A thread for 'The Thick Of It' (and 'In The Loop' as well)

Aiannucci
Quiet day on Twitter from me. We're writing a Thick of It book at the moment. Should be out later in the year. All new material.

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/10/yes-in-the-loop-writers-get-an-hbo-show.html

Good news for In the Loop superfans: Simon Blackwell and Armando Iannucci will write Veep, a new political comedy show from HBO that may star Julia Louis-Dreyfus. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Veep “follows a female senator who becomes vice president of the United States and finds the job is nothing like she expected and everything everyone ever warned about.” Terrific! We can now scratch the Blackwell-Iannucci-HBO-Louis-Dreyfus collaboration off our list of fantasy creative alliances, below.

oO

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/11/gears-of-comedy-total-pussy-test-drives-monster-military-hardware/

lawl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkkP_klodNQ

haaa... love this show.

we are in a prison drama. this is like the shawshank redemption, only with more tunneling through shit and no fucking redemption.

I just caught Peter Capaldi being a Wise Man on BBC's 'The Nativity' - kept expecting him to swear.

I noticed he was going for the Sean Connery school of Scottish accent acting.

he seems like a chill person irl

i guess that's what acting's about

I read a thing where he claimed to never swear IRL as well. Malc must be deeply cathartic for him.

In answer to all those who've been asking, a new series of The Thick of It is commissioned and work begins on scripts next month.

hope they make hollander a reg

the steve hilton guy is hilares too

#excited

ya

so HBO has picked up iannucci's "veep," wherein julia louis-dreyfus stars as a senator who becomes vice-president

looking forward to that. love armando and really like julia louis-dreyfus. also she's really good looking for a woman that must be about 50.

loved 'in the loop' when i saw it but only a recent convert to 'the thick of it' proper. 'KNOWLEDGE IS PORRIDGE'! god that made me laugh like a simpleton.

one thing I found interesting about "In the Loop" was how the American characters seemed a lot more appealing than the British ones, in that most of them seemed to be doing things for principled reasons (albeit crazy principled reasons in the case of the hand grenade guy), while the British characters were mostly stupid and just going with whatever seemed to be the flow.

think you might have been watching "ILX" by accident

haha

british characters were mostly cynical/self interested, tbh, rather than stupid

Well the Minister who goes to America and his assistant are not exactly shining lights in the brain department.

Are the new specials ever coming out or do they have to keep frantically rewriting them every time some new bombshell hits British politics?

most of them seemed to be doing things for principled reasons

doesn't gandolfini end up on the line of "and in the end i decided that ACTUALLY the MOST principled thing when you think about it is to NOT resign"

yeah what is the situash with the new episodes?

Ianucci's been making the US version instead of being in the UK writing anything AFAIK

tho he's said he's really glad abt the delay bcz it means they get to do the coalition govt now

veep starts 22 april on hbo and presumably around the same time on sky atlantic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0dMZo3l_5k

sitting down to watch this properly and in order over weekend.

Just re-watched all but the last season over the last week or so. Its been interesting to watch Malcolm become less of a caricature over time.

7 new eps written

http://www.digitalspy.com/british-tv/news/a382383/armando-iannucci-weve-written-seven-new-thick-of-it-episodes.html

Armando Giovanni Iannucci OBE

ugh

don't they give these trinkets to every member of the british entertainment industry who (often after a long domestic career) has some success in america

http://i49.tinypic.com/11bqjhu.jpg

a+

Ouch. I think Campbell's right about this in this case, but maybe he should have let someone else do the dirty work. Something I thought he'd be good at.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtJVXcuHssI&feature=player_embedded

well, TTOI isn't really the sort of thing that lends itself to a 30 second trailer so i'm still hopeful in spite of ^^^that.

Inception?

https://twitter.com/Aiannucci/status/243683223169814528
https://twitter.com/Aiannucci/status/243683392330293249
https://twitter.com/Aiannucci/status/243683787639250946

That indicates significantly less Malcolm Tucker overall maybe, unless the early episodes involve a lot of running back and forth between parties.

The Thick of It Tories generally bring the lols more than their non-Tucker Labour counterparts though.

really? the Glen and Ollie combo is pure gold. then there's Jamie, Julius... really there's no one on the other side anywhere near as good as that. Peter Mannion and Emma Messenger are good (and excellent actors) but Vincent Franklin is pretty characateur-ish as well as pretty badly played imo.

i mean he's not terrible but everyone else is so good that it kinda shows him up. and i'd guess he's pretty much the main character now.

More likely to be about Peter Mannion than Vincent Frankin's character, who I agree is relatively weak. PHIL is amazing though, although mostly as a foil for Ollie.

that andrew rawnsley interview with armando the other do was crazy. armando being all calm and sensible, rawnsley being a concern trolling herb.

Great series opener.

i thought it was quite bad, the writing was poor: just a series of one-liners in place of any kind of substance. a couple of good one-liners admittedly but not bedded into a believable scenario. the direction was poor as well, a load of actors who didn't seem to know what they were supposed to be doing. i don't thing this is the directors fault though.

i know dosac is supposed to be some lolworthy non-department but i just didn't believe the scenario with the apps and then i didn't believe the fake furore with the minister going home with his half bottle of champagne. it was flimsy.

also it was annoying that they did that )re in the loop) thing of re-using an actor from a previous episode in a completely different role. one of the actors (i dunno who since i couldn't actually tell who anyone was supposed to be) was previously used as the newspaper editor in spinners and losers. the one who was trying to get ollie's ex gf to get ollie to dish the dirt so that he could have a headline for the morning's paper.

the glorious confusion of the rise of the nutters/spinners and losers episodes worked because the central characters were already bedded in. you can't really use that format on new characters who we know nothing about. no amount of one-liners and frantic camera moves can substitute for that.

overall this was a lot like veep.

rubbish, this was great. I especially liked the casual nazi references from several tories,

this was fucking waste

only writer credited was will smith the prick who plays the conservative apparatchik

idk if this is iannucci making a bbc1 sitcom episode as oblique condemnation of coalition era cultural degredation, or he really doesn't give a fuck anymore now he's running tings for HBO

credit to roger allam to putting in a good shift in a failing enterprise