bully. Yet there was a strange, passionate integrity to his skilfully-controlled
nastiness. You got the sense that he was the product of his environment, forged
into a force of nature by the insanity of contemporary politics, a quintessential
user of bad means to good (?) ends. He was good
at being a bastard, seemingly wild but strictly disciplined.
Compare him to
boorish brutes like his thuggish understudy Jamie or the clearly unbalanced Cal
Richards. At the other end of the scale, compare him to the professional
snivellers he so relished verbally eviscerating for seven years. How could you
not salute a character who made himself the terror of this rabble by virtue of sly
cunning and sheer force of will? When it came to the show’s famously
competitive swearing, he was a virtuoso, crafting fluid mini-masterpieces of
profanity while barely pausing for breath. When it came to political skulduggery
he was a fiend, an amoral manipulator who repeatedly papered over his own
mistakes with the flayed hides of the less politically-adept. He wasn’t a hero
by any stretch of the imagination, but he was an island of competence in a sea
of grating ineptitude, driven by a code of party loyalty (however twisted) that
motivated him to wear himself to a nub as he was devoured by his own fearsome
persona, year after year.
The King Kong of fictional politics has toppled in slow
motion and landed in a black cab. The T.V. landscape is a little poorer for his
departure.
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