How pike gag turned Armando into one of the big fish
SOME years ago, an employment show called The Fairy Jobmother offered brisk commonsense guides on how to impress potential businesses.
Top tips included wash your hair, dress smartly, and don’t get a giant cannabis leaf tattooed on your neck.
I’ve only interviewed someone for a position once, and the winning candidate did none of these things. But he did promise that he did a very good impression of the Pope being swallowed by a giant pike. So I gave him the job.
At the time, I was a BBC trainee, working on a new show which hoped to lure a younger audience to Radio Scotland.
We had been given the slot normally occupied by the midweek sports show, so the programme was called No’ The Archie Macpherson Show.
There would be comedy, hip music and news at 10’clock. All we needed was a presenter.
IT was Andy Cameron who recommended Armando Iannucci, after seeing him successfully propose at a university debate that Scotland was the funniest nation.
I auditioned Armando over the phone one afternoon, with no real idea what I should be looking for in a cool, trendy youth presenter – which is why we only discovered later on that, when it came to music, Armando was more Bartók than Blur.
Later, we co-presented another music and comedy show called Bite The Wax, featuring music so achingly fashionable that neither of us had a clue and resorted to smuggling crib notes into the studio so we had something to say about the artists between records and sketches.
One night, we lost the notes and had to i mprovise through 90 minutes of live musical squawkings. ‘Here’s Queen Latifah,’ I remember Armando extemporising. ‘She’s a rapper, and also… Queen of the Netherlands.’ It was only a matter of time before Radio 4 scooped Armando up to produce comedy shows in London.
In his tiny BBC office, he played me a tape of Neil Kinnock losing his temper with a waiter during the General Election campaign.
It was actually an impressionist he’d been working with called Steve Coogan, but it fooled a newspaper, which tried to buy the tape off Armando’s new show The Day Today for £1,000 plus a picture of the editor in a heart-shaped frame.
Success changes people, but not Armando. He’s still witty, self-deprecating, and, unlike most of his comedy creations, not that sweary. We went out for a meal last month after the European premiere of his new film, The Death of Stalin, a disconcerting portrait of the mad, perverse logic in Soviet Russia.
It is brilliant, although as Armando said, if he’d applied the same level of realism as BBC2’s Gunpowder to Stalin’s crimes, the audience would have been unable to sleep for weeks, far less laugh.
I’ d l i ke to claim I spotted Armando Iannucci as a gamechanging talent right from the start. I’d particularly like to make that claim this week, when Armando comes to Glasgow to accept a BAFTA Scotland award for his outstanding contribution to film and television. But that wouldn’t be true: I just wanted to see that pike impression.