Character

Siobhan Sharpe

Siobhan Sharpe in Twenty Twelve (2011), played by Jessica Hynes.

Siobhan Sharpe runs Perfect Curve, the PR agency brought in to handle communications for the Olympic Deliverance Commission. She talks in a blizzard of hollow branding jargon, agrees with everyone in the room simultaneously, and seems constitutionally incapable of finishing a sentence with actual content. She wants to seem essential, and mostly succeeds by sheer confidence.

Hynes plays her at a pitch of total sincerity, which is the joke: Siobhan genuinely believes her own nonsense, so the emptiness never curdles into cynicism. The writing gives her a distinctive verbal tic — vague enthusiasm standing in for thought — and Hynes turns it into music, making a satire of corporate speak feel like a specific, deluded person rather than a type.

Played by

Appears in

Twenty Twelve2011