Writer Ian puts swearing into sit-coms

Jun 7 2009 by Michael Kelly, Sunday Sun

IT would be easy, and appropriate, to describe writer Ian Martin’s job as the dog’s b****cks.

It would even come as no surprise if you were to learn that he had come up with the phrase as he’s found fame as the “swearing consultant” for TV show The Thick Of It, which inspired the film In the Loop.

Set in the corridors of power, it deals with scheming ministers and their psychotic “spin doctors” whose use of the f-word and profanities make Gordon Ramsay seem slightly uncouth.

And they’re not just any old swear words. Some are worthy of study for their complexity and fans of Ian’s work can quote it as a Shakespeare scholar could Henry V’s Agincourt speech.

Any thought he uses his unique talent as some form of catharsis so that in person he is expletive free disappear within seconds of speaking to him.

He is currently working on the latest series of The Thick Of It and is very busy. Or as Ian puts it: “I haven’t got time to take a p**s.”

His skills, shall we say, come naturally.

Ian’s career as a wordsmith actually began in the North when visiting the brother of his fiance at the time at Durham University and, as he says, “bumming” around.

He got a job in the early 1970s at the now defunct newspaper the Durham Advertiser, where he spent four happy years, meeting his wife Eileen who was a care worker.

Ian, 56, said: “I had a brilliant time. I really loved the people. I left in about 1977. I went back 25 years later. It was bit of a melancholy experience, just reminding me how much older I was. It’s still a stunning place, though.”

He next headed down south, ending up doing a Friday column for the Guardian newspaper. He said: “It was about a Martian who had infiltrated artistic and cultural life. Quite rightly I got sacked because it was s**t.”

However, he went on to develop the idea with his brother Paul, who now works at Cumbria County Council, and came up with the Martian FM website. An offbeat, irreverent and, naturally, vulgar idea, on which the pair had the time of their lives.