AVENUE 5: Armando Iannucci in space, not the musical with sweary muppets.
TV’S greatest satirist Armando Iannucci goes on his dream sci-fi adventure in space-tourism comedy Avenue 5
ARMANDO IANNUCCI HAS always dreamt of the cosmos. Before co-creating Alan Partridge, before savaging the buffoons of British politics with his prescient political comedy The Thick Of It, and long before his US sitcom Veep became an Emmy awardwinning smash hit series, he was a sci-fiobsessed teen, devouring HG Wells novels in his bedroom. “Not teleportation and tentacled space aliens,” Iannucci is keen to point out, taking a sip from his morning latte. “More hard sci-fi. The type that can pick up a contemporary theme and really explore it from a new perspective. I also liked how it could often do something a little bit existential, asking questions like: what the hell are we doing? How are we behaving as a species?”
His latest creation, Avenue 5, asks those questions, and a couple of others that HG Wells never got round to. Questions like: does blood freeze in outer
space? What are the challenges involved in interstellar funerals? And, crucially: just how much havoc can one spaceship yoga class gone awry cause? (The answer, revealed in the show’s hilarious first episode: a lot). Hugh Laurie stars in the HBO series as Ryan Clark, the captain of an intergalactic cruise liner that runs into trouble while ferrying space tourists on a tacky tour of the Milky Way. Think Titanic, but instead of the north Atlantic Ocean, we’re in the cold chasm of space. And instead of an iceberg, the problem’s a horde of spandexed holidaymakers attempting the downward-facing dog.
“The idea came about around three years ago,” says Iannucci as Pilot TV joins him in a central London editing suite, where he’s racing to finish the series’ final cut before Christmas. “I stopped doing Veep after season four. I knew I was going to do [2017 film] The Death Of Stalin. HBO said they’d love to have me back. I said, “Well, I’d love to do a sci-fi.” They said that’s great, because they haven’t got a sci-fi. so I sat down with simon [Blackwell, executive producer] and we started thinking. That’s where we came up with that idea of a trip that’s supposed to take eight weeks that all of a sudden... isn’t going to do that.”
What they ended up concocting puts the “lunar” in lunacy. A seemingly small hiccup onboard the titular ship has repercussions of galactic proportions for those onboard. The ship’s passengers — an ensemble of bickering oddballs that includes alumni from The Office, Brooklyn Nine-nine and yes, The Thick Of It — spiral into hysteria. The ship’s crew attempt to maintain order — a task easier said than done with idiotic billionaire owner Herman Judd (Josh Gad) causing disarray at every turn and skeletons lurking in key crew members’ closets, just waiting to be discovered by nosey vacationer Karen Kelly (Rebecca Front).
“There are thousands of people on board. What do they do? What are the rules after that incident? Do you still have first class, second class and third class? Or does all that go out the window?” asks Iannucci. “When do they start to eat each other?”
The show is in some ways classic Iannucci, packing plenty of the writerdirector’s hallmarks: an ensemble cast spouting witty dialogue? Check (“This is fate! And it’s freestyling with us! It’s jazz fate!” to quote Matt, head of customer relations). A rabble of authority figures who are revealed to be comically inept, descending into farce as they bumble from mishap to mishap? Present and correct, just like the ones at the centre of The Thick Of It, In The Loop, Veep and Death Of Stalin. But at a time in British and American political history when things, you may have noticed, seem to be going just a tiny bit totally batshit insane, fans may be confused to see Iannucci blasting off into the final frontier, with so much material to be mined in Westminster and the Oval Office. Is TV’S greatest political satirist of the last 20 years done skewering the yes-men, mercenaries and morons of our civic systems? Or is there more than meets the eye to the ambitious Avenue 5?
Pilot meets iannucci
On A Tense, apocalyptically rainy December morning – the day of our recent General election, to be precise. He can’t quite decide what’s been the most Thick Of
It-style moment of the election campaign, because so many have been sillier than anything he’d have considered for the outrageous mid-noughties series. “I’d definitely have rejected Johnson hiding in a fridge,” he says, before recalling the moment our Prime Minister took a reporters’ mobile on live TV to avoid having to look at a child sleeping on a hospital floor. “And pocketing someone’s phone? That’s just bizarre, like an improvised take we’d have thrown out as too bloody ridiculous. The Thick Of It was all about these calamitous, unforced errors. These things were being done on purpose.”
The Glasgow-born comic launched The Thick Of It in 2005 having made a name for himself alongside Chris Morris with BBC radio series On the Hour, which later morphed into an influential TV comedy titled The Day Today. One of that show’s characters, Alan Partridge, co-created by Iannucci, became a Toblerone-eating phenomenon in his own right, leading Channel 4 to greenlight a surreal series of the writer’s own, 2001’s The Armando Iannucci Shows. Four years later came The Thick Of It — a show about the clowns at the heart of British government on both sides of the political divide. It made a British icon of Malcolm Tucker, the series’ acid-tongued spin doctor, played by Peter Capaldi. It also obliterated all swear-words-per-episode records in Beeb history, if such a thing existed (season three, episode seven reached highs of an F-bomb every 12 seconds).
The show’s success sparked a spin-off movie, In The Loop, and a beloved Us sister series, Veep, starring Julia Louis-dreyfus as a beleaguered Vice President. since then, however, Iannucci has retreated to the 1950s in his 2017 Communist comedy The Death Of Stalin, and to the 1890s for upcoming Dickens adaptation, The Personal History Of David Copperfield. Throw into the mix
Avenue 5, set 40 years into the future, and you begin to wonder if the comic is understandably trying to escape our current political landscape.
“I’m getting as far as I can from the present day because the present day is unquantifiable at the minute,” he says. “The only way to say anything about it is to get some distance from it.” With Avenue 5, Iannucci saw an opportunity to make broader observations about mankind’s capacity for bonkers behaviour. “I wanted to get away from the intricacies of politics and into just, well, human behaviour. Social politics, I suppose you might call it. How do people cope and work out whose in charge? Do they start from scratch or turn into animals?” Beneath the space exterior of Avenue 5 are plot threads and themes directly influenced by our current leaders and landscape, he adds. “The rise of populism, nationalism, truth, fake news and all that. How do you whip people up into thinking something that denies factual analysis? I’m still interested in all of that.”
No kidding. There are hints of Trump in Josh Gad’s Judd, the incompetent ship owner whose attempts to arrange rescue usually only sabotage situations further. “Judd is based on a type of business person who might have been lucky with one idea — in his case, luxury holidays — then thinks he can do anything. Richard Branson hit it lucky with Virgin Atlantic. Why does that make he think he can bring out a Coke? Or a bridalwear magazine? Or condoms? I don’t get the logic there,” he laughs. “Someone like Branson, he’s a businessman. He’s not a space expert. That’s what Judd is in this. He ran hotels and holidays, then thought, ‘okay, holidays in space!’”
The comedian relished throwing conundrums at Judd that he couldn’t solve by just demanding they be solved, like a certain Commander-in-chief. “In these first few years of Trump, you’ve seen him appear like: “If I say something it’ll just happen. Because that’s what happens in my company. Why’s it not happening?” And I just thought it’d be funny to have a character like that, where the problem he’s encountering is the laws of physics. He’s so used to getting what he wants. But here, that just doesn’t happen. There are higher rules.”
In the show, Judd struggles to properly grasp those higher rules — or anything else for that matter. “We’d sell more steaks if the restaurant was completely red. That’s science, probably!” he exclaims in one scene. Iannucci and co didn’t just settle for a “that’s science, probably” approach when it came to Avenue 5, though. Instead, they carried out extensive research to make sure the show was rooted in reality. “Hugh Laurie and I went around the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,” the writer recalls. “We saw the Mars Rover and I spoke to some of the scientists about how they plan for missions. It’s all to do with problem solving.” The pair also visited the headquarters of spacetourism businesses Spacex, created by billionaire Elon Musk, and Branson’s Virgin Galactic — both of which intend to extend space exploration to mere mortals instead of just astronauts at some point in the near future.
“It’s quite funny going to these places. Over there is someone painting a rocket. Over there is someone eating some trail mix or microwaving some soup,” he laughs. “They’re like someone’s garage or tool shed. After that, the whole show actually spun out of me fairly quickly.”
The result was a comedy
that boldly goes where few sitcoms have gone before, tackling themes not often explored in big-budget TV shows: commercialism, existentialism, the perils of space yoga. He’s not feeling too nervous about its reception, despite it being a different flavour than fans might be used to.
“I was always nervous when Veep went out that Americans would say: who do these Brits think they are, coming over here, this is ridiculous! I don’t know. HBO seems happy with it…”
Iannucci’s happy with it too — in no small part thanks to Laurie, the show’s “fantastic” leading man. “He was very interested in the psychology of the show. His character is rather complex — a slightly tortured individual, in a position that he thought he was equipped to deal with, that it soon becomes clear to him he’s not equipped to deal with at all.”
Already, he’s starting to envision how Captain Clark might be further fleshed out in upcoming seasons. “We end [season one] on a very good cliffhanger. It’s always been envisioned as a bigger picture. It’s not all mapped out, but as we were making it, as we got to know these characters, a bigger picture starts to emerge.”
Iannucci used to sit in his room reading HG Wells novels because “I was always very bookish. I think maybe growing Italian in Scotland then a Scottish-italian in England, you’re always one step back from everyone.” Maybe that’s what gave him his love for comedy that interrogates human behaviour, the human condition, he wonders out loud. “Whether that adds to that sense of observing things, I don’t know — possibly. You’re not so deep inside something that you can’t see the whole thing. You’re slightly detached from it.”
Avenue 5 attempts to do the same thing — detach from our planet and blast off into the cosmos, in order to make some salient points about life on Earth. Before we part and step out into the Election Day drizzle, he realises a fatal flaw in his show’s entire premise.
Depending on how things shake out across the coming weeks and months in British politics, the idea of being marooned on a spaceship several lightyears from Earth might not be treated like the disaster it’s portrayed as in Avenue 5.
“It might actually seem quite attractive, mightn’t it?” he says, breaking into a nervous chuckle. Houston, Armando Iannucci has a problem. And we have a new must-watch sitcom.