Posted in: BBC, TV | Tagged: armando iannucci, bbc, pandemonium

Armando Iannucci Says BBC Needs To Tell The Government To F*ck Off

Published Fri, 10 Dec 2021 05:05:10 -0600

This was Armando Iannucci's first live audience experience for over two years. He wasn't sure how it worked. But, with Shaun Keaveny on stage for An Audience With Armando Iannucci at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in London, interrupting the Andrew Lloyd Webber Cinderella musical for a night, alongside the release of his new book of satirical poetry, Pandemonium, it seemed to work.

His audience, live and mostly masked as we were, came to Armando in different ways. Some from Veep and The Thick Of It, others from Alan Partridge, On The Hour and The Day Today, others from his opinion columns. I was sat next to someone who was born in 1997, the year of one of Armando's greatest televisual triumphs, The Election Night Armistice. That didn't seem right.

An Audience With Armando Iannucci at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in London

He talked about his father not being able to vote in the UK, but being okay with that, saying the last time he voted, Mussolini got it. How his father worked for an anti-fascist newspaper in Italy and so had to rapidly emigrate. He talked about how Pandemonium is based on Milton's Paradise Lost, a tome he wrote his dissertation on at university but realised that the literary analysis life was not for him when he noticed the opening stanza could be sung to the theme of the Flintstones… "Man's first disobedience, And the fruit of that forbidden tree.".

He also talked about the BBC, who trained him as a radio producer and whom through he put his greatest hits, but also in the face of having only worked at HBO for the past few years.

He can see the BBC threatened with being slimmed down, at the same time Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Disney throw huge amounts of money at anyone with a scintilla of talent. He sees the BBC's strength in not having budgets, just creativity and letting people get on with it, He notes that at HBO he only has to talk to two people, but at the BBC it's more like eighteen. He emphasises that the BBC needs to focus on developing homegrown talent, ideas and potential, but then also stand up to critics and the government in defending them. That the BBC needs to be able to say "f-ck off!" to the government, to leave them alone as they know what they are doing. Whereas now, he sees the BBC willing to hand itself into the station at the merest whiff of criticism.

This reminded me of Ian Hislop's Have I Got News For You address defending the BBC against criticism of the Martin Bashir/Princess Diana interview – which was cut from broadcast by the BBC, as they didn't seem to be interested in defending themselves at the time. Or, since.

And that government should be annoyed by the media – or the media isn't doing its job. He also talked about the two notes he got from the BBC when making The Thick Of It, one was to remove Michael Tucker's line "That's as inevitable as what they'll find in Jimmy Savile's basement." Pre-Savile death, of course. And how it was pointed out that the most recent episode of The Thick Of It on the BBC had 3.4 uses of the word "f-ck" every minute, that the upcoming episode "had two c-nts in it" which he was allowed to keep if he toned down the f-cks. And looked forward to a future, after the collapse of civilisation and the monetary system where "we're all just sat around, trading c-nts for f-cks." It's one future, certainly.

He also talked about the time that Alan Partridge interviewed Tony Blair for the Labour Party Youth Conference, a ten minute sketch that was written by Armando Iannucci and Steve Coogan on the train up, when he realised that Peter Mandelsohn didn't realise that Alan Patridge was a fictional character, and that Tony Blair learned, word perfect, with all the necessary comic timing, in the ten minutes before the performance began. And at which point, Armando realised that Blair was an actor playing a politician.

There was also the moment when, in Time Trumpet, they used footage of David Cameron showing off his England wrist band when he realised the cameras were on him, that Newsnight had recorded but hadn't used because they thought it was unfair, But once Time Trumpet had used it, then Newsnight was justified in using it too.

But this all leads up to the current Prime Minister, whose utterances would have made perfect The Day Today fake headlines – is "Prime Minister addresses heads of business on the need to to to Peppa Pig World" any more unrealistic than "Portillo's teeth removed to boost pound"? With Armando stating, what is the point of doing satire about modern politics when Donald Trump can boast he could shoot a man dead in the street and still get elected – and then does?

And to tie it all back into Bleeding Cool matters, Armando Iannucci also speculated on the future for Alan Partridge, and envisions an Alan Cinematic Universe, and a Multiverse of Alans to come…

Pandemonium is available now.