Power failure

You wouldn’t necessarily use the word subtle to describe a programme in which a well-dressed, well-spoken woman describes a speech that’s been altered as ‘pencil-fucked, completely’ but Veep (Monday, Sky Atlantic) is subtle, sinuously subtle. In his way Armando Iannucci is as creative with the English language as James Joyce. He is proof that doing an English degree at Oxford is not necessarily, to adapt another of his phrases, ‘like using a croissant as a dildo — it doesn’t do the job and it leaves a lot of mess’. His neologism in The Thick of It — ‘omnishambles’ — is now as much a part of our political vocabulary as ‘white paper’ or ‘liar!’

Both Veep and The Thick of It  are about being powerless. All the characters are on the fringes of power, and it hangs tantalisingly out of reach. The catchphrase in Veep is ‘did the president call?’ The answer is always ‘No’. Selina Meyer, brilliantly played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus from Seinfeld, devotes herself to good causes, like a Victorian wife neglected by her husband. Some are worthwhile, and so unattainable, like ‘clean jobs’. Others are bonkers, such as her wish to replace polluting plastics with cornstarch, which not only enrages the plastics lobby but also creates cutlery that collapses in anything warm. In Armandoland, everything that will go wrong does, and then gets worse. The Veep, struggling through the pencil-fucked speech, blames an aide: ‘We were hoist by our own retard.’

The disabled lobby bounds into action. The vice-president’s people are lost. ‘Every minute we delay, “retard” goes up a font size.’ ‘I misjoked,’ says Selina, another new word I assume. Sometimes the show breaks into a spoof of The West Wing, as the characters stride down corridors, throwing over their shoulder orders that will never be followed.