Interview: Armando Iannucci on moving beyond the BBC

The creator of The Thick of It tells Dan Sabbagh how being online has boosted his credibility and why he’s gone beyond the BBC – despite being ready to man the barricades to save its digital channels Armando Iannucci, comedy all-rounder, is pretty clear what he thinks about the BBC – saying that he will “man the barricades” in support of a corporation that has commissioned so many of his programmes, from I’m Alan Partridge to The Thick of It. Yet, curiously, after several years embedded in a comedy unit inside the corporation, and a shorter spell as a freelance while his Anglo-American film In the Loop was coming together, Iannucci has moved beyond the BBC’s orbit. He has a new job, working for an independent producer, Baby Cow, as chief creative officer, and reckons that when it comes to comedy at least “the ecology is healthy”, or to put it another way, “I’d like to sell something to ITV”. Unlike others of his generation who have made the switch from BBC to indie, Iannucci “doesn’t want to be running a business”. Baby Cow is owned by his friends, Henry Normal and Partridge star Steve Coogan, and for Iannucci, who doesn’t live in London, its offices are a useful base for future projects. He talks hopefully about working in a way that “takes me out of my comfort zone” and notes that “Baby Cow doesn’t do a funny panel show” and that “it doesn’t do BBC1 or [again] ITV”. Where we meet, in an office on a largely disused floor, there are piles of old scripts and background notes, including, at the top of a box of papers, Alan Partridge’s life story, presumably background and inspiration for a Partridge movie that is in the works. Nor is he short of things to do – as well as the film there is a series for HBO, and more of The Thick of It coming up. He believes that for the first time in years “the BBC is not the only place to go to” for comedy writers, citing “the squeeze on their budgets” and pointing out that ITV, Channel 4 and “even Sky” are moving into comedy. Plus there is money to put content online – Iannucci wrote the Alan Partridge North Norfolk Digital series that appeared first on the internet, sponsored by Foster’s. “The ecology is healthy,” he says; no worries about the death of public service broadcasting here. He frets more about BBC executives’ ability “to turn themselves into a police station even when they haven’t committed a crime” under the slightest pressure from tabloid critics – although he is shrewd enough not to get drawn into complaining about any over-zealous culture of compliance. He also voices concern about the prospect of BBC cuts. A particular concern is the vague threat of closure still hanging over BBC3 and BBC4. “BBC3 and 4 combined are where Channel 4 was when it started up,” he says, arguing that “The Thick of It wouldn’t have got on as a BBC2 show” because of the pressure of needing a certain level of ratings. Conversation with Iannucci bumps around; he tends to answer questions fairly briefly and unemotionally, and sometimes a full answer emerges only after returning to a topic a few times. He wants to work on more of Mid Morning Matters, set in North Norfolk Digital, which shows “you can just do a comedy without a channel controller giving you the OK”. The first of the 12 episodes attracted over 1m views, and the web series is now being reversioned for TV. Later, it emerges he wants to develop an Alan Partridge app “sometime next year” but – importantly – he doesn’t want it to be some sort of news feed site because that would make for a boring interactive experience. “We did a Malcolm Tucker app, and thought, let’s invent a story. So the phone turned into Malcolm Tucker’s phone, where other cast members left him messages. Over 30 days you can follow the story.” Partridge, though, isn’t going fully digital, even if the thinking behind taking the character online was in part that it was a good fit – one can imagine the perennial underachiever appearing on YouTube because his television career was finally over. But then there is the film too. A script is with the BBC, but, Iannucci says: “It’s not Alan goes to Hollywood; it’s very Norwich-based.” He says he wants to introduce Partridge to a new generation through the mixture of old and new media. “My 11-year-old thinks I’m cool because he watches things I’ve made on YouTube,” he says, adding that the vast video archive is critical now for comedy. “A lot of people only know Eddie Izzard from YouTube, where they watch his standup.” Warming to this theme, he argues that YouTube is the arena where comic careers now begin. “If you wanted to be in comedy, it used to be the case you wrote scripts or did standup. Now people just send me YouTube links of their own work.” But he doesn’t think broadcasters such as the BBC should be putting up raw submissions because “as with anything creative, 90% of it is shit”. Politics, meanwhile, dominates the rest of his work. After a break, there’s a new series of The Thick of It coming next year, somehow surviving the fall of New Labour. “The cast has dispersed; there’s been a change of government.” But who is going to be the hapless minister? “There’s always been Roger Allam,” he points out. Allam played Peter Mannion, the Tory shadow minister for social affairs and citizenship, with more than a hint of Ken Clarke, in a special and in series three back in 2009. One wonders how super-aggressive spin-master Malcolm Tucker will survive in opposition, and indeed without Alastair Campbell in No 10, to which Iannucci’s first answer is: “It’s not written yet.” Later though, he observes that it has taken time to “get under the skin of the coalition”, adding: “It’s been interesting to watch the two parties get on. It looked like David Cameron’s laid-back style was more efficient, but in fact it looks like a mess. They keep changing their minds.” He says that “politics feels unreal” at the moment, and that “when Cameron and Clegg wander into the room, you don’t think that’s the prime minister and deputy prime minister. They are two sales executives. The gravitas with politics has gone.” Political influence It is tempting to think that Iannucci has had a little to do with that himself. It is not uncommon for those who work in politics to conclude that at any one time they are among either the hopeless characters from The Thick of It or the heroic ones from The West Wing. Continuing the theme, his next project is Veep, for HBO, a eight-parter which is set in the vice president’s office, and stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus. “This is a person who has stood in an election and lost to the president – so they inevitably think that they are better than them. I think that’s a funny dynamic.” Working for HBO has stimulated him, and he takes satisfaction from the fact that the programme is likely to be aired in the UK on Sky Atlantic very soon after it airs in the US, because the British channel has a long-term output deal with the US broadcaster. “In a way it doesn’t matter where a programme is made,” he says, highlighting the transatlantic sensibility and economics of upscale television. Increasingly, he believes that US broadcasters are competing for UK talent: “The problem will come if the US starts buying up every project they like.” But it hard to imagine American viewers warming to something as British as Alan Partridge in big numbers, even if Steve Coogan is an increasingly familiar actor on the far side of the pond. Later I ask him directly about whether comic art has overtaken real life, and in particular politics, given how influential The Thick of It was and is. This time he gives a vivid example. “When I was doing the research for Veep, I went around the West Wing, shown around by Obama’s personal aide. The West Wing is rather disappointing, it’s poorly lit, it’s a warren. “Obama’s aide was in this tiny room, with a single bookcase – but from his door there was the Oval Office. Anyway, he was showing us around and he was saying ‘this is the Roosevelt Room – that would be where CJ and Josh [characters from the West Wing] would have been talking’ and I thought why not say that’s where this president or that president did this or that. What’s happened is that the only shared reality we have is things we have seen on television.” Iannucci may not have written The West Wing, but the point is clear enough. And for a writer, director, producer and performer who has helped create some of the reality-defining shows of the past two decades, the opportunities have never been greater, given the growing market for his work, in the UK and the US, on screen and online. Armando Iannucci BBC BBC3 Television industry BBC4 Comedy Television Radio comedy YouTube Dan Sabbagh guardian.co.uk

Posted by on July 4, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.