You’ll
notice that series 2 of The Thick of It
started the same year that series 1 did.
The show premiered in the spring of 2005, with series 2 beginning in
that fall. In some circles, the two are
lumped into a single season, but I’ll stick with IMDb’s nomenclature, which
places this episode in series 2.
This is
the first time we see Malcolm away from DoSA for any significant period of
time. While Hugh is off visiting some
constituents and (predictably) making a mess of things, Ollie is invited to
Number 10 to spend the week working under Malcolm. His young, ladder-climbing heart is thrilled
at the thought that he’s been cherry-picked by the big boys for his special
skills, but it turns out that it’s nothing so flattering. Word has gotten around that Ollie slept with
a member of the opposing party, and Malcolm has given him a desk and a phone
for the express purpose of calling his girlfriend to glean intel.
Malcolm
naturally spends plenty of time brow-beating and menacing Ollie, though he
delegates a fair amount of it, but we also see a lot of Malcolm in his element
ripping new ones into other ministers and civil servants. There’s also a great scene of Malcolm
bargaining with a pair of news editors, and Hugh coins a new adjective,
“Malchiavellian,” to describe Malcolm’s personal brand of amoral ingenuity.
Additionally,
this episode introduces my second favorite character on the show: Jamie, Number 10’s senior press officer. The joke, that he’s just like Malcolm but
even worse, is maybe a bit obvious, but Paul Higgins plays it to perfection. While being screamed at by Malcolm would be
intimidating and mortifying, Jamie would actually make you fear for your
safety. Ollie initially believes him to
be “the nice Scot,” but he soon finds that Malcolm likes using Jamie as an
attack dog he sets loose on those who displease him. In a lot of Ollie’s scenes, we see Jamie in
the background berating, threatening, and sometimes manhandling his assorted
peons.
Essentially,
Jamie functions like Malcolm’s id, more unhinged and less calculated than the
man himself. He and Malcolm speak the
same political language and follow the same by-any-means philosophy. And more than anything, when they’re
together, you can see how much fun
they’re both having. Whether it’s Jamie
screaming threats to cut off someone’s ears or Malcolm grinning at the prospect
of menacing some BBC News plebs, they both thrive on calamity. They’re in their element when they’re
surrounded by chaos and they have an enormous disaster to fix. In a way, they remind me of those organisms
that can only live at the bottom of the sea, amidst crushing pressure and
sulfur-spewing volcanoes.
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