Is Armando Iannucci the finest satirist of his generation? He’s certainly the
least predictable. While too many topical jokers genuflect to the Holy
Trinity of political truisms — Bush is a booby, Blair is a lapdog, Gordon
Brown fancies a new job — Iannucci has managed to glean serious laughs from
shedding new light on the political process. The Thick of It, which
ends its BBC Two run tonight, nails its weak, self-serving politico targets
to the wall. But it also lets us feel the horrendous pressure that leads to
their horrendous behaviour.
And it has confirmed the soft-spoken Glaswegian as one of British comedy’s
most excitingly free thinkers. His other greatest hits were collaborations —
with Chris Morris on the barely dated 1994 news send-up The Day Today;
with Steve Coogan, Patrick Marber and Peter Baynham on three seasons of Alan
Partridge. But although The Thick of It is written in teams, and
features improvisation from its cast, it is devised and overseen by
Iannucci. And the critical gasps that greeted its debut on BBC Four last
summer have now led to Sunday’s profile by The South Bank Show.
“It is slightly bizarre,” he says, genial but tack-sharp, “talking about
yourself as if you were dead.” Not only that. You wait a lifetime for a
high-cultural endorsement and then two come at once — tomorrow he delivers
the third of his four lectures as News International Visiting Professor of
Broadcast Media at Oxford University, where he himself studied. It ’s given
him a welcome chance to sit back and think about his craft, he says. More
importantly, though, “I thought my mum would find it immensely amusing if I
got to call myself professor for a year.”
So, what is the sensibility that links the TV shows above with Gash
or The Saturday Night Armistice; his radio shows and columns? On The
South Bank Show, Steve Coogan suggests that it’s his interest in people
on the periphery, his disdain for the obvious joke. Iannucci himself points
out that he mocks arguments rather than personalities (an approach that
reaches fruition in the simultaneously savage and sympathetic The Thick
of It). To Rebecca Front, currently at work on Iannucci’s new library
sitcom Shush, he’s “one part Jonathan Swift, two parts geography
teacher”. Fair comment? “Well, I’m sitting here with a cardy on,” he admits.
“I don’t know what Jonathan Swift wore.”
Like Chris Morris, he received a Catholic education. Is the famed Jesuitical
intellectual rigour behind the impatience with lazy thinking that fuels his
work? “Maybe it’s that,” he says, “or maybe it’s something innate in me, but
I do always like to pick up on false logic. When a politician misuses an
argument, you do find your self thinking: ‘Well, that just doesn’t work
logically . . .’ ”
And there’s no more successful exponent of the logical pirouette than loveable
leader Tony Blair — or, as Iannucci dubbed his pint-sized puppet on The
Saturday Night Armistice, Mr Tony Blair. When Iannucci was working on a
piece about the Iraq invasion, he dug out Blair’s speeches for the build-up
to war and the build-up to the Millennium Dome. “And the language was the
same! They were both ‘golden opportunity we cannot miss . . . this, at long
last, will give our country the chance to hold its head up high . . . to be
a beacon to the world . . . all the doomsayers and the naysayers will tell
us to stop . . .’
“It all comes from faith, and that’s his answer now to the whole Gulf thing.
It’s no longer ‘there were weapons of mass destruction’ — well, that didn’t
work — it’s now: ‘I mean well, my heart’s in the right place.’ Which, when
you’re sending people into war, isn’t good enough, really.
“Guy’s a nutter,” he adds, with a twinkly disbelief that manages to mock both
Blair and his own effrontery at the same time, “an absolute nutter.”
And yet, in the process of putting together six episodes of The Thick of It,
Iannucci has found his political views challenged. The idea that satire
should empathise with its targets seems heretical. But in asking his actors
to improvise, he was asking them to behave just as their characters would
have to in the eye of each day’s fresh political storm. Everyone gets to be
the villain and the victim. Even the show’s Alastair Cambell-like hatchet
man Malcolm Tucker, played by Peter Capaldi, is shown to be ultimately
vulnerable.
“I’m still as angry as I ever was with the way certain politicians manipulate
their words and their facts,” says Iannucci. “On the other hand I’ve become
equally angry with the way the media behaves towards those politicians. The
Ruth Kelly thing, for example, letting people on the child register work in
schools. Well, how was she supposed to know everything in her department,
which is basically responsible for ALL SCHOOLS! Fine, officially she takes
the blame. But really it’s too much for us to expect her to actually be
personally responsible.
“Watching the series back, I realise I want people to think about Hugh Abbot,
the minister (played by Chris Langham): ‘Well, if I were in that position
I’d probably do the same. I’d do whatever it took to make things go away,
tell a little lie, because that’s what we do.’ What’s most important is the
human element. It’s not really a satire of how government works, it’s seeing
how people do or don’t cope. Or how they compromise. And I wanted us to feel
implicated as viewers too.
Because we buy the papers. So in the end . . .” here comes another
pronouncement, one part savage to two parts self-mocking: “we’re all guilty,
we’re all as guilty as sin.”
When he started out, producing The Day Today and its radio forebear On
The Hour, Iannucci worked himself and his collaborators hard. He claims
that his motivation was fear: fear that what he was doing simply wouldn’t be
good enough. “Once it’s on tape, that’s it,” he says, “so you might was well
get as good as you can.”
The Thick of It, though, is one of the easiest things he’s ever made.
It’s densely plotted, certainly, and exquisitely performed. But he actively
encouraged his writers not to linger on the scripts, because he didn’t want
it to feel like a sitcom, weighed down with cutely conceived one-liners.
Which means the production process is fast. So he can afford to make the
next series ten episodes long.
Before that, though, there’s plenty more stuff to get his teeth into. There’s
Time Trumpet, a send-up of list shows set in the future, featuring the
unreliable reminiscences of celebrities such as a 60-year-old Charlotte
Church and a 70-year-old David Beckham (“that was a fun casting session”).
He has his own comedy unit at the BBC, which he’s dubbed SLAP — “slightly
amusing programmes”. Oh, and he’s writing an opera about plastic surgery
with the composer David Sawer.
Meanwhile, his satirical past continues to cast shadows.
He came to enjoy Broken News, the Day Todayish news parody, once he
stopped himself from muttering:
“But didn’t we do this?” But the newscasts themselves have gone beyond parody.
He watched an ITN report in which a reporter in combats battered down a door
in Saddam’s palace before handing over to Trevor McDonald. “I thought:
‘That’s exactly the same as a scene we did in The Day Today.
But as a joke! It was very, very weird.”
And yet, as a satirist, was there not a part of him that felt just ever so
slightly proud? “No, I just felt gobsmacked. I just felt, that’s madness,
that’s utter madness.” He smiles. “But then I thought the war was mad.
Because Blair is mad. He’s a nutter!”
The South Bank Show will be shown on ITV1 on Sunday at 11.10pm; The Thick
of It will be shown on BBC Two tonight at 10pm
Pranks for the memory: five Iannucci moments
1 Telling Tory politicians’ hustings “jokes” at a comedy club
(Election Night Armistice Special)
2 Getting an unwitting O. J. Simpson to sign a piece of paper
with “I DID IT” written on it (The Saturday Night Armistice)
3 Persuading celebrities such as Linda Lusardi and Ian
McAskill to spend a day in a Portakabin for a “reality show”, not telling
them that they wouldn’t be filmed (2004 — The Stupid Version)
4 Getting Eric Bristow to lead a management seminar, using
darts to illuminate leadership principles (The Friday Night Armistice)
5 Creating Brown World — an exhibition in a shopping centre
that invited the public to explore the colour brown (The Saturday Night
Armstice)
