Malcolm Tucker is f*cking furious! His dossier of DoSAC dirt has gone missing—and it contains all sorts of news articles, interviews, procedural documents for ministers dealing with the press, and embarrassing and/or incriminating email chains that he’d been saving for a rainy day. Fortunately, you get to have a peek at them. Just make it quick, or you’re in for a bollocking.

This book, put together by the writers of The Thick of It, supplements the TV show of the same name and will obviously make a lot more sense if you’ve seen the show. There’s a wide variety of content here, and I was chuckling a fair bit throughout. At some points I was taken by surprise and hooted out loud like a weirdo. My favourite bits involved Julius Nicholson (I could hear Alex Macqueen in my head as I read those), and Malcolm’s bitingly sarcastic email exchanges with people such as Nicola Murray and Jamie Macdonald.

However, there were a few things that I had to nitpick at:
- Terri Coverley’s middle names are given as Thelma Elizabeth, whereas on the show she has only one middle name, Jessica.
- Email addresses changed format from one chain to another—although I just realized that if a character had a dosac.gov.uk email address when the first party was in power, they might have switched to a gov.org.uk email when their party was kicked out.
- Some of the photos looked Photoshopped; the one of Peter Mannion and his wife was the one that really didn’t work. A couple of others could be argued to be deliberate Photoshops (e.g., the concept of Malcolm’s chat show, where he’s Photoshopped behind a desk but he isn’t given any legs that I could see).
- Philip’s home email address is given as Phillip.Smith at Gmail—why would he spell his own name wrong in his email address? If his actual name was taken, he would have added stuff to make a new nickname, like Philip.Smith.Baggins or some LOTR reference like that. (Actually, he’d probably scoff at that reference as being TOO easily guessed—his reference would probably come from deep within the Silmarillion.)

Overall, though, the variety of documents and the attention to detail in most other places (I LOVED how the copyright and cataloguing information was presented) made this a fun book. ( )

 
There were a few parts in this that could only work if they were being read by the actors, but most of it was the usual brilliance you see in the show, like:
 
• Malcolm's interview, where he claims he could win a fight against Muhammad Ali (because he has Parkinson's now)
• Nicola's interview, where she reveals she did try yoga (but had to stop because she broke her sternum)
• Mannion's attack points file, where we find out he crashed his yacht against another yacht (because "the ocean made a sudden unexpected up and down motion")
• Malcolm's Guide to Managing Your Public Image, full of helpful tips like "if you feel you might be unable to stop yourself smiling at a service of remembrance imagine your own cock being fed into a moulinex (Clinton once coaxed a tear this way in Normandy)
 
If you love the show, you'll love the book. ( )