THE ACCIDENTAL COMEDIAN
Profiling the comedy genius that is Armando Iannucci
His fingerprints can be found all over British comedies from On the Hour to I’m Alan Partridge, The Thick of It and The Death of Stalin. Yet you won’t see his name in lights; partly because one of our most subtle and sophisticated humourists tends to recoil from that sort of fame, but also because there may not be enough lights.
Armando Giovanni Iannucci owes his exotic name to his Italian immigrant parents, while his accent and humour are Glaswegian. ‘Sometimes I don’t think of myself as Scottish or Italian, but I do love Glasgow,’ he has said. ‘I don’t speak a word of Italian so I suppose I’m more a Scot. I’m really proud of that.’
He’s also proud that he went to St Peter’s in Glasgow, the same primary school Billy Connolly attended several decades earlier. Connolly went on to work in the shipyards while Iannucci went into youth programming at Radio Scotland, but their paths crossed early on when Connolly made a return visit to his old school.
‘There was a real divide in the teachers’ attitudes,’ Ianucci recalled. ‘Some thought Billy was good because he was funny and famous. Others thought he was bad because he made fun of the crucifixion and used rude words like “jobbies”!’
From early on, the 54-year-old seems to have found his place, quietly observing other people’s confusion and discomfort from a distance. Despite
producing hours of deft satire, writing columns for The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, and presenting the political mockery show The Friday Night Armistice, his most personal work lies in a 2001 Channel 4 sketch series, The Armando Iannucci Shows, where one programme reflects on the feeling of not quite belonging.
‘People laugh at your clothes, you say the wrong things in the pub about football, and everyone seems more urbane and amusing at dinner parties,’ he once said. ‘I don’t know whether this is a product of being not quite Italian and not quite Scottish, but I’ve always felt slightly detached.’
Iannucci’s Neapolitan father, also called Armando, arrived in Britain with not very much and tried his hand at a variety of businesses to provide for his young family. ‘In the good times, we lived in a nice house, but there were bad times,’ remembers his son. ‘There was a particularly bad time when there were six of us in a two-bedroomed tenement flat in Glasgow. But even then, I remember television taking us out of ourselves.’
Morecambe and Wise were favourites in the Iannucci household, as well as Seventies hits like The Generation Game and Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em. Eventually a pizza factory business did well enough to send the young Armando to St Aloysius College, a Jesuit private school in Garnethill, Glasgow. Iannucci continued his academic career at Oxford where he gained a first class degree in English.
After that, he applied and almost landed a job at the Treasury but at the last stage was told that they felt he wouldn’t take the job seriously. Instead, he settled down to a PhD on the works of Milton, until BBC Radio Scotland came calling.
During his final year at university, he’d teamed up with Andy Cameron for a debate about whether Scotland was funnier than England. They won the debate, and Cameron was impressed by Iannucci’s sly undergraduate wit, so when he heard the BBC were looking for fresh new presenters for a music and entertainment show, Cameron suggested they get in touch with Iannucci.
‘The idea of me presenting a youth music show is such an abomination, I’m amazed it ever happened,’ Iannucci has said of this. ‘But it probably helped that I didn’t know anything about music, in much the same way as when we first did Alan Partridge, we got Steve Coogan to do sports commentaries.
‘Steve admitted he didn’t know much about sport, which was a great help in that Alan was flannelling around trying to think of things to say. I think ignorance in certain areas is a great blessing.’
If Iannucci harboured a plan for world comedy domination, at this stage he kept it well hidden, but his first radio outing, No’ The Archie Macpherson Show, became a surprise hit. Radio reviewers noted his
The idea of me presenting a youth music show is such an abomination, I’m amazed it ever happened
wry presenting style and surreal comedy skits, reminiscent of Chic Murray and Arnold Brown.
Working in the BBC’s Queen Margaret Drive in Glasgow also gave him the chance to learn about studio production and programme making. Iannucci was an original, but back then all that meant was that he didn’t fit in with the broad comedy popular in Scotland at the time, such as Naked Radio or A Kick Up the Eighties.
Inevitably, he moved on to BBC Light Entertainment in London, producing shows like The News Quiz and The Mary Whitehouse Experience, yet he had no outlet for his own comedy tastes. ‘Pretty soon I figured out that if I didn’t want to end up in my mid-50s wearing a cardigan and poring over scripts I’d need to come up with projects that were at least partly written by me,’ he said.
On one of the BBC’s interminable staff training courses, he came up with the idea for a spoof news show. On the Hour later transferred to TV as The Day Today, mercilessly parodying the tics and pomposity of broadcast news. ‘Crazed wolves in store a mistake, says Mothercare’ and ‘Headmaster suspended for using large-faced child as satellite dish’ were two typical headline stories.
The shows also introduced TV audiences to one of modern comedy’s most appallingly funny creations: Alan Partridge. While throwing around ideas with the writers and performers one day, Iannucci asked Steve Coogan if he could try the voice of a sports commentator. ‘He gave it a go, and we fell about. Then someone said “he’s Alan”,’ recalled Iannucci. ‘And someone else said “And he’s a Partridge”. We had his background worked out in minutes. We knew he was from Norwich because we couldn’t think of any other comedy character from Norwich.’
Alan went on to greater ignominy on his own chat show, Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge, before having a meltdown in what he called ‘the Dundee Incident’.
Iannucci was so tickled by the idea of Alan on a Toblerone-fuelled drive from Norwich to Dundee in I’m Alan Partridge that when he made his American political series Veep for HBO, he named the production company Dundee, complete with a logo featuring a massive futuristic cityscape and the word ‘Dundee’ in Cinemascope lettering. ‘I like the fact that it goes out across America at the end of every episode,’ laughed Iannucci.
Alan Partridge could be enough of a legacy for one lifetime, but a low-budget experiment in 2005 at the BBC spawned another monster for Iannucci. The Thick of It and the spin-off
movie In the Loop are set in a silo of panicking politicians and snarling spin doctors. On top of that heap sits Malcolm Tucker, the most creatively profane character in British comedy, but also the man who brought Peter Capaldi’s career back to life.
The future Dr Who had enjoyed success in the 80s and 90s in Local Hero and The Crow Road, but by 2005 his star had dipped to the point that he was about to sell his house and quit acting.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect was that Capaldi had never met Iannucci when he was asked to audition for a possible BBC series. Not only did the two men share a Scottish-Italian heritage, but their parents once lived in the same street in Springburn, Glasgow and hung out together. Armando’s father even built and installed a cupboard for the Capaldis’ kitchen.
Despite this common ground, Capaldi’s heart sank when Iannucci suggested improvising a scene where the party enforcer loses his temper. But as he started bellowing, Capaldi recalls that he ‘felt a little click; I knew how to do this. Armando cast me in a role that nobody else would think of me in’.
Iannucci knows about casting against type: after all, if you were looking for someone to steer the most richly obscene scripts on television, you probably wouldn’t go for a dapper, softly-spoken, middle-aged Scots-Italian with a self-effacing air. Even his long-time friend Steve Coogan affectionately describes him as a bit of a square.
‘He’s the kind of person who has a half of lager in the pub, but I like that,’ said Coogan. ‘If he came in and said “I’m buying myself a sports car tomorrow” I’d throw up my hands in despair.’ So far Iannucci’s most startling decision remains his acceptance of an OBE in 2012.
Former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell, widely assumed to be a model for Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It, couldn’t resist going on to Twitter to accuse Iannucci of joining ‘the establishment he claims to deride’, warning that ‘three little letters’ could have more impact than he realised. Smartly, Iannucci shot back to Campbell: ‘WMD’.
Later on, Iannucci offered more domestic reasons for accepting the award. The honour made his mother proud, he said. ‘And I thought it would be a lovely day out for the whole family at Buckingham Palace.
What struck me on the day was that it was quite moving, not because of what was happening to me, but because there were other people there who have done extraordinary things.
‘I felt a bit of a cheat because all I’ve done is my job for the last 20 years, rather than rescue homeless people or work for charities. The woman next to Rachel, my wife, was there to see her son get the George Cross. He’d saved five people while under fire.
Rachel said to her: “That’s really
I just can’t have someone over me telling me what to do. I think it affects your decision-making process
impressive, you must be very proud”, and she said “nope, he was just very, very stupid”. So you do feel quite small at these award ceremonies.’ Iannucci has also laughed off his Twitter spat with Campbell, saying it only happened because his wife had left him home alone that day.
Family is important to Iannucci. His father died when he was 17, but Iannucci visits Scotland regularly to see his mother, who still lives in Glasgow, where she looks after her son’s Scottish Bafta awards. He also makes a point of working strictly 10am to 7pm, and keeps weekends clear for family time. He has called Rachel, a speech therapist, a great inspiration, saying ‘I would never be where I am today without her’.
‘I knew as soon as I met her in the university library that there was a spark between us. When she asked me what I was doing later, I said, “having dinner with you”. I’m not usually that forward, but I was so sure she felt the same as me. I am very indecisive, but Rachel makes me go out there and do it.’
The Iannuccis have three children, Emilio, Marcello and Camilla, and live in Hertfordshire. According to their dad, all the children have shown interest in following their father into the performing arts, with 24-year-old Emilio appearing in his father’s film Death of Stalin last year as a young doctor.
Using his sharp eye for people’s flaws and contradictions, Iannucci was determined that Death of Stalin would be different from anything that’s gone before. The Russian tyrant is much funnier for a start, even if the comedy is constantly lapped by darkness – never more so than when Stalin himself dies and there’s a scramble to fill the power vacuum that’s left behind.
‘I remember saying to everyone at the start, this is comedy, but we must always be very respectful of the fact that millions of people died as a result of Stalin’s orders,’ he said of the film. ‘The comedy really is a nervous comedy of hysteria. Hopefully, the laughter comes from these people’s struggles to survive, to do anything to save their own skins and advance their careers.’
Despite creating so many shows about politicians, Iannucci tries to avoid political endorsements. In the past, he has gone on record as a supporter of the Liberal Democrats, though he has since said he regrets it.
He has also resisted being drawn into conversations about Scottish politics, even as comedy material. ‘I don’t deliberately steer clear of Scottish politics,’ he has protested. ‘But I don’t think I’m qualified because I haven’t lived in Scotland for 20 years. I wouldn’t be the right person to analyse it, living in London.’ However, he does admit to being intrigued by the 2014 referendum. ‘I didn’t have a vote during the independence referendum and I did feel a bit annoyed that I didn’t have a say in a fundamental question about the land where I was born.’
Despite his pungent political writing, Iannucci says political office holds no allure for him. ‘I don’t think I could survive. It’s the whole idea of accepting the party line. I just can’t have someone over me telling me what to do. I think it affects your decision-making process because you’re tired all the time. When I’m at home, for instance, I always have a 20-minute nap after lunch.’
His wry take on politics may also be an inherited gene. Before he immigrated to Britain, his father was a journalist in Mussolini’s Italy, wrote for an anti-fascist newspaper and then ‘had to take to the hills and join the partisans, and as soon as the war was over he got out’.
He made a new life in his adopted country, but without British citizenship he couldn’t vote. As a teenager, Iannucci once asked him if he was frustrated that he couldn’t vote in an election. ‘Ah,’ replied Armando Senior, ‘the last election I remember, Mussolini got in!”
In 2015, Iannucci reached a personal and professional turning point, declaring that he wanted to move on from writing about modern politics. That year he stood down as the show runner of Veep, his hugely successful HBO series about a female American vice-president. It was time, he said, that someone else had a go.
Iannucci has also been keen to shoot all his future film and TV projects in the UK. In The Loop and Death of Stalin were both filmed here, and he has convinced HBO to let him do the same for his forthcoming sci-fi show Avenue 5.
His current project is a faithful version of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield for BBC Films with Slumdog Millionaire star Dev Patel as the title hero, and Peter Capaldi as the notoriously deluded optimist, Mr Micawber. The film shoots this summer, with Iannucci listed as director and writer.
‘I was never tempted to change my name, even though most people can’t say it,’ said Iannucci. ‘At least it gets you noticed amongst the credits for shows. In that sense, I’ve done far better than if I’d called myself Joe Thomas.’