Dangerously Close to the Truth

OK, I was in a bad mood yesterday. I had a headache, felt exhausted and had to deal with idiots all day. Hence my ill-tempered attack on the campaign to let Gurkhas settle in the UK. That said, I stand by my charges of hypocrisy and I still think Joanna Lumley is a shit actress and famous simply for being famous. She is not a 'National Treasure', (and if she is, we're culturally bankrupt). So, am I in a better mood today? Well, I still feel exhausted and I've had to deal with nutters most of the day, (is Friday the day they let them have a 10p piece for the payphone?). But I didn't have a headache. Anyway, in an attempt to be more positive, I'm going to heap praise on a film I saw on Wednesday evening - In The Loop. First up, I have to say that it took me a while to 'get' the TV series The Thick of It, which this film was derived from, and with which it shares several characters. It didn't help that I came into it with the first Christmas special a couple of years ago, not fully grasping the characters, their relationships or the situation. By the second special I began to appreciate it and found repeated viewings of the two specials rewarding, and I subsequently caught up with the original series on DVD.

Now, this isn't a film review blog, so I have no intention of going over the plot of the film, or in recounting individual scenes. What I will do is tell you why I liked it so much. Having, in a previous incarnation, worked in Whitehall as an intelligence analyst, I can honestly say that In The Loop comes dangerously close to the truth about what goes on there. Obviously, I never worked at a sufficiently high level to have ever encountered foul-mouthed spin doctors like Malcolm Tucker, but I certainly recognised many of the behind-the-scenes machinations portrayed in the film. I particularly liked the scene in which the US Under-Secretary of State sets about rewriting the minutes of a meeting to better reflect what the department wanted to have happened there. I myself have done the same sought of thing, (I hasten to add, of course, that none of the meetings I ever acted as secretary to could have contributed to starting a war), 'adapting' and rearranging the actual events of the meeting to better reflect what should have happened in an ideal world. The reinterpretation of intelligence analyses to suit the agenda of particular individuals or institutions was also very familiar. The Cabinet Office, particularly the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), was especially fond of completely ignoring reports which contradicted a conclusion it had already decided upon. The 'sexing up' of weak intelligence from dubious sources which happened to support the agenda was also fairly common. Mind you, I can't say I ever saw anything quite as extreme as simply rewording an American report, attributing it to a new, completely fictional, source, before presenting it back to them as new intelligence. Not that it isn't possible - nothing would surprise me. In the final analysis, the main reason I liked the movie was because, as well as being dangerously close to the truth, it didn't forget to be very funny - undoubtedly the best British political satire I can recall seeing.