At long last we’re back in the thick of it. We left the besieged cast at the close of series 3, heading to the hustings in what was evidently a failed attempt to pack an overnight bag and stay in government. Since then Ianucci and co. have been busy conquering America with his witty, wince-inducing take on American politics, Veep, and it’s certainly been a duller three years without him.
The cast have been as busy as their creators in this lengthy interim and it’s all change at Dosac as series 4 begins: art has imitated life and the word of the day is coalition. Hapless minister Nicola Murray is out and Peter Mannion, her beleaguered shadow from series 3, is now steering the ship – still flanked by the ever-ambitious Emma and the fantasy-fixated, floppy-haired and sublimely ineffective Phil. He doesn’t seem any more cheerful for this elevation, which may have something to do with sharing his authority, office space and ministerial wheels with thrusting junior minister Fergus and his spad Adam, the lib dem part of this failing marriage (affectionately dubbed ‘the inbetweeners’ by their Tory counterparts.)
Though the former opposition have been moved out of their shadow roles and into the limelight, there are still some familiar faces haunting the halls of Dosac: smug director of comms Terri, played by the excellent Joanna Scanlan, is still reluctantly hanging on in there, dogging Mr Man-yum’s every footstep. Meanwhile James Smith’s long suffering Glen Cullen has jumped from a sinking ship, only to find himself just as unappreciated and disillusioned with his new lib dem buddies. Having thought he was signing up to ‘a party with principles’, Glen is exasperated to find they have promptly thrown them away to join forces with the ‘upper class-holes I worked my whole life to keep out.’
Vincent Franklin also returns as Malcolm’s touchy-feely former nemesis, Stuart ‘knowledge is porridge’ Pearson: the chai-drinking, blue sky-thinking, Tory Spin-Doctor who’s dishing out his rhyming pearls of wisdom in overdrive, greeting the gang with tales of his meeting ‘this am with the pm’ and departing with a jovial ‘laters legislators’. Though the players have changed, the game remains largely the same: minister screws up apparently simple task and PR pro attempts to minimise the fallout. In this instalment, Mannion (who we’re told can’t even right-click a mouse) is forced, as the coalition’s ‘front man’, to launch the new ‘silicon playgrounds’ initiative his lib dem partners have come up with. Inevitably, it all goes horribly, cringingly wrong.
Despite this tried and tested territory, the episode as a whole feels slightly off the pace that we’re used to. It’s not that the killer lines aren’t there – Mannion claims the best ones, moaning about protesters’ ‘tent-based twattery’ and the futility of addressing school children (‘They’re volatile and stupid and haven’t got the f***ing vote. Might as well be talking to geese’). They just don’t arrive quite as thick and fast as we’ve come to expect. There was the minister-made-mess but no tense build to the arrival of the Tucker tornado. This episode also seems slightly overpopulated and the new characters are yet to make much of an impression: Fergus and Adam haven’t brought much to the table and at this point seem pretty much interchangeable.
Nevertheless, in Capaldi’s absence, the brilliant Roger Allam as Peter Mannion MP shows himself well up to the task of carrying the episode and his dour, depressive shrugging makes a nice contrast to Nicola’s panicky wheeling about the offices. Despite not being the best episode of the lot, this is a solid start to the series and paints a strong picture of the trials and tribulations of coalition politics, from which Iannucci will doubtless be milking much comedy gold over the coming episodes. Next week the fantastic Rebecca Front returns as Nicola Murray, along with Chris Addison’s quick witted Ollie – the special advisor everyone loves to hate – and it’s sure to pick up the pace from here. Not to mention Mr Tucker himself. He’s now in opposition, and he’s not going to be happy about it. Which can only be a good thing.
