The Thick of It: Series 2, Episode 1 (2005)

 

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.