No Minister

Looking back at The Thick of It and looking forward to Veep

The probability that an aide to Hillary Clinton has prefaced advice to her with ‘Khaleesi’ must surely now be approaching one. In such dark times, it’d be good to pay attention to the other HBO show about women in power returning to our screens. The question is, why hasn’t Veep had the same impact yet on British culture as its predecessor? Especially when the four seasons of Veep so far are the greater achievement than the sum of The Thick of It.

The immediate half-answer is that Veep is about the American political system, not the British. You’d assume though the kind of people who are into British politics enough to watch a comedy about it might also have some dim interest in the local superpower. But the misconception lingers that the show is the US remake of The Thick of It (a pilot was made for one, but it wasn’t Veep), and so it gets treated with same combination of disappointment and scepticism as remakes of The Office or Spaced. At the same time, it hasn’t helped that if you want to avoid streaming Veep you can only find it on ‘Sky Atlantic’, not a business class lounge but the aspirational channel where most half-decent American shows get squirrelled away here. So despite Veep having the greatest joke-density of any TV show since The Simpsons, it’s had to overcome an unfair mistrust.

Whenever you’re told about a person who’s hilarious, a real crack-up, already you’re poisoned against them. It’s even worse for a comedy show, going around calling itself comedic from the…