What we don’t want to see is Malcolm Tucker have a heart. You see, underneath his flaming piss-driven anger, there shouldn’t be a man just trying to do his job. There should be more piss, and more flames, and definitely more anger. Who is Malcolm supposed to be now? He was initially a clear take-off of Alistair Campbell, but Campbell left his job. The rest of the show has moved with the political times. Tucker is clearly too valuable to let leave. But this doesn’t feel like a good direction to be taking the character. This was the weakest episode of this series by a bit of a stretch, tracking a strangely implausible effort by the BBC to mistakenly portray minor minister Nicola Murray as a stalking horse to the prime minister. After becoming more miserable week on week, Murray seems to have bottomed out in the blank stare stakes, although in her race to the bottom, all her staff have given up even pretending to have any respect for her (notably Ollie comparing her make-up to face paint). In contrast to the eye-searingly bad idea of Hug-A-Tucker, watching Glenn tell fellow special adviser Ollie that he was in the running to be a candidate for a safe parliamentary seat was perhaps the first sincerely nice action among the DoSAC staff ever seen in the show (“It’s like being told your Dad’s gay or something. But I am strangely, really proud of you.”), even if his dream wasn’t to stay alive for long. Hopefully, that will be the last of characters being nice to each other. If I wanted to watch boring people say pleasant but dull things to each other, I’d watch Gavin And Stacey. Read our review of episode 5 here.
