The Thick of It

The Thick of It began life on BBC Four in 2005 as two three-episode series made on a budget of £100,000, commissioned by the channel's controller Roly Keating. Armando Iannucci conceived it after arguing the case for Yes Minister in a 2004 documentary for the BBC's Best British Sitcom poll: rewatching the older show, he concluded that the real constraint on ministers was no longer the Civil Service but Downing Street's grip on the message. Two specials followed in 2007, before the show moved to BBC Two for a third series in 2009 and a fourth in 2012.

The setting is the Department of Social Affairs, a Whitehall catch-all whose minister, Hugh Abbot (Chris Langham), is hounded by Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), Number 10's director of communications and chief enforcer. Chris Addison, James Smith and Joanna Scanlan play the advisers and press officers scrambling around them; Rebecca Front and Roger Allam join as the cast widens. Iannucci shot it on hand-held cameras with no incidental music and no laughter track, taking the Dogme 95 films, and Festen in particular, as a reference point. The cast improvised around the scripts, and a writer credited as a "swearing consultant" sharpened the profanity.

The show won the BAFTA for Best Situation Comedy in 2006 and 2010, the second year alongside performance awards for Capaldi and Front. It spun off the feature film In the Loop (2009) and led HBO to hire Iannucci for Veep. Its coinage "omnishambles" entered the Oxford English Dictionary, and a 2021 BBC Culture poll of 206 critics placed it twentieth among the century's greatest television series.