The bombast of UK X Factor, meanwhile, has a cheeky knowingness to it, thanks to Peter Dickson's voiceover and Walsh's innate sense of lunacy.
Mr Flanagan's literary knowingness cannot do "just-like-that", but his extraordinary imagination brings him very close.
Jimmy himself is a closet romantic, hoarding old expressive words, but he has to fight hard against all this knowingness.
'They' say lots of things – sometimes helpful, usually not but always with an air of shrewd knowingness.
In other departments, this Grease-meets-High Grease-meets-High Grease-meets-High School Musicalion (just kidding about the last) certainly has a cheeky knowingness about its influences and pop-culture references but this is not deployed wittily enough to turn the nonsensical narrative and its attendant cliches and anachronisms into giddy camp gold.
The gimmick is to overlay the dangers of ancient life with the knowingness of modern comedy.
And while this naughty school-girl routine is undoubtedly done with knowingness – she's been papped falling out of the Groucho Club too many times – her appeal still keys into a part of our national psyche that seems obsessed with the underdog.
Or, as the New York Times put it in a possibly over-thinky think piece in 2011: "In a culture defined by knowingness and ironic distance, genuine surprise is increasingly rare – a spiritual luxury that brings us close to something ancient.
As paradigms of the modern technocratic politician, neither (as fools like me who admired Miliband can now state with nauseating knowingness) is cut out for leadership.
Like me, you may well be reacting to that with a look of knowingness and ironic distance.
Staged on a central, hexagonally tied rectangle, Michael Longhurst's superb production (how on earth did they rehearse this?) features two performances that are miracles of timing as they dart in and out of knowing inverted commas and effect subtles glissade between beautifully calculated in-on-the knowingness and nakedly unfeigned feeling.
