It’s fifteen years since the Londoner’s favourite satire, The Thick Of It, was broadcast. Creator Armando Iannucci told us: “Malcolm Tucker was an amalgam of a whole load of henchmen who would go around bullying ministers into sticking to the No 10 line.” Sound familiar? “Dominic Cummings is all that rolled into one. Except my impression is, rather than feared, he is despised.”
Iannucci feels the show could work today. “The Department of Health and Social Care would be a good ministry to set it in now, but it would feel more tragedy than comedy.” Actor Chris Addison, who played special adviser Ollie Reeder, said: “When we made the show, there was still a veneer of competence about front-line politics, but that’s just not the case anymore. The idea of a minister at sea is a little pointless when we have the daily briefing where we can see one in real life.”
There is one recent incident Iannucci wishes had featured. “I do wonder about an episode where the party leader gave a speech, while losing their voice with letters dropping off the set behind them. We’d base the rest around what happened in the next 24 hours. Those conversations must have been priceless.”
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DAISY EDGAR-JONES, star of Normal People, reveals how not getting a job she really wanted changed the course of her career. “I actually did the thing you do when you break up with someone: a break-up hair cut, which was my fringe.” She told Elizabeth Day’s podcast it was “the best decision I’ve ever made ... it’s the only reason I got Marianne.”
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ACTORS’ union Equity held digital hustings last night for the role of general secretary. One of the two male candidates said “it should be a matter of marginal embarrassment that the union’s first female general secretary is certainly going to be followed by a bloke”. Awkward. Especially as Sandi Toksvig, the Women’s Equality Party co-founder, was hosting the event.
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TORY MP Robert Halfon wonders on Conservative Home about the overseas aid budget: “Given the pandemic, is it really conceivable that it should continue to be spent in the same way?” What happend to Compassionate Conservatism?
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KEIR STARMER’S new adviser Anneliese Midgley’s first job was at The Beatles Shop in Liverpool when she was 13. Once she was starving and ate a Ringo gingerbread man. Turned out it was a relic from 1963. Help!
Glamour revisited with sun, shades and sequins
Lily James soaked up yesterday’s rays, simply telling her Instagram followers “this sun”. What more can you say? Meanwhile Gillian Anderson said she was “so excited” for viewers to join her for the National Theatre Live showing of A Streetcar Named Desire. And Kate Beckinsale posted a throwback snap for jewellery designer Markus Molinari on his birthday. “I love yew and I long for your bunny slippers,” she added. The glamour of life before lockdown...
