Highly Overrated But Still Good

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

This is a truly masterful episode of The Thick of It, a fitting climax to the whole series. As with all of the other episodes of "The Thick of It", to enjoy this properly you really need to understand the characters, who is who. The whole thing moves so fast, that if you don't know, it will just seem like a load of people running around in offices swearing at each other.The PM has resigned and rival party leader Tom is all but crowned as the new leader. This is a problem for Tucker because he has never been in with Tom's faction (aka The Nutters). So what should he do, should he take Tom down and put a rival in his place or can he inveigle himself into the Nutter faction? The way Tucker lies, cheats, spins and swears his way past his rivals is truly a sight to behold and should be compulsory viewing for all party hacks and PR spin-meisters.The counterpoint to Tucker is the hapless Ollie Reader, who is looking after Ben Swain MP, junior minister, but is promised a place in Tom's cabinet after the transition. Ollie sees his opportunity to be in his own words "catapulted into the political f**koffasphere" out of the moribund Deparment of Social Affairs and Citizenship and onto "the bridge of starship government". Ollie is very clever but at the same time utterly clueless. If ever there was a character who illustrated the difference between book smart and street smart, Ollie is it.Poor old Glenn, loyal to his minister Hugh Abbot who is out of the country. If you watch carefully, you can see Glenn being beaten down at every turn by everyone's withering put-downs until finally he completely cracks and breaks down.In the background there is the night desk of the Daily Mail, where the editor is desperately trying to figure out what is going on, so that he can put it on the front page. Sadly his only source for the political maneuvering is Ollie via his ex-girlfriend Angela on the news desk. Ollie's reliability as a source is alternately described as "shallow throat" or "a complete spasmoloid." At one stage the editor memorably tells Ollie that the headline on page six will be "Junior Government Gimp wrecks Ex-Girlfriends Career"

The Prime Minister has announced he is stepping down and it is mere minutes before the jockeying for position begins. Reliable Tom is the favourite but when Malcolm gets wind of a story over drug addiction doing the rounds he finds he has to kill that while preventing anyone strong stepping into the ring. Hugh is out of the equation and the rumour is that someone has already booked onto the Today programme for the next morning to announce they are running. With night rapidly turning into morning, the political machine goes into overdrive with spin doctors, advisors and journalists all chasing who is and isn't standing.With Langham still awaiting trial on criminal allegations, The Thick of It continues to keep us waiting for the second season but does produce another special and a very timely one it is too as political spinning goes nuts as the PM steps down. To be fair, the actual handover to Blair was done without a lot of public spinning and manoeuvring however such is the general cynicism about politics that it is easy to buy into version set behind the scenes in our parallel government. That said, although the race to be the new PM was never going to be a race so much as a handover, there must have been a lot of stuff going on around was anyone going to challenge and also who was going to be the deputy.Anyway, this special screened the week after Blair stepped down and picked up where the Christmas special left us – with the PM quitting. The plot is very clever here although it can be quite hard to follow as we see everyone in full on survival mode with even Malcolm himself not completely in the loop. Throughout the episode we see candidates moved into position and then dismissed with each revelation or change of allegiance – it is not 100% convincing in how fast it all happens but when you are caught up in the pace then it is easy to go with. Again, I know people don't necessarily like it, but I do find the hand-held cameras to be of benefit in creating the energy and pace around the narrative.It goes without saying that the dialogue continues to be this wonderfully foul version of the West Wing that is hilarious. At times the sheer volume of language does overwhelm the dialogue and it becomes all about the swearing rather than the swearing being used, but generally when this happened I was too busy laughing to really care all that much. Capaldi is given a good dimension to work with as he is in a fight rather than in full control (or at least clearly the one in charge when things are not in control). He wears this well and brings the spin out convincingly. Higgins does well to accept second place character wise as he tries and fails to move himself up on a new horse (a man so dull that, when Higgins is told that "there are shades of grey" and not just black/white issues, he responds "aye and I'm looking at about 15 of them right now"). Addison plays a similar role but with less spine and he is convincing as the script sees his arrogance collapse as he plays a mans game without a clue what he is doing beyond the next two minutes. Smith is given some strong material to work with and has some good moments in he latter half of the film while support from Edwards, Scanlan and others is roundly good.Overall then another very strong special. Not as out and out funny as "Rise of the Nutters" but it has a stronger narrative and is a very tight and funny comment on the spinning and manoeuvring inside the mock UK government – of course, it'll be nothing like this in reality(!).