k-punk
Spectres of Mark
... which has just started a new series on BBC4, is everything that the dreadful Blunkett play failed to be. Where the Blunkett play was comforting (especially to most of those it was supposedly satirising), The Thick of It is bleakly unsettling. The standard description (The Office + Yes Minister) gives a broad impression of the series, but The Thick of It is much more unremittingly savage than either. The baboonish territorial aggression and Hobbesian one-upmanship are perhaps the closest recent British 'entertainment' has come to the Alec Baldwyn character in Glengarry Glen Ross... all of which makes me wonder why it is that British TV comedy seems to have a much better handle on contemporary reality than does TV drama, which is marooned in a mire of star-led MOR or glossed-up to the nines in yet another costume effort...