Malcolm Tucker Is Back

Armando Iannucco is, or should be, very happy right now. Let me explain.

Years hence, when students of English political history want to see what politics was like at the turning of the millennium, they’ll dig deep in the video archives and watch The Thick of It, the BBC’s brilliant, vibrantly profane political satire series, which Iaunnicci created. The show focuses not on senior statesmen making lofty decisions, a là The West Wing, but on the staff who populate their world and ultimately shape it more than great ideals or national struggles. At the center is one of the greatest characters in the history of television comedy, Malcolm Tucker, the Prime Minister’s enforcer and chief spin doctor. Tucker, whose portrayal by Peter Capaldi should win every award it’s eligible for every year that the show runs, is concerned with one thing and one thing alone: nursing his party through the daily screwups, struggles and pressures that a tired regime brings so it can stay in power.

This single focus defines him. Fear and intimidation are his calling cards; his threats are stunningly, hilariously graphic, and his staccato Scots accent gives them even more bite. It starts with what he calls “a lot of what we might call extremely violent sexual imagery” — the f-bomb, fast and furious — but that’s just the beginning. To an opposition staffer who wants to leak embarrassing private information about a cabinet minister, he promises retaliation so merciless “you’ll have to be reassembled by air crash investigators.” A minor minister is “so dense light bends around him.” To a minister and her senior staff whose department bungled one too many times, “I will rip all your bodies to bare bits, and sell off your flayed skin for a sleeping bag.” He is pure ruthlessness, pure calculation, and, given a near-impossible job, pure effectiveness. He doesn’t need fame, he doesn’t need money, he doesn’t need friends. He needs Labour to continue at Number 10, and woe to anyone who through incompetence or malice imperils this. (The above picture is from the BBC’s movie version of The Thick of It, titled In the Loop.).

Over its three series The Thick of It has tracked British politics fairly closely, with special episodes reflecting the transition of power from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown and the past series tracking the lead-up to this year’s General Elections. The last few episodes, broadcast in late 2009, spent more time with the opposition figures who mirrored the show’s Labour characters. The last show ended with the call for elections, and Tucker fearing that a loss could put the party in opposition for a generation — “until Daniel Radcliffe is advertising walk-in baths for the People’s Spread.” Tucker himself had been fired and then rehired to put down a cabal aimed at replacing the PM, so his fate is far from certain.

Which, until Tuesday, threatened this question: If the Tories won, what to do with Malcolm Tucker? The show couldn’t be credible as satire if Labour had prevailed, Tucker is too dominant a character to be completely powerless, and a clear Conservative majority would have made him powerless. What to do?

Hence Iannucci’s reasons to be very, very happy. The Tories didn’t get a clear majority; it got a coalition government whose partners, the Liberal Democrats, are nursing a generation of tension, frustration, and resentment toward the Conservatives. The Tories’ base is frustrated with new PM David Cameron for (they think) blowing the election and caving in to too many Liberal Democrat demands, the Liberal Democrats think their leader, Nick Clegg, gave away an historic opportunity to get political reform which would vastly improve their long-term strength, and Labour, after Gordon Brown’s election loss and retirement, is in complete disarray.

In other words, it’s party time for Malcolm Tucker, who will no doubt use every opportunity to drive wedges between the Tories and the Lib Dems, to destabilize Nick Clegg’s leadership, and while he’s at it, elect a new Labour leader. Many had theorized that Tucker was based on Tony Blair’s communications chief, Alistair Campbell, and Campbell’s recent splurge of activity — advising Brown on post-election strategy, rounds of interviews with newly interested reporters, and his own twitterings about defectors from the Liberal Democrats — should put to rest any doubt about Tucker’s continuing central role in the show’s next series. As he himself would say, he will be f***ing back.

There is a point to this beyond Armando Iannuicci’s great relief and that of the show’s fans. Even with David Cameron and Nick Clegg stitched together at the hip, English politics will be a very rocky ride for the foreseeable future. Very few of today’s Tory leaders have actually had to govern, and none at all among the Liberal Dems. They have not had to deal with the relentless, omnivorous appetites of a press corps trying to feed a news cycle that’s not just 24/7, but 1440/365 (minutes per day, days per year). They are working out the big, controversial issues, but they haven’t had to manage the issues that are substantively minor but so symbolically powerful they pack just as much controversy and divisiveness. They haven’t had to reassure jittery markets. And they haven’t had to deal with the likes of a Malcolm Tucker, who knows when and where to slip the knife for maximum effectiveness, and will do it often because it’s the only weapon he has. It will be a very rocky time indeed.

Cash and Carbon at the BBC

One reason it’s interesting to track the BBC is its exposure to different kinds of pressure. It’s funded by the state through a license fee on every television in the United Kingdom, so to license-payers it has to prove its worth — it has to put on programming which truly engages a broad majority of the viewing public (different audiences at different times). But it’s also directly regulated by the British government, so it has to stay mindful of political controversy. In America, ratings and demographics are king, but it’s much more complicated in the UK, and much more revealing because those different pressures force choices between often competing dynamics.

BBC controversies can come from strange places — or at least, strange to those of us on the western side of the pond. In 2002 the Beeb was rocked with scandal when its chief newsreader failed to put on a black necktie before announcing that the Queen Mum had died. Stars Jonathan Ross and bad-boy comic Russell Brand were suspended and fired, respectively, for lewd prank phone calls to the home of Andrew Sachs, most famous for playing the incompetent waiter Manuel in Fawlty Towers. Political correctness is a fact of life, with nearly every possible interest group imaginable pressing the Beeb to bend to its own particular view of the world. With Britain’s economy in deep trouble, the salaries of BBC talent and leading executives have also become fair game.

Which leads us to the aforementioned Ross, whose Friday night talk show is enormously popular, and Top Gear. Ross is truly iconic and might have been born to host a talk show — only David Letterman seems to fit the form better. He’s equally good on radio, where he hosts two shows, and on television. Ross can manage the trick of being self-deprecating while holding his own with the biggest stars in the land; he’s hip without being self-conscious, ironic yet sincere, and relentlessly energetic and edgy. In 2006 the BBC signed him to host his three shows for £18 million pounds over three years, and almost immediately the criticism started, then intensified after the Sachs phone calls. When the executives who had signed the deal left, Ross’s protection within the BBC was gone, and even though he let it be known he’d accept a hefty paycut to stay with the BBC, by then he was toxic. He seemed to get the message and a few weeks ago he announced that after 23 years at the Beeb, he would not seek to renew his contract.

Top Gear’s presenters are highly paid as well, particularly the show’s chief-among-equals, Jeremy Clarkson, whose salary is somewhere between £1.5 and £2 million annually. But salary isn’t what the show’s critics gravitate to — instead, it’s TG’s extraordinary disdain for the agenda of the environmental movement, particularly global warming and carbon emissions. On a weekly basis, TG’s very existence frustrates environmentalists, with its unabashed ardor for fast, expensive, and thirsty supercars. Just as routinely it never seems to miss a chance to mock the green movement; presenters Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May have taken pickup trucks to the North Pole, stripped-down sedans through the pristine salts flats of Botswana, and SUVs tearing through acres of green fields and woodlands in a Top Gear version of a fox hunt. Every few episodes TG stages a race between a supercar and a form of public transport; inevitably and gleefully, the supercar wins with better speed, comfort, and style.

All of which has earned the seething enmity of environmentalists. A few years ago Clarkson’s face was on the receiving end of a pie thrown by protestors as he was about to receive an honorary degree from an engineering school (his first reaction was “good shot!”). And the chief spokesman for Britain’s Green Party has called for an international environmental court to punish Clarkson for “crimes against the planet.”

So, starting its 13th series this summer in the UK (just broadcast last Monday in the U.S. on BBC America), and acknowledging at the top of the show the harsh economic and political climate the show was operating in, how did TG respond?

By sticking to its guns, or gears, as the case may be, and staging a race between a gas-guzzling 1949 Jaguar, the supercar of its time, a smoke-belching steam locomotive, and a vintage 1949 Black Shadow motorcycle that Steve McQueen would be proud of. As always, the race was suspenseful, authentic — Clarkson really was shoveling coal into the engine’s furnace, and Hammond really was groaning with pain after several hours on the Shadow — and funny. As always, the show refused to gloss over the vehicles’ extraordinary consumption of fuel, and as always, the show didn’t seem to really care.

But it did operate within one critical limitation: affordability. Both the Jag and the Black Shadow were borrowed, and the locomotive brought with it a full load of 200 ticket-buying passengers, who were only told they’d be on the fastest steam locomotive run from London to Edinburgh since the 1960s (the show casually mentioned borrowing the car and motorcycle but was silent on the train). As always, the show looked expensive, with breathtaking helicopter shots and sleek, glossy editing. Its producers were clearly willing to accept politically-driven restraints of cost, but, as always, any other restraints went out the window.

All of which was so in-your-face and so politically incorrect that it was the most watched show of its night in the UK, taking in 30% of the UK audience, three times BBC2’s average viewership. And what does this all say beyond the context of talk shows and fast cars?

It says that the environmental movement’s momentum might, just might, be stalling when the public face broader challenges. Ross’s TV talk show and Top Gear get comparable ratings — about 30% of the viewing audience. The chief publically-owned broadcaster of a very politically correct nation decided that it wasn’t willing to pay a political price for Ross because of public resentment over his salary. But it decided it was willing to continue to take huge amounts of political criticism from the environmental community over Top Gear, as long as TG accepted new budgetary realities.

It might be that maybe, just maybe, that the public has decided that it’s tired of the arguments that the anti-carbon emissions community has been making. They — we — want comfort, they want excitement, they want delight in their/ our lives, and they/we find Jeremy Clarkson in all his man-childish and obsession with massive horsepower to be much more sympathetic than Al Gore and his dire warnings of flood and catastrophe. They/we are sensitive to cost and to economic realities, particularly to those who make a lot of money from government-written checks. But the call to sacrifice quality of life to save the planet may have seen its day.

Top Gear Rides Again — Conan Goes Solo

Could you possibly screw anything up as badly as Jeff Zucker and the suits at NBC Universal — whom GE is jettisoning after 23 years — screwed up the Jay Leno/ Conan O’Brien non-transition? And those same suits are still employed, while O’Brien is gone from the network he’s called home for over 16 years. To understand why, it would have been helpful to tune in this past Monday night to perhaps the most popular show in the English-speaking world. All the answers, however indirect, were there, for anyone to see.

I’m referring to the U.S. season debut (for its 13th series) of Top Gear, which can be described as accurately as a show about cars as Disney World can be described as a theme park whose host is a mouse. Top Gear is watched by — according to most counts — about 375 million people the world over, and this doesn’t account for knock-off shows in Australia, Germany, and Russia. The show is fundamentally not so much about Ferraris or Bugatti Veyrons as it is about adventure, delight, and the friendships that can form around deep shared passions, and its secret is that it holds nothing back. Its hosts (or presenters, in BBC-speak) have taken a Toyota to the North Pole, cheap used cars through the largest salt flat in the world, third-hand motorcycles (or worse) though Viet Nam, and have even tried to send a Robin Reliant into outer space as a mini-space shuttle. They’ve crossed the English Channel in a retrofitted pickup truck, put a Ford Fiesta front-and-center in a beach assault with the Royal Marines, and, for the sheer fun of it, played a very large game of darts with used cars as the darts and motor homes as targets. Wherever the imagination can take anything with wheels and a motor, Top Gear has followed.

And to kick off its latest series it went back to 1949, with a race among the three fastest land-based forms of transportation of the day: the Jaguar HK120 (driven by presenter James May), the Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle (by Richard Hammond), and the Tornado 60163 locomotive, where Jeremy Clarkson donned a fireman’s overalls to shovel coal into a steam engine. Races are a favorite of Top Gear, and this one went from London to Edinburgh along the routes that would have been available in 1949. As with other Top Gear races, it was funny, suspenseful, and stunningly photographed — a climax of planning, artistry, and serendipity — and above all, authenticity. This one ended at the bar of the Balmoral Hotel, with a soot-covered Clarkson and a typically disheveled May finding themselves in the middle of a wedding reception — from which came the picture above.

Meanwhile, O’Brien was out of a job, having failed at the first thing that he’d probably every failed at and leaving the network rather than compromise what to him was the greatest franchise in all of television, the Tonight Show. Why? Bad construction, it seemed, and a weak foundation. His Late Night program did well because Leno’s Tonight Show delivered him a healthy audience, and Leno did well because the 10pm NBC shows were at least in the ballpark with their competition at other networks. Leno’s 10pm show wasn’t, which meant fewer residual viewers for the local affiliate’s news (a big moneymaker for them) and Conan’s Tonight Show at 11:30.

This kind of construction is important because… well, let’s face it. It’s because the shows are crap. Leno’s Everyman schtick hasn’t changed in years, any more than Conan’s Goofy Nerd schtick has changed in years. Every night they bravely face the impossible challenge of having to fill 40 minutes, which will include at least 15 minutes of painfully dull interviews of celebrities pitching their latest work (made worse by the fact that neither Leno nor O’Brien seem capable of an interesting two-person conversation). With all that’s available on cable, on TiVo or DVR, on NetFlix, or on the Internet, the only reason you would watch these shows is if you couldn’t find your remote, your spouse had forbidden you from channel surfing, or you forgot to send your last DVD back in the mail.

Which is not the case with Top Gear, voted last month as the best British television show of the last decade. Unless BBC News America has suddenly scaled the ratings heights, Top Gear has no lead-in. It’s simply an unconnected dot in the television landscape, and unless you know where to look for it, you won’t find it. But people do, because each show has something special and delightful about it that makes you want to relive the experience of seeing it again or for the first time.

And this is something Jeff Zucker and his fellow suits at NBC Universal seem to understand, as well as his bosses-to-be at Comcast. They’ve hitched their stars not to NBC prime time programming, based on 22 episodes a year running from fall through spring, but to a steady stream of smaller shows that more powerfully target narrower audiences with shorter and more frequent seasons. They seem to understand that the concept of a network, with the power to control a schedule, is dead, or close to it. If I can watch Top Gear on channel 189 at 8pm on Mondays instead of whatever NBC has on the air (I don’t know because I’m not watching it), there’s no real value in being a network.

This might not have been clear five years ago, when NBC put in place the Leno/ O’Brien succession plan and locked both late-night mainstays down for years to come. But it’s certainly clear now, and the $44 million check that NBC gave to O’Brien can probably best be seen as a final payment on an insurance policy, just in case the network model still had some life in it.

If this is bad news for O’Brien, it should be good news for the rest of us. It means more channels and more opportunities for people on the creative side of television, it means a greater appetite for risk among those who can fund television production, and it means more variety and more choice for viewers. And Max Weinberg can go back to being Bruce Springsteen’s drummer. How bad can all of that be?

Three (Super)Cars and a Bridge

A recently aired (at least on BBC America) Top Gear episode had Jeremy, Richard and James gunning three supercars — a Ford GT, a Ferrari, and a Zonda — through France en route to the Millau Bridge.  Long trips in fast cars through gorgeous scenery is central to the show’s DNA, but usually there’s a twist — a race or a series of challenges designed to keep things entertaining.  Not this one, though.  As Jeremy refueled his thirsty GT every few miles, Richard scraped to get the Zonda out of an underground garage in Paris, and James struggled with wind and rain in the convertible Ferrari, the show was making a much more fundamental point about supercars.

Which was:  they’re irrational, and no one should even try to argue objectively that they’re worth the huge sums of money they cost to build, buy, and maintain.  You should only buy one for love — love for its beauty, for its engineering brilliance, for how it makes you feel.  And the reason we need to care about them is that the irrational passion they represent is exactly what makes the world a better place.

That’s why they ended the journey in Millau.  The bridge is spectacular — about 8000 feet long and almost 900 feet above the ground.  It was meant to alleviate traffic from the north that paralyzed the highway running past Millau when vacationers arrived in July and August.  And it seems to have done a pretty good job of that.  But traffic abatement is not why it’s worth talking about, or even noticing.  The Millau Bridge deserves attention because it’s beautiful, because it sets new standards in engineering creativity — because, that is, of the flaming, thunderous passion its creators took to the task of linking two points over a river.

What’s interesting, and a little bit sad, is to think about where else to find this kind of hold-nothing-back, dripping-with-joy passion.  It’s hard.  I think you can find it in Apple products — whenever there’s a new iPhone or a new  software update, I try to imagine the engineers behind them pumping their fists and daring their competitors to do them better.  You might see it in a great live musical performance, or a great meal by a great chef.  The best thing about watching sports is the elation of an athlete who, with a game on the line, tries something incredibly difficult and pulls it out.

But beyond that, passion and joy are rare commodities.  We worry too much — fret too much about looking bad if we fail, care too much about what People Might Think.  Most of our entertainment is about moderately satisfying targeted demographics, not the passion of its creators.  This seems particularly true of politics.  Hubert Humphrey leapt to an argument with ferocious joy, hoping to ignite others’ hopes without having to belittle his opponent.  Reagan was the same way — even when he went after Democrats, there was always a gleam in his eye that let you know that he understood his own theatricality, and relished it.

Obama was supposed to change this, and I think that beyond the botched agenda, the bizarre moments (a Cambridge police officer and a Harvard professor at the White House for a nationally televised beer?), and his habit of proposing enormously expensive programs when we can least afford them, this is his biggest failure:  his failure to bring real passion to public policy.  This was his real promise, and certainly what Ted Kennedy saw in him when he endorsed him.  But this White House might be the most calculating and joyless in memory.  His own campaign turned out to be less about hope and more about spite Democrats felt toward George Bush.  There’s no sense of ringing confidence in the nation’s future; no sense of great, audacious goals still for the nation to accomplish. No: there are only constituencies to manage, talking points to coordinate, positions to be hedged, opponents to be (negatively) defined.

Which is too bad, because passion also brings out the best.  Top Gear is worth watching because of how deeply its hosts love great automobile engineering and how badly they want to convey that to their audience.  The Millau Bridge is worth a drive because its builders sensed that if they got the opportunity, they could do something truly astonishing and wonderful there.  Passion pushes you to elevate your game, and gives people a reason to care.

Simmons-Gladwell Blogfest

Bill Simmons is the funny and thoughtful Page 2 writer for ESPN.com.  Malcolm Gladwell is the incredibly creative and insightful author of The Tipping Point, Outliers, Blink, and countless New Yorker articles on everything from college admissions testing to how to make a better cookie.  They meet here, for an epic back-and-forth.  If blogging had an Olympics, these two would be finalists.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/090513/part1

Top Gear — How hard can it be?

Ever wanted to convert a Robin Reliant (UK’s parallel to the Ford Pinto) into a Space Shuttle — as in the picture to the right?  To drive to the North Pole in a Toyota Hilux?  To steer a Ford FIesta through an empty shopping mall as it’s being chased by a Corvette — then land it in a mock beach assault with the Royal Navy?  To launch a Leyland Mini (loaded with rockets, no less) down an Olympic ski jump in Norway?

 

Of course you have.  I mean, who hasn’t?  And if you have — or, perhaps, you’d just like to see what happens when somebody else gives it a try — then Top Gear might be the best show you’ve never seen.

 

Top Gear is currently only available to U.S. viewers on BBC America, or on iTunes.  But it’s a worldwide phenomenon, with over 350 million viewers.  And it’s my favorite show on TV.  

 

The show’s one-line description would run something like this:  reviews of new cars, celebrity interviews, and features.   And like most one-line descriptions, it would fall far, far short of conveying the full picture.  

 

Which starts with its hosts, or “presenters” in BBC-speak.  Each knows his way around a gear box as well as a camera, but it’s the personalities and how they blend that makes the show.   Jeremy Clarkson dominates the screen with his physical presence — he’s quite tall and his voice booms — his energy, and his completely impenetrable self-regard.  Restraint and Clarkson don’t even seem to inhabit the same universe; a few weeks ago, he called Gordon Brown “a one-eyed Scottish idiot,” later to apologize only for his reference to the Prime Minister’s appearance.  To call Clarkson politically incorrect would be an epic understatement — he practically defines politically incorrect.

 

James May (“Captain Slow” to Clarkson) is almost the anti-Clarkson – sort of a shaggy, sardonic academic who rarely raises his voice, might study owner manuals as a hobby, and could easily collect cam shafts as examples of art (I don’t know that he does, but he could).  He can push a car as close to its limits as Clarkson, but more quietly, thoughtfully, with more of a contented sigh than a primal roar.  Of the three he is probably the most elegant writer, and in fact he came to the show after a career as an auto magazine columnist.  (Not to shortchange the others — all write their own material for the show, and all have written books).  

 

Rounding out the three is Richard Hammond, “the Hamster,” who could all too easily be seen as The Cute One.  Watch a few episodes, though, and he emerges as the adult of three, the one who knows that hosting Top Gear is a very good gig indeed and who doesn’t want to screw it up.  Understanding that offending huge swaths of the world’s population might not be a good idea, he’s the one who tries to rein in Clarkson’s worst excesses; knowing that May would be perfectly happy waxing rhapsodic about gear ratios, he tries to keep things on the clock.  Racing fast cars is dangerous business, and Hammond survived a near-lethal crash while testing a car on the show and survived to come back and drive just as fast. 

 

None of them have been prettied up or homogenized — they wear old jeans and on occasion might be bothered into tucking in their shirts.  They know their cars, breezily throwing about brands, makes, models and years like baseball players in a game of catch.  Most importantly, they fit.  Clarkson is the dominant one but in truth the show would be a different and lesser one without any one of them.

 

The actual auto reviews typically lead the show, usually of a super car which in no short order will be tested on the show’s own racetrack to within its very last horsepower.  May’s criteria are usually sensibleness and comfort, Hammond’s the feel of the car, and Clarkson’s whether the car has the power, speed and grip to release near-lethal amounts of adrenaline into his system.  

 

The only other real staple is the Stars in Reasonably Priced Car segment, where after they’re interviewed by Clarkson we see famous people who can afford far better take a Chevrolet Lacetti around the Top Gear race track, their times being posted in comparison to others.  It’s quietly subversive in an English way.  First Clarkson leads them through their own history with cars — Jaguars, Range Rovers, BMWs — then we see them having (often) much more fun running a fairly mundane 4-cylinder model at full throttle around tight corners and figure-8s.  Ron Wood glowed through his entire interview.  Sir Michael Gambon, arguably the dean of all English stage actors, has been back twice and the circuit’s final corner is named after him.  Gordon Ramsay, Simon Cowell, London Mayor Boris Johnson, Roger Daltrey, Hugh Grant, Patrick Stewart, Stephen Fry — they all seem to have fun, and watching them as Clarkson dangles their finishing times in front of them, you can see they’re much more competitive than they perhaps would like to admit.  

 

Beyond that, it’s gorgeously shot and wildly imaginative.  I could try to describe the feature segments and challenges but it’s far better to go to its extremely comprehensive website.   There you’ll see Clarkson and May hilariously romp through the (pathetic) best of the Soviet Union’s auto industry, May race an experimental powerboat against Hammond’s Ferrari along the Riviera, and all three try to turn everyday cars into boat cars, then cross the English Channel.   There are challenges of all sorts and on every continent — Clarkson is ferociously competitive and possibly the worst winner in the history of competitive sport, which goads the other two on.  

 

The cars they test are the newest, most expensive, and sportiest in the world, and they’ve been everywhere from Africa to the Arctic, but the real fun of the show is watching the three together.  They’re like three mates who have known each other since high school and sneak in a visit to a pub or garage (or both) when the wife’s not looking.  There’s a sense of mischief, fun, and fundamental affection and respect that is more genuine and affecting than you see almost anywhere else on TV.  

 

The hosts would say (and in fact have) it’s just a crappy show about cars, but it’s also a world-wide phenomenon.  And it’s so successful, so delightful, because, every week, it goes for broke.  It doesn’t try to be marginally better than its competitors because there are no competitors.   It doesn’t try to key in on target demographic groups, because it understands that with 6 billion people in world, many with televisions, many wanting to tap into the ethos of freedom and speed that cars represent, and some even with a sense of humor, it doesn’t need to target demographic groups.  It doesn’t hold back or compromise its own identity because the essence of the show is not to compromise, and the moment it did, the reason to watch would be over.  Every show seems to happen as if by accident, marvelously.  In a world economy in which creativity and innovation — doing something new and different which literally delights people into buying it — there’s a lot to be learned here.