Twenty Twelve: Olympian Chaos

The time has come to discuss my newest Britcom obsession: Twenty Twelve. Brought to you by the BBC, the show premiered last year for a six-episode run, won Best Sitcom at the British Comedy Awards, and is currently back for four more episodes. There is a time constraint on the show, evidenced by its very title, because it is concerned with the Olympic Deliverance Commission (ODC), the group that has to organize the 2012 London Summer Olympics. So far, there are plans to make a third series that will air right before the Games in July, but after that, Twenty Twelve will be no more.

The show is shot in the ever-popular mockumentary style, which allows for great insight into the characters and their increasingly bizarre antics. The Head of Deliverance is Ian Fletcher (played by Hugh Bonneville, who you may know as the Earl of Grantham from Downton Abbey), a man who is adept at saying a lot of things that mean absolutely nothing. It is his task to wrangle a group of highly incompetent people and organize the Summer Olympics, arguably one of the most complicated events that human beings have ever devised. Over the course of six episodes, we watch in fascination as they deal with a variety of problems. There's an artist who has made an impossibly complicated countdown clock, a Brazilian delegation that needs to visit the Olympic stadium, the search to appoint a Curator for the Cultural Olympiad (an event that no one actually knows how to explain), and how to prevent the endangered stag beetles in Greenwich Park. Each problem escalates into a hilarious farce that threatens to derail the entire Olympic games, and Ian and his colleagues are the last people you would ever want to organize any event, let alone one of this magnitude.

The cast of this show keep it firing on all four cylinders and they have a firm grasp of just how dysfunctional these characters are. Hugh Bonneville is splendid as the man who's in charge but can't really get anything done (he can't even get his ID card to let him into the building) without the help of his extremely efficient but subdued and besotted PA, Sally (the incredible Olivia Colman). Jessica Hynes is utterly mesmerizing as Siobhan Sharpe, the Head of Brand who has absolutely no worthwhile ideas and just nods her head rapidly while saying, "Uh huh? Yeah? OK," on a loop until the person she's talking with gives up. Amelia Bullmore plays Kay Hope, the Head of Sustainability who is infuriated every time she is confused for the Head of Legacy (even she can't properly explain what the difference is), while Karl Theobald plays Graham Hitchens, the Head of Infrastructure who truly knows nothing about his job and keeps making London grind to a halt when he tries to implement a new traffic management system.  And I would be remiss if I didn't mention David Tennant, who supplies the wonderful voiceover that calmly sets up the inanity of what you are about to watch.

I lost track of the number of times I burst out laughing while watching Twenty Twelve. It is utterly absurd, witty, and spectacular, an instant Britcom classic. The show serves as a worthy outlet for the collective British sense of doom and apprehension about the upcoming Olympics. I'm sure the members of the actual ODC are far more competent than their television counterparts, but Twenty Twelve does manage to get uncomfortably close to the truth on some topics. You can't help imagining that some of the conversations about traffic management and sustainability are similar to discussions that plague the ODC on a daily basis, the only difference being that the people of Twenty Twelve know how to mine these problems for all the laughs they can get.