Peter Capaldi

The Thick Of It was comedy of the year, no contest. Well there was a contest, because geriatric ward sitcom Getting On was also a hoot. But it only ran for three episodes - there must be more, surely? - so it doesn't really count. But when it came to the sheer delirious joy of ented spleen splatting off the walls of the corridors of power, The Thick Of It's scabrous language warmed the cancerous cockles of my scurvy heart.

The fall and rise of Malcolm Tucker gave the mighty Peter Capaldi a fiesta of invectives, but it was no one-man show. Everywhere you turned, the lunacy of political spin was sent screaming through the mincer. The prize quote in the climactic episode came when one spin-crazed monkey announced: 'We're going to be triangulating to a semi-aggressive tactical grid.' Which got the only valid response possible: 'You're talking s***.'

And so the third season of the sharpest sitcom on TV effs and jeffs its way inventively towards its denouement, with Nicola Murray MP (Rebecca Front) and her party facing annihilation at the ballot box. Yet just when they need him most, resident rottweiler of spin Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi) has been placed on gardening leave, reduced to lobbing popcorn restlessly at the television when Andrew Neil appears. However, even in his absence, Malcolm's still giving harassed minister Murray the heebie-jeebies - "I keep imagining every time I open my filing cabinet that he's going to be crouched in there eating a lamb shank," she groans - and sure enough, her nightmares become reality when Malcolm's offered a ticket back to the front line by an unlikely new ally, priggish blue-sky thinker Julius Nicholson (Alex MacQueen). "He is Lazarus, isn't he? He just can't die," observes Murray, ruefully. Thrillingly, the episode hints that the Opposition has unearthed its own Malcolm Tucker, a counter-spinner so fearsome that his short and unprintable nickname is whispered in hushed tones throughout the corridors of power. It seems as if everyone's tooling up for a battle royale; sparks and spittle will fly.

The political satire continues. Nicola Murray MP (Rebecca Front) needs to find a celebrity to publicise a new "Healthy Choices" campaign. But Steve Fleming, the PM's new fixer (played with diabolical glee by David Haig) has competing priorities, demanding massaged crime figures for an urgent press briefing. When Murray's team bungles both tasks, spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi) is incandescent. Stuck between Tucker and Fleming, Murray can only ask, "Could you two tell me in which order and from which direction I'm going to be shafted?"

"It's like the break-up of the Beatles during the fall of the Roman Empire while Jordan's getting dumped by that bloke," said Malcolm Tucker of the atmosphere in a Downing Street much like our own. In this third series of The Thick Of It, the wizard of spin is not only losing his marbles - they were dislodged years ago - but his magical power to terrify. In an eerily controlled monologue he told Terri, the civil servant whose main ambition is to get home by 6, that he was an ex-pharaoh floundering in a Nile of s***: "But I am going to fashion a paddle out of that s***." I loved the delicacy of that verb "fashion". As Tucker, Peter Capaldi should get an OBE.

With the Prime Minister away at a summit in Spain, splenetic spin doctor Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi) is left holding the fort in the savage political farce. Naturally he's soon driven to blue language and blind fury by minister Nicola Murray (Rebecca Front), who attempts to unveil her hobby horse policy, "The Fourth Sector Initiative" - but in the process inadvertently launches a leadership challenge.

It's been pleasing to see Armando Ianucci's polit-com promoted from BBC Four to BBC Two and reach a wider audience. Tonight, he playfully sets proceedings at another Beeb edifice, Radio 5 Live. After weeks of trading bitter blows in the press, minister Nicola Murray (the fantastic Rebecca Front) locks horns with her shadow live on Richard Bacon's late-night phone-in show. Publicity pit bull Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi) listens in the relative comfort of his office until some breaking news makes life difficult for the hapless politicians. Spin doctors are soon dispatched to the studio for damage limitation - with the usual side order of swearing.

The foul-mouthed misanthrope, which is what writer Armando Ianucci has constructed as a comic monster from an image of Alastair Campbell, former director of communications to Tony Blair, now has a new victim, minister Nicola Murray (Rebecca Front). She has four kids and a businessman husband, is neurotic, desperate for affection and approval, happy to blame everyone else for her mistakes - and is a media disaster waiting for its moment.

Peter Capaldi, who plays spin-doctor Malcolm, is the linchpin here, with his gaunt face - most terrible when smiling - and his conviction that all around him are guilty until their innocence is brought to him on a plate. And his terror, too - which is that of one who understands the ruthlessness of media that no longer care for fairness in their dealings or for policy in their coverage, but, like a piranha shoal, drift here and there until blood is in the water, when they swarm. The Thick of It has a solid base, but Capaldi is its on-screen genius.

It's party conference season and hapless Secretary of State of Social Affairs and Citizenship Nicola Murray is in Eastbourne with her team of self-serving apparatchiks. Of course, she's being stalked by the godfather of spin, Malcolm Tucker, who continues his pitiless assault on Murray's self-confidence. Tucker (Peter Capaldi) manages to torpedo Nicola's big conference speech by hijacking her "applause monkey", a media-savvy, Twitterwise member of the public with a sad story. Yet again, watching Armando Iannucci's withering satire is like being caught in a firestorm of expletives and deliriously offensive jokes. It's a relentlessly testosterone-charged world - Nicola Murray even remarks at one point "it's like being trapped in a boys' toilet" - that's packed with macho posturing from egomaniacal men behaving like competitive baboons. And it's brilliant.

The new series continues of the fizzing, potty-mouthed political comedy created by Armando Iannucci. A week into her new job as secretary of state for the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship, Nicola Murray MP (Rebecca Front) sends the government's communications team into a spin. Her department's computer system has wiped the immigration records of 170,672 people, presenting her with two daunting tasks: keeping the fact from the press, and breaking the news to the irascible Tucker (Peter Capaldi). Handling these duties of office, Murray has to sit through lunch with the staff of The Guardian without letting her department's mishap slip.

The Thick of It review

There's nobody on television more humiliating or derogatory than this political sitcom's main character, the tyrannical Malcolm Tucker (played with pop-eyed relish by Peter Capaldi). In this episode, the first in a new series, even the few lines in which he didn't swear were offensive.