Armando Iannucci

Armando Iannucci is a comic writer, performer, director and producer. He has written and produced many award-winning comedy shows including The Mary Whitehouse Experience, On The Hour, and Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge, all of which successfully transferred to television with On The Hour changing its name to The Day Today. He has won two Sony Radio Awards and three British Comedy Awards, one of which was a special award for his contribution to television comedy.

 

How did you get started in comedy?

I did a bit of comedy at school actually. I did my first stand up when I was twelve. I used to listen to a lot of radio comedy and I just quite blatantly wrote the jokes down. And the school used to do a sort of charity thing every Christmas for the old folks' home round the corner and we put on a show, and I ended up kind of compèring it. Then when I was at university I started writing sketches and doing stand up and character stuff and putting on one man shows and going up to Edinburgh and stuff like that.

I had a sort of instinctive feeling in my head about what I wanted to do. If I was involved in sketches as a student I felt were a bit conventional or whatever, I can remember feeling a little bit "Oh I want to try something different."

I was really influenced by a show on radio called The Burkiss Way written by Andrew Marshall and David Renwick, and that was taking very conventional radio formats and then just completely screwing them up and sticking them together. It was mad, but really, really funny. Fortunately no-one else listened to those shows so my style came over as unique whereas in fact it was blatantly plagiarised.

Where did On The Hour come from?

That started when I joined as a radio producer and I went on a training course. I was lumped in with lots of current affairs and news and features producers. And we had to make a programme and they wanted to make a kind of news feature programme. And I thought well I'm a comedy producer. I don't want to make a news feature programme because that's not what I'm here for. But I thought it was interesting working with people in all those different departments and all those skills.

And I thought: Why don't we make a false one? Why don't we use all the techniques they use? To have the jokes, but actually genuinely interview the character, in character, and as long as they can get the jokes out in some sort of order... So get someone funny who can improvise, ask them those things, and then take that interview away and edit it as you would a genuine interview.

So you scripted it to a degree?

I said: these are the jokes. Try and say this. Try and say that. And then you just wait for the funny thing, mark that up, and stitch it all together. It sounded real. And I thought, that's kind of interesting.

I got a guy who presented the news on Radio Orkney and he'd been trained not to let any moment of the output be dead air. So I got him to present it and we invented jingles and I made a little ten minute thing like that, and I gave it to the head of the department and said "Is there anything in this?" And he said "Yeah, do you want to do a pilot?" And that was On The Hour.

At the same time I heard on BBC London - GLR as it was then - Chris Morris doing a morning show in which he was doing precisely the same thing. He was pretending to be DJs and weather reporters and doing items about a cardboard box blowing around in the street with big pulsing jingles and throbbing, urgent music. So I just wrote to Chris and we got in touch and turned out we were roughly the same age and had actually had the same teachers. Cos he went to a Jesuit school and I went to a Jesuit school. So there was this bizarre coincidence.

I met Chris outside Broadcasting House, and he couldn’t find anywhere to park. He had this bashed-out old car and he couldn’t find anywhere to park. So we just drove round Broadcasting House for about two hours having a chat and it was that chat in which we mapped out On The Hour really.

Did you ever mean for people to think On The Hour was real?

It wasn't meant to be luring people in like an April Fool's elaborate hoax. I want people to find this funny. So in order to laugh at it you've got to know that it's made up. But I just thought the more convincing it was done the funnier it would be. The fact that some people did think it was real until a completely stupid news item was fine but I didn't want people at the end of it not to know whether to have laughed or not.

Your work often looks at the difference between people's private and public faces...

I'm fundamentally quite insecure. I always felt I was rubbish and eventually I'd be found out - then the older you get the more you realise that everyone else thinks that as well.

While I was researching In The Loop, someone in the State Department told me that Henry Kissinger, for the first two years he was Nixon’s Secretary of State, would go around asking people in the State Department "Do you think he likes me? I don't know. He doesn't say. Am I all right? Am I doing okay?" And I'm thinking: that's Henry Kissinger. You know, maybe he was just bombing Cambodia to impress.

Then you find things like the banks, these grand institutions where you think people clearly know what they're doing and they turn round and go "No, we just borrowed because everyone else was borrowing." And I think that's frightening but there's something funny about that, that we go around with this public face and this private face. And I suppose things like class and race and accent and how you judge people all come into it, how we judge people publicly and then privately and also people in public life actually behind the closed doors, what's actually going on, it just kind of fascinates me.

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