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The Thick of It
2005 · TV series · 30 min episodes · 4 seasons
Created by Armando Iannucci
Set in the corridors of power and spin, the Minister for Social Affairs is continually harassed by Number 10's policy enforcer and dependent on his not-so-reliable team of civil servants.
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27 comments on Hacker News
Highly recommend watching The Thick of It to get a glimpse of how such UK policies come to be.
Haha holy smokes, got to the end of the article and it reminds me of this: mhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6Hf_BKEfnY
(The Thick of It, by Armando Ianucci - also the creator of Veep with Julia Louis-Dreyfus - is a political satire TV series about bumbling government employees).
This reads like an episode of The Thick of It[0]. If it weren't real, it'd be funny.
As to the efficacy of the recommendation:
From The Verge's coverage[1]:
"The Environment Agency didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry from The Verge about how much water it thought deleting files might save, nor how much water data centers that store files or train AI use in the UK’s drought-affected areas."
And Tom's Hardware's[2]:
"Perhaps more pertinently, the advice rings hollow because it's likely not very sensible. While it's true that data centers do consume large amounts of water through evaporative cooling (where it's used), the vast majority of this power draw comes from CPU and GPU computation, not the storage of pictures and emails. Once the data is stored, the storage devices generate very little heat and are often spun down (placed into low- or no-power states) and called upon only when needed."
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thick_of_It
1: https://www.theverge.com/science/758275/drought-delete-files-email-data-center-water-uk
2: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/uk-government-inexplicably-tells-citizens-to-delete-old-emails-and-pictures-to-save-water-during-national-drought-data-centres-require-vast-amounts-of-water-to-cool-their-systems
As you mention "Yes, Minister", as a potential metaphor for truth...
That series was based on conversations between the writers and senior civil servants in UK Government. It was Margaret Thatcher's favourite show (she even wrote a scene to perform with the actors at some event or other), because in 1970s and 1980s Britain, it was incredibly on the money.
However, the more apt political comedy to reflect what modern politics looks like isn't "Yes, Minister" or "Yes, Prime Minister" (the sequel), but "The Thick of It", which shows well-meaning but put-upon civil servants dealing with the tyranny and abuse of special advisors and external consultants bullying and demeaning them at every turn. It, too, is based on conversations with real insiders in UK government.
I'll leave it to you to decide which is most apt for modern Washington, but there was a film of the latter mostly set in Washington, which tries to capture the tensions on that side of the Atlantic quite well, with the main joke being the UK's necessary subservience to a larger World power. It's worth a watch.
For my money, Musk looks a lot more like Malcolm Tucker than he does Jim Hacker.
This is what I call the 'Malcolm Tucker Test'.
Malcolm Tucker is a character from the BBC TV series The Thick of It, which is a sitcom set in the British government. His role is the PM's Director of Communications, and is allegedly based on Alistair Campbell, the real-life Director of Communications to Tony Blair (who was PM at the time the programme was made). Tucker starts off the show as the 'all-seeing, all-swearing'[0][1] villain, but quickly becomes the hero by virtue of being the only competent character.
The Thick of It is notoriously true to life: numerous insiders from the last British government told journalists that the only difference between the programme and the reality of government is that in The Thick of It, no one ever says, 'This is just like The Thick of It.'
There's a scene (I forget the context) in which Tucker snarls into a phone, 'How much shit's on the menu, and what fucking flavour is it?' This is the Malcolm Tucker Test.
My favourite failure was the AWS Pricing page, which until recently had no prices on it.
Quadrants 2, 3 and 4 fail the test by telling us what the flavour is but not telling us what's been flavoured.
The slogans in Quadrants 2 and 4 aren't as bad as they're painted here, though. Those are big multinationals selling to other big multinationals; their customers aren't compelled by specific assertions of value because their customers' decision-makers don't understand that value in such specific detail.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjKHPv7b3fQ
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYfHB-b3jvA
Utopia was one of the great political | civil service documentaries of the western world, up there with Yes, Minister and The Thick of It.
This is especially naive given that the problems with the Horizon system started in 1999, when the Labour Party was in power, and extended to the end of the coalition government, in which a Liberal Democrat was postal minister and a Conservative was Prime Minister.
Part of the problem is that MPs are on average too old, too stupid, or too reactive to actually understand technology, but another part is that they are incapable almost entirely of engaging with a deep problem if it doesn’t have a soundbite for the Today show.
“The Thick of It” was more of a documentary than many realise.
I recommend watching a BBC documentary called 'the thick of it'.
It's also a word most people learned thanks to the fictional Malcolm Tucker character in The Thick of It (Season 3, episode 6 when he's yelling at Ben Swain)
Watch an episode of “The Thick of It” before going to work.
If you liked that, watch The Thick of It, also by Iannucci, a dark comedy (tv series) about modern British government. Both funny and ugly.. the character Malcolm Tucker still strikes fear into my heart.
I mean, given the timing, I would assume to distract from Brexit, Number 10 parties, etc.
This (pull out a perennial policy interest and suddenly promote it weirdly eagerly, to distract from the government's scandals) is at this point such a trope of British politics that people make sitcoms about it (half the storylines in the Thick of It were basically this).
> Do you have any evidence for your extraordinary claims?
Anyone who has ever interacted with politicians knows that “The Thick Of It” is a documentary, not a comedy. These are not extraordinary claims at all. Wouldn’t surprise me if Priti wrote the tweet on the toilet with an aide firing suggestions through the door before one stuck.
Can confirm.
I worked in Westminster for a bit. That and "The Thick of It" were actually more realistic than many staged managed and PR airbrushed documentaries I have seen.
The content from BBC4 in general.
Mainly the wide array of in-depth documentaries presented by experts.
Yes, there've been loads of TOTP reruns since their budget was slashed and there may be some overlap with Sky Arts in some areas, but no channel comes close.
Notable excellent non-docs include Screenwipe, Only Connect, Detectorists (my favourite sitcom from the last ten years), The Thick of It.
I'd pay my licence fee just for BBC4, Radio 4 and BBC News.
there are several brilliant documentaries[⁰][¹] about the inner political circles in Britain which make exactly the point GP is alluding to:
[⁰] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thick_of_It
[¹] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_Minister
If you haven't heard of them, The Thick of It is basically a modern version of this show. By Armando Ianucci, the man who went on to make Veep (with Julia Louis Dreyfuss). Both series have been praised by insiders who say "The show is just like what happens in reality!".
He's also made the movies "In The Loop", set in the run up to the Iraq War, and "The Death of Stalin".
"becoming an expert"
In swearing? I can recommend BBC TV series "The Thick of It" - which actually had a swearing consultant employed on the scripts.
You're right that some decisions put things on a trajectory that can have massive ramifications for decades. I am still a bit skeptical of anyone's ability to project very far out.
Even a decision to go to war is full of uncertainty. Iraq I was days, Iraq II was decades. A general can never promise you it will come out one of those ways or the other.
Maybe I'm wrong though. It'd at least be nice to imagine someone has a plan and that it's not all just organic chaos.
"The Thick of It" does a good job explaining my side though -- it almost feels like a documentary for policy circles. The environment at that level is unbelievably frenetic. Getting anything done with intention is a near miracle.
But you're probably right that sometimes, at least on rare occasions, important people are able to clear off enough space to make important things happen that are long lasting with intention. I just think it's the exception, not the rule.
Except it mostly doesn't work.
My dashboard has recommended Minions "because you watched The Thick Of It". Out of the whole list, only Yes Prime Minister comes close, and even at that it misses the (more) obvious Yes Minister series.
I actually agree with much of the articles reasoning, other than the title, and everything about Ghostbusters:
> More specifically, a vocal portion of men on the internet — shall we say — go out of their way to make their voices heard when it comes to judging entertainment aimed at women, and that appears to be happening with the new “Ghostbusters.”
The thing with the new Ghostbusters has nothing to do with them being women. I'd see Bridesmaids 2 or any other comedy with Kristen Wiig (probably have), and I like Paul Feig fine.
The problem with the new Ghostbusters is that it's not Ghostbusters, not that it's necessarily a bad comedy.
The old Ghostbusters is shot and built up as a dark disaster movie, that just happens to be really funny. The new one is a Paul Feig movie (again, not knocking). It doesn't fit.
I noticed the same thing in the last season of Veep when Ianucci left. Instead of it shot more like an Office-type documentary (without the interviews, like its predecessor The Thick of It), if you look at the Christmas episode (of Veep) as the clearest example, it's shot like any other honestly mediocre sitcom, with saturated colors and honestly phoned in jokes.
Sorry about the tirade, but as a guy who does like good female media (Broad City and Lady Dynamite are my latest favorites), seeing this argument be made with terrible examples is unfortunate.
I hope that it is not the most honest, but I do agree that it is the best.
If you like The Thick Of It, you may also like the film 'In The Loop' and 'Veep' (both also 'created' by Armando Iannucci) as well as the Australian 'The Hollowmen'. 'Utopia', the sort-of follow on to The Hollowmen (which is excellent), is quite good too. There is also the 'Armando Iannucci show', which is very good, but also very different.
There is also supposed to be the Afghan version of the 'Thick Of It' too, although I have not found a source for that with translation.
Episode one of the BBC series "the thick of it" begins with exactly this situation. Perhaps the best comedy programme of the last ten years.
This is one of the central themes of In The Loop, a feature film spin-off from the excellent The Thick Of It (UK TV show), and a funny and possibly pretty accurate depiction of the USA-UK relationship.
So not a fan of The Thick of It then?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thick_of_It
[Only TV series that I am aware of that has a "Swearing Consultant"].
I watched the first 4 episodes of HoC this weekend and am quite disappointed.
Production is very good, acting is quite good (although Spacey simply plays "high status" all the time with a rigid upper lip and not much nuance).
For me there are two problems
- The two main characters are cynical people who are obsessed with power and just plain mean... and they win every time. I don't care for them; at this point I would like to watch them fail and be humiliated, but I don't think it will happen, so I lost the main incentive to watch the next episode.
- The whole thing is predictable. At the beginning of each episode a minor setback appears for the Underwoods, and they defeat it with a smirk (Robin Wright's smirk really gets on my nerves now, although she's probably one of the most beautiful women in the world).
- - -
On http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Cards_(U.S._TV_series) a critic is quoted saying "This hardwired venality is what makes this show so watchable. Here are the realities of political life as most of us suspect them to be."
I'm not sure. I think HoC takes itself and its subject much too seriously. I think reality is much more absurd and difficult to control, as described in Armando Iannucci's writing, which I can never get enough of (The Thick of It, In the Loop, Veep, etc.)
- - -
EDIT -- The rant above is a little off-topic; the on-topic point is that this is a very good move for Netflix and that (as others have noted) they really don't have a choice.
If they don't produce their own exclusive content they are at the mercy of other content producers who will try to price them out of the market (and would succeed in doing so).
It's not so much that these things are interfered with by petty politics, rather that they are defined by petty politics.
See the following clip from the sitcom-cum-documentary Yes Minister for a more complete elucidation of the issues: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmXzGI0XP7M
If you want to understand british politics, watch all of Yes Minister. Then watch all of its spiritual successor, The Thick Of It.