Sunday 28 October 2012

Great Fictional Anti-Heroes: Malcolm Tucker



“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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