Armando Iannucci: Nine things we learned from his This Cultural Life interview

Iannucci was born in Scotland to an Italian father and a Scottish mother of Italian descent. He says he grew up speaking only English, “because they wanted us to feel British integrated”. His father had “a very thick Italian accent and sometimes I couldn’t understand him. I’d strain at some points.” His dad loved Italian opera, which he would play “so loudly that the people above and below us would bang on the floor or ceiling.”

John Wilson and Armando Iannucci in the studio

2. He was a big classical music fan as a child

Iannucci’s dad’s love of opera must have awakened something in his son because he was a huge fan of classical music as a child, mainly Germanic composers like Wagner and Mahler. “[My brothers] pumped me full of Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, King Crimson and all the other colours,” he says, “but maybe it’s because it was their thing that it didn’t grab me as much as when at school… the teacher put on Holst’s The Planets. I just thought, I want to know more about this.” He didn’t care that this was not particularly cool for a teenager and considered it his own kind of rebellion. “It was almost like I had some perverse habit.”

3. He started learning the piano at 40

Although he’s a great music lover, Iannucci is not a great musician. But he has tried; he took up playing piano at the age of 40. “I applied for grade one,” he says and remembers his exam: “I sat in someone’s kitchen, along with lots of five and six-year-olds in tiny, tiny chairs.” His exam did not go particularly well due to practising on an electric keyboard and having to do the exam on a proper piano. “I may as well have picked up a tuba,” he laughs. “It was like a different instrument.” He passed by one point.

4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy formed his comedy style

The 1981 TV adaptation of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

In 1978, Iannucci heard the radio version of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which changed his idea of what comedy could be. “It was the first comedy I came across where I thought, oh, you can have fun with ideas as well as lines. It’s not just about jokes. It’s not just about sketches. It’s about narrative and characters and surrealism. It’s about imagination.” John Wilson suggests that the story’s hero, Arthur Dent, a man constantly out of his depth, may have informed many of Iannucci’s characters, from Alan Partridge to most of the cast of The Thick of It. “That is kind of interesting,” says Iannucci. “I haven’t made that connection, you’re the first one to do that. I will now go and wonder, ‘Have I just stolen it all off Douglas Adams?’”

5. The 2003 Iraq War was a comedy turning point

Iannucci names the 2003 Iraq War as a surprising influence on his comedy. He saw it as a war built on no evidence and thought the fact that Prime Minister Tony Blair could take the country into war against great opposition to be “absurd”. He decided his future work should have something to say: “It’s about people’s genuine ideas and beliefs. How do they twist narratives? How do they present us with something that they say is true in a way that tries to convince us, when in fact [it isn’t]?” His anger about it led to him writing The Thick of It. “I wanted to show what does go on behind closed doors.”

6. Many of his The Thick of It plotlines came true

When researching The Thick of It, Iannucci spoke to many people who worked in the political world but he says he was never looking for secrets and scandal. He just wanted to know “the dull stuff: what time does the minister get in? What time does he go home?” He wanted to show the ordinariness of those making extraordinary decisions. Nevertheless, his series somehow became so accurate that those in power thought he’d been fed secret info. “We would make things up based on what we had learned about how [political] life works,” he says. “Once [the episode] went out, we’d get a call saying, ‘How did you know about that?’” He says he once made an episode in which characters come up with five silly policy ideas, and three of them became actual government policy. “Chris Addison [who played Ollie Reeder] came up with the ‘spare room database’, which became the bedroom tax.”

7. Sidney Lumet is his filmmaking hero

In making his TV shows and films, Iannucci says he wants people to get lost in his story rather than notice his directing technique. For a masterclass in how to do that he looks to Sidney Lumet, director of films like Dog Day Afternoon, Network and 12 Angry Men. “No one film is like the other,” he says. “They’re all being told with this voice that is not saying, ‘Hey, look at me, I’m the director’. It’s basically saying, ‘Look, this is the story.’ It’s the commitment to the story and to the performance.” He says, like Lumet, he likes to rehearse with his actors for a long time before shooting. “I’ve always done it… I want to get to the reality, the rawness.”

8. The Thick of It couldn’t be made now

Iannucci says he’s often asked if he’ll make another comedy skewering the current political landscape. He says he doesn’t think there’s much to satirise now. “[The Thick of It] was from a golden time when there were rules in politics,” he says. “In each episode you’d show how the rules were bent and sometimes broken. But if there are no rules… if a presidential candidate can say, ‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters’ and get elected, or if someone can stand up in Parliament and say, ‘Yes, this does break international law but only in a very specific and limited way’ – if people are saying there are no rules anymore then where do you start?”

9. The Death of Stalin was partly about Putin

In 2017, Iannucci made The Death of Stalin, a comedy about a farcical scrabble for power after the sudden and unexpected death of Joseph Stalin. It was banned in Russia, with the Russian Ministry of Culture saying it was “of no artistic merit”. John Wilson wonders if Iannucci would consider making a film about President Putin. Iannucci says he would not, partly because he feels he’s already made it. “The Death of Stalin was before Donald Trump was even a nominee for President,” he says. “I detected not just in Putin, but in the likes of Berlusconi, Erdogan in Turkey, and then Trump, these people who arrived through a democratic vote but are clearly not that interested in democracy. So rather than the obvious tyrant, the bad guy with ‘Evil’ written across his head, it’s about the people who disguise themselves as democrats but are there to manipulate the rules."

Listen to Armando Iannucci on This Cultural Life