TV Meme Day Fourteen: Malcolm Tucker
Day 14: Favorite male character
Surprisingly, this wasn't a hard pick, which I've chalked down to the fact that as I overwhelmingly identify with female character more than male character, my favourite characters tend to be female. Tomorrow shall be the hard one.
Malcolm Tucker (The Thick of It)
Where does one start with Malcolm? The anger issues and swearing maybe, that's certainly what he's memorable for and how the character captured the public's imagination. Maybe the fact that he is a brilliant magnificent bastard, who has somehow managed to survived three seasons of his enemies trying to destroy him and once rose from the dead (well, a metaphorical career death but dude is freaking Gandalf). Maybe with the fact he's just so incredibly charming and charismatic and some of those rants are poetry.
I really like Armando Iannucci's less-is-more take on characters. If you think about it, the audience doesn't know very much about the characters of TTOI at all, yet, at the same time, they all appear to be fully fleshed out and three dimensional. And the character of Malcolm benefits greatly from this, because the audience knows so little about him, and the writers have never really explicitly deconstructed him, and yet the audience knows what makes this guy tick (politics-as-a-battle, loyalty to the party), know that he can be benevolent and in blink-and-you-miss-it moments, even verges on being nice, and we know that stripped of his power, he's actually kind of pathetic (which of course if why we want to see him kept in power, because those scenes were heartbreaking), yet at no point has the writing ever really made an effort to point this all out, it's just there subtly.
But it's not just the writing. I'm going slip out of the show and into the movie here, but I've read the script for the meditation room scene in In the Loop, and what's on paper and what happens, are two very different things - and that's Peter Capaldi basically just deciding to have a play with the character, and what makes it utterly fascinating as well as a brilliant moment is because the entire movie ends up pivoting around that scene and suddenly we're cheering for Malcolm and not for Simon, even though Malcolm's just gone from anti-hero to villain. With all characters there's a collaboration between actor and writer, but with Malcolm, the collaboration seems to be more evident.
And that's the kicker. It's not just the fact that I'm fascinated by the character, it's that I'm fascinated with the creation of the character, how there's a very visible collaboration between actor and writers, how there's been a creative decision not to make TTOI the Malcolm Tucker show and not make him the protagonist, how Malcolm is in so many ways a sit-com character and has certain sitcom-y role to fulfil in an episode (i.e. show up and swear), yet at the same time kind of has this epic anti-hero thing going on that defies the genre he exists in.
So really, it's the quazi-metaish intellectual appeal that pushes my love of the character from just plain love, to my absolute favourite and why I shall probably love him for years to come.
There's about 25 million different greatest Malcolm moments ever compilations on youtube, but I think these two bits from the specials are two of my favourite moments, the first when he's clearly panicking about being the story, and in the second very little moment his entire credibility and relevance and thus job rides on guessing the right MP.
Link to the meme Master List
Surprisingly, this wasn't a hard pick, which I've chalked down to the fact that as I overwhelmingly identify with female character more than male character, my favourite characters tend to be female. Tomorrow shall be the hard one.
Malcolm Tucker (The Thick of It)
Where does one start with Malcolm? The anger issues and swearing maybe, that's certainly what he's memorable for and how the character captured the public's imagination. Maybe the fact that he is a brilliant magnificent bastard, who has somehow managed to survived three seasons of his enemies trying to destroy him and once rose from the dead (well, a metaphorical career death but dude is freaking Gandalf). Maybe with the fact he's just so incredibly charming and charismatic and some of those rants are poetry.
I really like Armando Iannucci's less-is-more take on characters. If you think about it, the audience doesn't know very much about the characters of TTOI at all, yet, at the same time, they all appear to be fully fleshed out and three dimensional. And the character of Malcolm benefits greatly from this, because the audience knows so little about him, and the writers have never really explicitly deconstructed him, and yet the audience knows what makes this guy tick (politics-as-a-battle, loyalty to the party), know that he can be benevolent and in blink-and-you-miss-it moments, even verges on being nice, and we know that stripped of his power, he's actually kind of pathetic (which of course if why we want to see him kept in power, because those scenes were heartbreaking), yet at no point has the writing ever really made an effort to point this all out, it's just there subtly.
But it's not just the writing. I'm going slip out of the show and into the movie here, but I've read the script for the meditation room scene in In the Loop, and what's on paper and what happens, are two very different things - and that's Peter Capaldi basically just deciding to have a play with the character, and what makes it utterly fascinating as well as a brilliant moment is because the entire movie ends up pivoting around that scene and suddenly we're cheering for Malcolm and not for Simon, even though Malcolm's just gone from anti-hero to villain. With all characters there's a collaboration between actor and writer, but with Malcolm, the collaboration seems to be more evident.
And that's the kicker. It's not just the fact that I'm fascinated by the character, it's that I'm fascinated with the creation of the character, how there's a very visible collaboration between actor and writers, how there's been a creative decision not to make TTOI the Malcolm Tucker show and not make him the protagonist, how Malcolm is in so many ways a sit-com character and has certain sitcom-y role to fulfil in an episode (i.e. show up and swear), yet at the same time kind of has this epic anti-hero thing going on that defies the genre he exists in.
So really, it's the quazi-metaish intellectual appeal that pushes my love of the character from just plain love, to my absolute favourite and why I shall probably love him for years to come.
There's about 25 million different greatest Malcolm moments ever compilations on youtube, but I think these two bits from the specials are two of my favourite moments, the first when he's clearly panicking about being the story, and in the second very little moment his entire credibility and relevance and thus job rides on guessing the right MP.
Click to viewLink to the meme Master List