The Little Guys

British Comedy’s Most Perfect Support Characters

The formula for the perfect British sitcom is by no means a penned-down formula: for every hit, there have been a hundred duds, lost in the chasms of YouTube clip history and satellite television repeats. For the success stories, however, one uniting element is the presence of, not one or two, but a wealth of perfectly written characters that tap serenely into the British psyche. Behind every David Brent and Alan Partridge, there are some truly artistic perfections of comedy, not worthy in their own right of the spotlight, but somehow integral to the success of the show.

Michael (I’m Alan Partridge)

Before he voiced the now infamously irritating Meerkat in the never-ending Compare the Market adverts, Simon Greenall built cult comic acclaim as handyman and war veteran Michael in this Ianucci-penned classic. Perhaps the closest thing that Alan has to a friend, Michael endlessly recounts racist and risqué stories of Vietnam in his almost indecipherable Geordie accent, much to Partridge’s intrigue. He is a portrait of a man that has been to the brink of mental despair and back, dangerously toeing the line, just as Partridge does, between comedy and tragedy, but never dipping in his enthusiasm and optimism for his menial job at the deathly Linton Travel Tavern.

Best Moment: Panicking at the arrival of the police after Partridge tries to steal a traffic cone, Michael legs it off into the darkness only to reemerge several hours later.

Keith (The Office)

Through school, university, and in the workplace, there is always that one person who doesn’t quite make sense in the real world, but have somehow managed to exist. These are the Keiths of the world, the silent and eternally irreverent at the wrong moments, always lurking somewhere in the background with a packet of crisps or a comically enlarged scotch egg. Keith makes a scarce appearance in the Ricky Gervais’ breakout comedy, but the choice appearances he makes are memorable. He perfectly sums up the unambitious, criminally boring drones that roam the offices of bland satellite towns like Slough, wearing the same clothes into work every day, and stating his biggest disappointment in life is that he never went to Alton Towers.

Best Moment: One-on-one with Tim, Keith spills all about the secret to his sexual success, before devouring his trademark Scotch egg.

Super Hans (Peep Show)

In his mind, he is the version of himself that he wished he was when he was a pot-smoking teenager: in reality, Super Hans is a fairly useless but unrelentingly interesting man-child, simultaneously leaching off and fucking over Jez (probably his only friend). For here we have, in one of the most spot-on, well-written characters of the 21^st century, a highly functioning, recreational drug user, a stencil for the man no one wants to be, but everyone wants around. Hans is renowned for, in his own words, his ‘off-key remarks and crazy insights’, his drug induced anti-establishment paranoia, as well as a whole number of inexplicable characteristics that only really make sense because it’s him. Why is his flat full of snakes? Why is his New Year’s Eve party ‘the heart of darkness’? Who are the twins? In a show whose USP is that it gets inside its protagonists’ minds, we thank God that we don’t have to peer inside Hans’ twisted, unhinged brain. He’s like one of his favourite Class A’s: we miss him when he isn’t there, but too much of the man we’d be curled up in the corner begging to listen to some Snow Patrol.

Best Moment: An incredibly difficult decision for the man who might be the highlight of the 8 Series show. It’s a toss-up between the time he cuts out the crack and accidentally runs to Windsor, or when he unexpectedly reveals that he is in fact the father of two German twins, a fact never previously or from then on referred to.

Brian (Spaced)

A true cult classic of video dungeon proportions, this early 00’s surreal-com starred a blossoming Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (pre-Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz days) in one of the most bizarre, non-sequitur, yet amazingly down-to-earth depictions of turn of the millennium unemployed 20-somethings. Amidst all this is post-modernist uber-pretentious artist Brian, the weird bloke from downstairs from whose room erupts the most unusual of noises and experiments. Packed full of unusual remarks and awkward facial expressions, Mark Heap has made a career from playing this role on repeat in Green Wing, Friday Night Dinner, and a whole host of cameo-performances. Indecipherably weird, Brian flits in and out of the scene, shrouded in melancholy and mystery: in a show which features illegal robot wars, zombie invasion, and extraterrestrial horror in North London, Brian is the most absurd element in there.

Best Moment: Brian finally strikes success and gets an installation in a ‘cool’ gallery, only to knock himself unconscious for the duration of the event. And, because it’s modern art, it’s a huge success.

Jamie McDonald (The Thick of It)

While Peter Capaldi’s notorious Malcolm Tucker was always the likely choice, his increasing role throughout the series has led him somewhat to be the protagonist/antihero of the show, and thus no longer a ‘little guy’. Enter ‘The Crossest Man in Scotland’ Jamie McDonald, second in command to Tucker and equally, if not more, tactless and repulsive. Constantly on the verge of bursting a blood vessel in his head, McDonald makes up for his shorter screen time by firing out expletives and threats at a machine gun rate. Together making up the ‘Caledonian Mafia’ that runs Number 10, McDonald is arguably the one man who can match up to Tucker’s penchant for verbal abuse. At closer examination, McDonald is perhaps the more heartless of the pair: while Tucker lacks compassion, he is driven by something more benevolent; McDonald, on the other hand, is driven purely by self-motivation and careerism, a real shocking yet worryingly accurate portrait of the modern unelected politician.

Best Moment: He tells Tucker that he recently went to go see There Will Be Blood, in his eyes the perfect title (along with ‘There Will Be Tits’, before lamenting the fact that there wasn’t even that much blood.

Thank You For the Selfies

This morning millions of Britons woke up to discover that, after months of campaigning, preparation, registration, heated dinner table debates, prediction polls, and endless news coverage, the Conservatives were still in power. Not only were they still in power, but they’d heaped up an unprecedented majority, and caused absolute carnage as a result of it. Here’s what happened.

Whatever it is the Conservatives are doing, it’s popular.

As pretty much every poll under the sun suggested, this election was, if you’ll pardon the cliché, too close to call: Labour and Conservative were neck-and-neck in the lead, and we were headed straight for a hung parliament. So it was to everyone’s surprise, most of all a very baffled David Dimbleby, when the clock struck 10 and exit polls showed a suggestions of a Tory majority.

Despite his public image as an Eton/Oxford educated toff who likes smashing up restaurants and raising tuition fees for plebs, it turns out that Cameron and his nasty party are actually more popular than they were five years ago. It’s the first time since Thatcher that a Prime Minister has improved their majority (or in this case minority) whilst in power.

What is more, Cameron took a hefty number of big scalps in the process, causing the inevitable holy trinity of resignations in the morning: Farage, Clegg, and Miliband emerged like brow-beaten schoolboys from the headmaster’s office, Farage cockily proclaiming that he felt better than other, while the other two practically wet themselves on stage apologizing.

In a manifesto that listed the return of the abhorrent Right to Buy scheme, and the promise of further NHS cuts and drawbacks, Cameron, with his sleeves rolled up and hair slicked back, has managed to pique the attention of the electorate for five more years.

Liberalism died a slow death

In the tragic turn of events that is Nick Clegg’s life, the Liberal Democrats downgraded their respectable 57 seats and a Coalition partnership, for 8 measily wins, not even enough to field a team in the House of Commons football tournament. They lost the deposit on over 300 seats, taking just 7.9% of the vote, and ending up with fewer MPs than when the party was founded in 1988.

Clegg, in his resignation speech, mourned the party’s fate, a truly saddening prospect considering the profound liberal input into the Coalition: the Equal Marriage Bill just an example of the direction Clegg and Co had hoped for. In the radical divide between right (Conservative) and left (SNP), the Lib Dems fell through a gaping hole in the middle.

Sadder moreover for some of the party’s ‘heavyweights’: a crestfallen Simon Hughes and an eternally humbling Vince Cable lost at the hands of their Coalition partners, while Charles Kennedy and Danny Alexander fell victim to the massive swing of the SNP in Scotland. Repeated proclamations that the party would 'bounce back' were excruciatingly Alan Partridge-esque, said with the conviction of a man about to run to the hills and burn all his possessions.

Behind all this, Paddy Ashdown looked on with what we can only imagine is disbelief with the fate that has befallen his pride-and-joy, left only with legacies of broken promises and a dysfunctional coalition agreement, solemnly eating his hat in the corner.

Class Politics has returned to Westminster

Gone are the days of party centralization and the so-called ‘median voter’ that gets rammed down your throat at Politics A Level. If this election showed anything its that people are starting to show their allegiance to their ideological party, and leaving behind the stragglers in the middle. The Conservatives have shown themselves to overwhelmingly be the party of the English middle class, acres of English countryside caked in blue on the BBC’s computer graphics. Where the Lib Dems once pussyfooted around, Cameron’s Tories have lapped up rural constituencies in the South West and Wales.

Scotland, meanwhile, underwent severe yellow fever, the Scottish National Party scooping up all but three seats: tired with the Westminster consensus, the SNP under Sturgeon has found its footing, and, spurred on by the close defeat in the independence referendum, has shown Scotland what they really need after years of centrism – a truly progressive party with Scotland’s interests at heart, a status that Labour could never be afforded. Scenes of a 20 year old Glaswegian student usurping the Shadow Foreign Secretary, as well as the fall of Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy, spoke volumes about the ‘lion’s roar’ that Salmond so proudly waxed lyrical about.

Far Right or Far Wrong?

In other news, so-hot-right-now UKIP classically underperformed, losing one of their two seats, and best of all failing to elect 'Man of the Racists' Nigel Farage to parliament, seeing off competition from the Pub Landlord, and the Monty Python-esque 'El-Zebabist Nation of Ooog'. He slinked away in predictably untrustworthy style, resigning, as he said he would, but saying that he might run to be leader again, which he definitely didn't say he would. He's gone...but somehow I think not for long.

Prophet Zebadiah from the El-Zebabist Nation of Ooog

Miliband’s Socialist Dream didn’t work

Make any criticism of Ed Miliband that you want – he can’t eat a sandwich, he can’t smile properly, he drops his consonants in interviews, he stumbles over his words like a drunk teenager, even his arms are too long for his body. What you can’t say is that that man isn’t ideological. Under Ed the Red, the Labour Party saw perhaps the strongest lurch to the left since Foot, with his Living Wage, his mansion tax, and his outspoken opposition of non-doms, zero-hour contracts, and even Rupert Murdoch.

What everyone who has studied politics failed to remind Ed was that Michael Foot’s legacy was one of ‘The Longest Suicide Note in History’, the 1983 Labour manifesto that gave the party its lowest seat count in the 20^th century. Unfortunately, after a consistent run of neo-liberals and social democrats, a left-wing Prime Minister is not what the people (at least the English people) want.

In the wake of all this, Labour offered the Conservatives the outright majority they needed on a silver platter, losing in the process his right-hand man Balls (one day, a shoo-in for Chancellor, the next day, unemployed), and ending up with the fewer seats in Scotland than there are pandas.

All the while, bandwagon jumper Russell Brand quietly backed away, suddenly remembering that he wasn't a politician but a comedian. His backing of Miliband at the last minute was interesting yet inconveniently after voter registration had closed. His revolution was built on the back of unanimous hatred for the Tories, and with the party stronger than ever, its starting to seem unlikely.

An extremely likeable figure, Miliband’s resignation was one of equal parts fond optimism and directionless ambition. Ed left in a flurry of camera snaps and crying socialists, announcing ‘Thank you for the selfies’, and leaving a horde of trade unionists wondering what would have happened had they elected his brother.

Democracy, Deceit, and David Dimbleby

They come around every four or five years, rearing their ugly head like the estranged relative who forgot your last four birthdays, only to give you some t-shirt you might have worn when you were 16, the last time you saw them. The UK General Election is undoubtedly the most covered news story in the British media, one election barely having finished before popularity polls are being taken for the next one. We’re told, like an ongoing public service announcement, that this is our chance to change things, to get involved in politics, to really make a difference. But is it? Is it really?

Politicians have a reputation for being slimy, dishonest, self-serving, Machiavellian snakes who survive off the burning dreams of their electorate: this year, unfortunately, we have a motley crew of competitors of outstanding boringness. Such is the nature of modern politics that any form of conviction or real politik has been traded for meticulously planned soundbites and witty one-liners, with accountability coming in the form of guarded responses along the lines of ‘it matters what the party thinks, not what I think’.

Cameron’s track record as a ‘chap’ serves him well among the middle class Conservative voters, who see him as the man with whom you’d like to have a round of golf, or invite round for a roast.

Miliband, who has fortunately embraced the fact that he is pretty weird by all standards, is becoming more loveable day-by-day, but in the same way you might love a dog with three legs and no hair. He can’t even play the ‘class card’ on Cameron, since they are both privately-educated, old Oxonian Southerners who have about as much in common with the North as the Boat Race.

Then there’s Clegg, poor poor Clegg, sitting dead-eyed behind Cameron in the Commons, robotically nodding like a trained seal. You can’t help get the air of a man who has given up on any chance of a reputation after his, most probably, short-lived political career has ended: once a true Liberal organization, the Lib Dems are backboneless ‘kingmakers’, whose main aim nowadays seems to be making up the numbers.

In the role of ‘token right wing offensive’, we have tweed-model Nigel Farage, whose idea of campaigning seems to be getting squiffy in middle class pubs in Kent with names like ‘The Fox & Benefit Scrounger’. Alcohol, it would seem, is the elixir which brings out the inner racist in Farage, a bit like your uncle after a couple of sherries on Christmas Day: don’t trust any claim that ‘its not racism, its about border control’, this man’s yellowed teeth and gout-ridden face cannot be trusted.

Green’s Natalie Bennett is refreshingly new to the scene, but seemingly inexperienced and forgettable: who can forgot her excruciatingly awkward silence in an interview about housing plans. Nicola Sturgeon and Leanne Wood, both admirable politicians in their own right, will have absolutely no ballot presence for the majority of you, so are unfortunately irrelevant. So if you’re going to vote, vote on a manifesto, not on a candidate: I wouldn’t elect any of these guys to the parent’s committee, let alone to Number 10.

In the final 100 days, we have the pantomime that is the televised debates. Now this year worked slightly differently, on account of Cameron’s stubbornness, or the fact that he’s realised that human beings find it difficult to empathize with his glowing red face. The trilogy of three-party debates of 2010 was switched in favour of a one-on-one interview session with Paxman for Cameron and Miliband, a seven party ho-down on ITV, and the upcoming ‘challenging’ leaders debate with all but the two coalition parties involved. The debate, unfortunately, is not a process for the parties to demonstrate how one manifesto is better than the other, but rather a point scoring contest for the minority parties to take shots at the two main parties.

An ensuing barrage of who can make the best empty promise overwhelms the event: any voter with half a memory can remember ‘Cleggmania’, the frenzy that followed the man of the people’s performance, before his moral compass was surgically removed and crushed by the Conservative freight train. The whole proceeding was like a junked-up, glamourized PMQs, only with a horde of candidates who’d never actually been a member of parliament, and so can cast all sorts of aspersions and make all sorts of statements that they have a snowball’s chance in hell of upholding.

The next debate, featuring representatives from Labour, UKIP, Green, Plaid Cymru, and the SNP, has potential to be a real grilling: the opportunity for the small parties to literally tear Miliband a new one means that this debate will not be politically enlightening but the nearest thing to televised torture we’ve ever seen, hosted by David Dimbleby. You can talk about choice in an election, but looking upon this lot like pre-packaged meat at Lidl and I can’t help but feel slightly underwhelmed.

The night itself is undeniably an exciting event: fond memories of staying up till the early hours to hear the result makes this a big event in my calendar. The spectacle is, however, over-the-top, glitzy, repetitive, and quite exhaustive: its our only real equivalent to the Oscars, staying up all night, struggling through all kinds of awards that we just don’t care about (Best Sound Editing, Blackpool South, etc), until we finally get to the good stuff at the very end, when your eyes are frosted over with sleep and tears.

A large majority of the night, meanwhile, is not results, but fillers: Jeremy Vine and his swing-o-meter, the ‘path to number 10’ animations, and frantic clips of volunteers running around with ballot boxes. Every year, David Dimbleby looks older and older by comparison to the increasingly dystopian broadcast studios made entirely out of LCD screens and armchairs. And then the result finally comes. Or does it? In 2010, it took nearly a week for a result to emerge: this year, in what is sure to be even closer, it may take weeks. The party with the most seats, as we have now learnt, isn’t necessarily the winner.

The General Election reaches its climax: a government is formed, hundreds of photos are taken with our new Prime Minister waving gleefully with their kids. And then? Undoubtedly disappointment. All these amazing promises and goals made in the election to garner popularity, it turns out there’s absolutely nothing of substance behind them. It took us about a year to realise that with the Coalition, after George Osborne ceremonially squatted down and laid a fat tuition fee increase on every student in the country. The sooner we realise that politicians are pragmatic rather than idealistic, the better.

It’s been a frustrating few months, as you can see. And finally the big day, May 7^th, is round the corner. And I will be voting. I’m not doing a Russell Brand and telling you to all rebel against the corporatists and coffee shops and tear up your ballot. Voting is a privilege as well as a right, and despite the bad name they get for themselves, the majority of politicians are actually doing a pretty alright job. So I do urge you to do your research, register, and place a cross in whatever box you see fit: but I don’t ask you to enjoy it.