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Peter Capaldi plays spin doctor Malcolm Tucker |
Hilarious sexed-up spin antics, but they’ve cost many lives
IT doesn’t matter if it is true or not, it happened.” Malcolm Tucker, the terrifying, eye-bulging spin doctor who dominates the film version of the brilliant BBC series The Thick of It, utters these lines towards the end of the movie.
By that time, we have seen any number of U-turns and funny lines, and some fantastic trademark baroque swearing.
In The Loop stretches The Thick of It formula (shaky cameras at all times) to breaking point by employing the variety of characters familiar from the TV series – the bumbling minister (once played by Chris Langham, now brilliantly taken on by Tom Hollander), the hopeless and cut-throat series of aides and advisors, and this time we also have the Americans, most notably in the large form of ex-Sopranos star James Gandolfini, who plays an unlikely peace-loving general covered in medals.
The film is almost too topical for its own good, with the current No10 email scandal an absolute godsend, and references to porn films and expenses statements already in the script.
In the world of spin unpicked (brutally) by Armando Iannucci, nothing matters, apart from spin itself.
Nobody has principles, everyone shouts and swears, all the time, facts are reversed, reports are cut and pasted together, and then re-cut and re-pasted and lies are told and untold.
At the centre of stands Malcolm Tucker, who of course, bears no resemblance at all to Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s spin doctor during the New Labour years.
Tucker is everywhere, turning up just when you least expect him to, always ready to deliver yet another, killer and very sweary one-liner.
He even takes on James Gandolfini himself, in a set-to where neither man is ready to back down.
All this is incredibly entertaining, and the laughs keep on coming, but it has a serious edge.
For years, we have been governed by the spin doctors. Our lives have been dominated by invention, falsehood and topsy-turvy politics.
The politics of image, the politics of nothing. But the consequences of this world of spin were not just hot air.
It was spin which took us into the Iraq war, after all, with the lies about “weapons of mass destruction” and Saddam’s supposed ability to nuke the UK in a matter of minutes.
Lies and sexed-up spin has left hundreds of thousands of people dead. And this is the bitter legacy of a political world for whom principles are nothing, and where the interpretation of reality is more important than reality itself.
In the Loop is one of the funniest films I have seen in a long time, but its dissection of the dangers and absurdities of government by spin is deadly serious.
JOHN FOOT
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