THE AMERICAN CANDIDATE
Mayor Quimby’s roving eye
The monorail? The mafia? The mistress in the motel? All shrugged off by the beating legislative heart of Springfield. No second acts in American lives? F Scott Fitzgerald should have included an exemption clause for dodgy politicians. Some will point to the fact that Quimby is a cartoon. But that changes nothing. Because let’s be honest, you’d struggle to name an American TV politician who isn’t.
Josiah ‘Jed’ Bartlet’s halo
Which doesn’t get tarnished at any point. Yawn. If any real-life politician seemed as tediously noble as The West Wing’s President Bartlet, the world would assume he had dozens of orphans chained up in a secret dungeon under the White House. In fact, come on NBC: how about some sort of reputation-destroying sequel? That’s how we Brits roll.
Elizabeth Faulkner McCord’s glasses
They’re meant to signify vulnerability. But really, Téa Leoni’s Madam Secretary lead just looks like one of those cliched church mice who turn, unsurprisingly, into beauty queens on the night of the prom. That’s the thing with American TV politicians: they can drum their fingers on the nuclear launch button and still, somehow, get to act as if they’re underdogs.
Frank Underwood’s hands
The ones he used to kill that dog on the day we first met him in House Of Cards. But even that was an act of mercy. Kind of. The dog needed to die. And we needed to understand what we were getting ourselves into. Every time he breaks the fourth wall, Frank’s making us complicit in his guiltily seductive ruthlessness.
McKenzie Allen’s backbone
Geena Davis’s role in Commander In Chief had it all, in an infuriatingly self-satisfied way. The suits patronised her but within days of becoming president, she proved herself to be a natural by imposing US will on a tiny African nation and firing all her lackeys on a whim. Another triumph for the American way, then...
Tommy Carcetti’s balls
They were plenty big. Just as well because for The Wire’s Italian-American dreamboat to even imagine he could become mayor in the city of Clarence Royce and Clay Davis, they needed to be the size of space-hoppers. US TV politicians attempt the impossible and succeed gloriously. UK ones attempt the mundane and fail miserably.
THE BRITISH MEMBER
Francis Urquhart’s laser eyes
The mobile death rays just below Urquhart’s eyebrows were a window into the soul of the original occupant of the House Of Cards. Urquhart destroyed everything he touched and took great pleasure in doing so. Frank Underwood is a rogue. Francis Urquhart was Satan. The relation they bear to each other sums up the Atlantic gulf separating US and UK TV politicians perfectly.
Aiden Hoynes’s ego
David Tennant’s turn in The Politician’s Husband was a new low. How did Hoynes respond to his wife getting ahead while he returned to the back benches? By taking on the childcare? Helping a bit more around the house? Nope. At first, he sulked. Then he undermined her at every turn. And then it got a whole lot worse. Clearly not a man who ever asked himself what Jed Bartlet would do…
Alan B’stard’s penis
According to the show’s running gag, the right honourable member, which dangled between the legs of Rik Mayall’s timeless New Statesman caricature, was tiny. Did his diminished masculinity explain his sadistic fury and taste for whips and prostitutes? And did B’stard simply reflect the exotic tastes of certain of his real-life political brethren around the same time?
Jim Hacker’s old school tie
The Yes Minister time-server’s greatest asset and what many UK politicians have in lieu of a spine. Hacker wasn’t a bad man, and that was the point. While US TV politicians take quasi-heroic stands against conformity, British ones surrender to it, understanding that backgrounds and back-channels are all they have.
Malcolm Tucker’s shin bone
Well, not his shin bone, strictly speaking. It’s Olly Reader’s shin bone, which The Thick Of It’s demonic spin-master Tucker threatens to forcibly remove and then use as a disembowelling implement on Reader’s stomach. Baroque levels of savagery? All in a day’s work.
Michael Murray’s sweaty palms
GBH’s neurotic champagne socialist lived in fear of his delinquent past coming back to haunt him. He probably should have been more worried about his delinquent present. His nerves were shot and his palms were sweaty. He was as composed and plausible as a Green party leader on Newsnight.
Madam Secretary begins 22 April, 9pm, Sky Living; Ballot Monkeys begins 21 April, 10pm, Channel 4
