Becky Martin

In The Thick of It (2005), people struggle to finish an exchange without making their position worse. A carefully chosen phrase can be as dangerous as an unguarded one, and the fly-on-the-wall direction leaves little opportunity to recover. Becky Martin is well suited to that sort of comedy, which needs precise timing without performers seeming to wait for their cue. We found the conversational panic painfully funny because the effort to sound in control keeps producing fresh embarrassment. Martin directed one episode, in 2012; the programme’s larger achievement is shared.

Her television directing began with sketches and comedy series in the late 1990s and early 2000s, before a substantial run on Peep Show: 36 episodes across series four to nine, from 2007 to 2015. Veep took her into American television, with 14 episodes between 2013 and 2019. Those credits give some scale to a career spent handling ensembles and finding jokes through performance. Two episodes of Succession, in 2019 and 2023, extended that work into drama.

Armando Iannucci and Natalie Bailey are also among the directors of The Thick of It, while the writers include Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Tony Roche and Ian Martin. The scripts allow improvisation, and the loose, observational style makes prepared humiliations feel accidental. It also lets us watch the ensemble rather than attend only to the person delivering the sharpest insult. The direction works because it allows the writing to be precise without making the confusion look rehearsed.

Martin’s stated concern for truth in comedy makes sense of this work: the people need to believe in what they are saying, however foolish it sounds. That is a sound basis for directing actors, though it does not make every insult equally entertaining. The relentless abuse in The Thick of It sometimes offers less variety than the ensemble does. Start there, and give the people without the sharpest lines some attention.