I recently listened to Armando Iannucci giving a BP British Art Lecture on the Tate podcasts. It was dated to 2006, but what Iannucci was talking about then and what he is in the media for now are both mutually entwined. 'The Thick of It' is currently in my opinion the best that television has to offer, and with other writers, both television and political, offering their eulogies to it being not just funny and cutting, but also prescient and truthful.
What we see in the series of media manipulation and political incompetence, is the workings of government laid bare before are eyes. The work of the camera in faux docudrama style adds to this manipulation of our senses. Within this manipulation a clever dupe is created.
The comedy tries to make us aware of how the government is media run, the mask it creates of duplicity and public image as reality here unmasked. We see the strategies of policy and PR, even MP secretary of state, changing lifestyle to fit public image in order to create public image. Creating false front by living a false life and by false values that would make Baudrillard proud.
However in this unravelling of government media machinery, the show itself creates another level of simulation. Now are understanding of civil service and government logistics is now 'The Thick of It'. In the same way it points fun at the media generation of reality, and the Orwellian absurdities of the logic applied to the morality of its due process, it creates a media reality that we see as the truth of 'what goes on'.
In the BP Lecture, I was fascinated by Iannucci's term of the Post-Real, a era in which we are now living.
