The comedian and writer Armando Iannucci’s dark eyes widen as he
recalls the day when one of his attempts at getting fit came to an abrupt
halt: “I left the gym and never went back after my towel was stolen while I
was in the shower. When I asked someone there why it had happened, they said
it was ‘because I was on the telly’.”
Towel-stealing is just the sort of muffin-headed celeb worship that leaves
Iannucci, the creator of The Thick of It and co-creator of I’m
Alan Partridge, incredulous. “That towel’s probably on eBay now as a
damp relic,” he says, laughing. Vapid fame, pointless politics and media
fabrications are all prime targets for his satirical scripts. And this
weekend, at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, he is picking
away at these bêtes noires, exploring why they can leave us
feeling spiritually empty, frustrated and angry.
It is serious stuff for someone who has been so instrumental in crafting
modern British comedy. Iannucci, 43, first achieved prominence producing
Radio 4’s seminal news spoof, On The Hour, in 1991. He
fostered a pantheon of talent that includes Chris Morris, Stewart Lee,
Patrick Marber and Steve Coogan. But he hardly oozes celebrity. He is small,
contained and dresses with the tidy indifference of a self-effacing
academic. You would be pushed to spot him in a crowd, unless you caught that
cawing voice, mild Glaswegian mixed with the singsong Italian meter of his
Neopolitan dad. The most animated thing about Iannucci is his eyes, which
dance beneath beetle brows. Every now and then he flashes a slightly manic
smile.
And here I am, doing the very thing he despises: being a media person busily
perpetuating our culture’s obsession with superficial appearances. It’s what
lies beneath – our neglected, distorted quest for depth and meaning, that
interests Iannucci far more. He has long flirted with matters of the soul:
he was brought up as a Jesuit schoolboy and in his early teens seriously
considered training for the priesthood. What happened? “I guess I just moved
on,” he laughs. Nevertheless, before finally deciding that his true vocation
lay in comedy writing and performance, he conducted postgraduate research at
Oxford into the religious language of Milton’s poetry.
Now that our culture has sold its soul to celebrity and surface, there’s not
much left of us beneath, he explains, illustrating the point with a parable
about his foray into adult swimming classes. “I used to be a terrible
swimmer, but eight years ago I saw an advert for an adult improvers course
and went every Tuesday. It was mostly middle-aged, middle-management men who
were used to being in control. They had to stand around without their suits,
being practically naked, being bad at something. Most of the men couldn’t
hack it, and the numbers dwindled.” Iannucci stayed the course though, and
managed to hang on to his towel.
Don’t mention the D-word
He has stuck with his pursuit of spiritual insight, too. Although he lost his
Roman Catholic faith as an undergraduate (he read English at University
College, Oxford, in the late 1980s) and no longer prays, his religious sense
lingers. “I’m interested in theology, or in people who are involved in it,”
he says. “I was particularly into Thomas Merton, an American Cistercian monk
who wrote against the Vietnam war in the Sixties. Merton was also into
mysticism, into seeking the common ground between, say Christianity and
Buddhism, that they all link at a basic level, beyond dogma. I’ve arrived at
that idea myself,” he says.
Isn’t all that Sixties-type spiritual exploration rather old hat in a world
where everyone’s reading Richard Dawkins? Iannucci bridles at the D-word. “I
do feel spiritually dislocated from this life. But I simply can’t agree with
the Dawkins thing and all his arguments that religion is basically
irrational. So what? Isn’t a lot of what we do irrational? We’re all so
interested in design and music, but really that’s just all patterns and
different sets of noises. And then there’s football. It’s purposeless. Just
a bunch of men running around being watched by thousands of other men. It
says a lot about the value of pointlessness that all these things are quite
good.”
As he pursues this point, Iannucci becomes animated, leaning across the table
and fidgeting with my interview notes. “Spirituality is a fundamental human
thing, as much as imagination or conscience,” he says. “It just does not go
away, this sense of need. It gets moved around into different shapes. There
will always be manifestations of religion. People need to feel that they are
watched or maybe judged and they have a need to find other people who think
and fear the same things. It’s about seeking meaning; people still do things
like go to church services or confession, but increasingly people go to the
gym or see therapists or go on Facebook.”
Facebook is, in Iannucci’s eyes, rather an abomination. At the festival, he is
discussing the fad for superficial self-revelation through blogs and social
networking websites. But, he admits, “I have never been on Facebook. People
ask to be my Facebook friend, and I don’t know what it means or how to
respond.”
For such a media figure, Iannucci is a reticent social networker. Married to
Rachael, 43, with three children under 14, he says that his son laughs at
the obsolete mobile phone he lugs around. YouTube is high on the Iannucci
hate pile, too. “I find it quite depressing the whole thing of people
putting pointless stuff up for the whole world to see. Things start becoming
unsurprising. You can type anything into Google and YouTube and see
something – stick in, say, ‘desk-juggling’, into a search and you’ll find
someone doing it.”
Perhaps it was this unworldly pensiveness that inspired the BBC last year to
invite him, along with the corporation’s chairman Michael Grade, to join a
seminar to “do something” about broadcasting spirituality on the Beeb.
Iannucci seems sceptical. “They called the seminar ‘Taking religion
seriously’, and I think I was asked along because it had the word
‘seriously’ in the title,” he says. “It had been suggested that one
alternative approach might be to treat religion humorously.” Iannucci fears
that mixing his brand of humour with religion would prove sorely
unpalatable, though.
“When you make jokes about religion, you are bound to upset someone. If you
want to look for things that are funny you have got to look at the
contradictions in how people behave. For example, religious fundamentalists
in the United States are antiabortionists, but then they are pro-hanging. I
find that funny. Adam Curtis’s documentary, The Power of
Nightmares, showed how one fundamentalist Islamic group decided it was
OK to blow up Muslims living in nonMuslim countries because they were
heretics. Then they decided it was OK to blow each other up if they
disagreed. In the end, one guy declared that he had the right to blow up
everyone else in his group. I find that funny as well as chilling. You can’t
expect to come up with nice jokes about religion.”
Iannucci, the inoffensive? But his work is littered with stunts such as The
Day Today’s mock-shock documentaries, which enlisted naive celebrities
to spout nonsense in support of spoof scare-campaigns against paedophiles
and a nonexistent drug called Cake. “I never meant to be edgy. I just set
out to do stuff that I found funny. People will find things funny if you
prod their sensitivities,” he says, jabbing his finger at arm level. “I
don’t know where I learnt to be naughty like that. I wasn’t a naughty
child.”
People want real discussion at real depth
Indeed, like many comics, he’s remarkably unsubversive in the flesh. He even
worries about his diet: three years ago he stopped eating carbs at lunch, as
he is convinced that they sap his energy levels. He’s becoming a small-c
conservative, to boot: he lives in the south Buckinghamshire countryside
with his family, and now, to his evident discomfort, he has his own
Establishment-friendly office at the BBC. “I don’t know whether that’s a
good thing or bad,” he says. “I suppose that rather than dressing up like a
punk and never being admitted into the BBC building, it’s easier to be
allowed in and do the things I want.”
He’s not quite a fully fledged corporation man yet, though. In fact, he’s
clearly overjoyed at the Beeb’s comeuppance over rigging the poll to name
the Blue Peter cat. “That whole business has made people more aware
that these things are more than just harmless tricks,” he says. He hopes
that public disgust at being conned by unreality TV, soundbite politics and
celebrity hype might start some kind of backlash, a campaign for real
information.
“People want real discussion at a real depth,” he says. “We don’t get it any
more in politics. The parties don’t do deep politics; they keep it light and
accessible. I think this makes people frustrated. They get frustrated by
things that they hope will be substantial but turn out to be flimflam.
People are increasingly aware that they are slithering from surface to
surface, from Beckham to rigged TV competitions, and they start to ask,
‘What’s the point of all this?’
“That’s why events like Cheltenham are so well attended. Festivals have become
suddenly popular. People are hungry for substance and unafraid of big
themes. While elsewhere the solid centre disappears from debate, people are
learning to channel their need for mental nutrition into attending events
with real content.”
Uncrowned king of comedy
Armando Iannucci’s comedy credentials stretch back almost two decades. Here
are a few of his TV and radio credits:
1989 The Mary Whitehouse Experience (producer of the topical TV
comedy show)
1991 On The Hour (creator, co-writer and producer of the Radio 4
show)
1994 The Day Today (co-writer, producer of the TV adaptation of
On The Hour)
1995 The Saturday Night Armistice (writer, presenter of the late
night TV show)
1997 I’m Alan Partridge (co-writer, producer, director of
the hit TV comedy)
2005 The Thick Of It (writer and producer of this TV satire of
modern politics)
2006 Time Trumpet (writer of the hit TV comedy series)
Also at The Times Cheltenham Literary Festival . . . Armando Iannucci will
be speaking at the festival this weekend on politics, comedy and reality TV.
For details and to book tickets call 01242 227979; or visit timesonline.co.uk/books
. Readers may also enjoy a range of festival events with a medical slant
. . .
Today: writing medicine Sebastian Faulks ( Human Traces) and
Steve Jones ( Coral) discuss the joys of medical research and the
ways it shapes their work. Tomorrow: fact v fiction Does fact match
fiction? The Times’s Dr Thomas Stuttaford and ambulanceman Tom
Reynolds, author of the blog Blood, Sweat and Tea, join
doc-turned-screenwriter Jed Mercurio to explore the topic. Wednesday:
depression Poet Gwyneth Lewis and author Jeremy Thomas discuss
depression. Thursday: parenting The Times’s psychologist
Tanya Byron offers parents a helping hand with practical advice from a
professional and personal perspective. Next Sunday: epilepsy . . . The
Times’s literary editor Erica Wagner and author Paul Broks discuss the
portrayal of epilepsy in literature and drama, and its power as a fictional
device. . . . and life coaching Can you harness the body’s energy
to be successful in every situation? Voice and acting coach Patsy Rodenburg
believes so.
