Twenty Twelve Recap: ‘Clarence House’ (Season 2, Episode 3) By Jem Bloomfield July 15th, 2012 at 2:38 pm (CALIFORNIA LITERARY REVIEW)

The Olympic Deliverance Team are drifting into the office, arguing with people on their phones. Here in the real world, the security company G4S has announced that it may have problems supplying the staff it had intended to work the Olympics, leading the British government to draft in an extra three thousand troops from the Army to make up the shortfall. Still, jokes about the various abilities of London football clubs must be made, and thank heaven Twenty Twelve is here to make them.

In comes Hugh Bonneville and the terrible truth dawns, only half hinted at the end of the last episode. Olivia Colman’s character thought Hugh Bonneville’s character had got back together with his wife, just as she (Colman’s character) was about to reveal her deep and abiding love for him (Bonneville’s character). Without staying to have her heart trampled on any further, or indeed clear up the misunderstanding, she disappears from the show, leaving a new PA in her place, the cheery and to Bonneville’s character faintly unnerving young man Daniel Stroud (Samuel Barnett). He is very definitely New Style – breezy, familiar with the team and slightly irksomely gets on better with most of them than the boss. He’s winsomely hard on himself when he brings a muffin rather than a Danish pastry, showing a proper regard for the niceties of baked goods protocol.

The plot of this episode revolves around a call they have received from Clarence House. Siobhan (Jessica Hynes) is sure this is one of the guys who do that jumping thing (cheap but brilliant joke), but in fact it is the residence of the Prince of Wales. Shelving the royals for the moment, and paying due attention to Jessica Hynes, she has continued to develop Siobhan along increasingly annoying lines. The flattening out of the character I noticed last week has (I think) gone even further, and there’s an entertaining little scene in which Ian (Hugh Bonneville) wants her to stop mucking about on her Blackberry whilst talking to him. It’s not epoch-making, but does capture the slight awkwardness of feeling that someone is being rude to you, but that drawing it to their attention would probably make you ruder than they are being, so you resent them without feeling able to do anything about it. That’s either emotional truth, or it’s one of the really screwed-up things about being from a certain slice of the British middle class and their allied brethren…

READ MORE: http://www.examiner.com/article/the-hobbit-movie-news-may-be-a-trilogy-third-film-from-jrr-tolkien-s-notes