Hugh Bonneville and co on the return of the London 2012 mockumentary "It's a critique of social incompetence, but all the scripts have their roots in credibility" Written By Alison Kervin 12:50 PM, 10 July 2012 (RADIO TIMES)

"If you get bandwidth on this, you’ve got maple syrup on your waffle at the get-go,” says Siobhan Sharpe, Head of Brand for the London 2012 Olympics. She runs her hands through her hair, smiles to herself, and looks over at her colleagues as if she’s just said something profound and life-changing. They look back at her as if she’s stark raving mad. The truth is that no one ever understands what Sharpe’s talking about. It’s hard to imagine she understands what she’s talking about herself.

I’m on the set of BBC2’s award-winning comedy Twenty Twelve, which returns for a three-part special this month, leading up to the Games. The mockumentary-style sitcom owes its success to clever, well-observed scripts by John Morton that blend the utterly insane with the entirely believable, and a cast who portray beautifully the madness and potential jeopardy involved in organising a major event.

Indeed, so close to the truth about Locog (the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games) has the show come that it has been suggested that writer/director John Morton has a mole in the committee feeding him true stories. The show even had a storyline about the Olympic clock breaking down, just as the real Olympic clock broke down.


“No. Honestly, it’s all made up,” says Morton. “The clock thing was luck! I’m flattered that people think I might have guys inside feeding me lines, because presumably that means they think the show is realistic… but I don’t… not at all.”

The first three episodes of the show were screened to Locog at a breakfast meeting in a London hotel. “I assured them that I didn’t have spies in the camp and that I have gone out of my way to make sure that the characters aren’t based on real people. I’ve created titles that don’t exist, like Head of Deliverance. Everything is to one side of the real world. The show isn’t about the Olympic Games, it's about human beings trying to interact and make things happen.”


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