The Thick of It: the agony of tight spacesIan Martin is a writer for The Thick of It.Walking on to a film set for the first time is always dislocating. You cross a boundary between a commonplace reality and a tight, compacted fictional space. It's a shock, like discovering a diamond in a lump of coal, or a woman on Mock the Week, or a Lib Dem canvasser on your doorstep.
When the new series of The Thick of It was shot earlier this year, the wobbling stargate between ordinary space and the claustrophobic world of contemporary politics felt even more dramatic somehow. Production designer Simon Rogers and his team had conjured up the airless, gothic hellhole that is the opposition's headquarters within a blameless country house near Ruislip. You ascended a real, ancient staircase into a recreation of Labour's Victorian gloom-tank on Victoria Embankment. Suddenly that look of abandoned hope that seems to haunt Team Miliband made more sense. If a shadow cabinet meeting overruns they must all be on suicide watch. In the parallel telly universe it certainly doesn't improve the mood of Malcolm Tucker.
The show's coalition government ensemble inhabit a lighter, modern environment. But here the contrast between the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship set and its immediate environment was even more striking. The location was an amazing disused office slab in Walton-on Thames, half a century old, designed by architects Sir John Burnet, Tait and Partners in the "Thunderbirds Modernism" style. These days, a Ballardian wilderness hides the swinging 60s abstract sculpture and formal gardens, but the groovy aluminium facade still looks pristine. It's a lovely, long building, each floor a prairie of open space. The DoSAC set was hunched into a corner.
On the "real life" side of the boundary, the space seemed fantastical, an optimistic dream world. There they'd have been, all those space-age ghosts. Doing the twist at the Christmas do, going on the pill, smoking pipes indoors, talking Tupperware, planning a holiday abroad. Everything was possible. Then you walked over the threshold of cables into the unreality of DoSAC. And you were plunged into this overcrowded rat cage, with fictional squabbling venal bastards at one another's throats in a grotesque travesty of consensus politics. And it felt as though this was the true space, this was the genuine reality. Here's Peter Mannion, the latest secretary of state, as beleaguered as the last. Mournfully, desperately looking for a corner to hide in, beset by civil servants, spads, his snarling coalition partners, the press. And party strategist Stewart Pearson's fearsome shirts.
Uncomfortable space has been a tonal constant in Thick since 2005. As in real life, where we've watched successive administrations run out of money and credibility, so we've seen the characters in the show flail and suffocate in their analogue world of diminishing opportunity. Policy-making is reactive and panicky, expedient and reversible. Those notionally in power are choking under a brutal scrutiny.
Small BBC budgets, of course, helped shape the spaces. Director Armando Iannucci and producer Adam Tandy have always improvised locations. The first series (now nailed historically by computer monitors the size of packing crates) was shot in a former brewery. A lot of bollocking and hiding takes places behind closed doors. We see hapless minister Hugh Abbott, played by the brilliant Chris Langham, eating biscuits in a pantry. Or tracked down by Tucker to his forlorn hiding place in a chair storeroom. At one point in the scene, Abbott even puts his head inside a cupboard.
And series one established the classic Iannucci "back seat of the car" shot. Ministers and aides wedged in like terrified backbenchers under a three-line whip, desperately trying to pull soundbites out of thin air. It's a motif that continues into series four with an incredibly bad-tempered row between Mannion and his colleagues about how best to appear publicly concerned over something he didn't give a shit about half an hour earlier.
In series two, largely shot in the BBC's own hideous media centre, DoSAC became part of a "ministerial hub". The characters were now spatially, literally in transparent government. Glass walls and clear sightlines through the communal open-plan office made it harder to hide from Tucker. Actually, the most farcical element of the building – a huge, overscaled staircase that has the effect of shrinking everyone on it to the size of a child – came into its own in series three. New minister Nicola Murray had to use the stairs because she had a fear of confined spaces and famously ("See you, you're an omnishambles") couldn't get in a lift. In the new series, Murray has a meltdown in an inter-city train vestibule. It's funny, but also almost unbearable to watch as the peerless Rebecca Front, who has publicly and bravely talked about claustrophobia, channels her own anxiety.
In the past we've seen Olly Reeder cornered by Tucker in a toilet, John Duggan terrorised by Tucker in a bathroom, Glen Cullen assaulted by Tucker in a narrow hotel corridor. Nicola and Mannion and Richard Bacon in the radio studio, while the control booth teems with advisers. And this theme – lack of space, no room for manoeuvre – flows through the new series, perhaps most strikingly in the public inquiry scenes. Trapped in the witness chair, caught in the gaze of TV cameras, at the mercy of harsh inquisitors, our characters are in a familiar crisis.
They've run out of time, and out of space.
Ian Martin is a writer for The Thick of It.http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/26/the-thick-of-it-secret-of-success
