The BBC celebrated one of its own on Monday night. Armando Iannucci was treated to a fawning retrospective by Alan Yentob, and it opened with a crass piece of TV trickery. ‘Armando Iannucci is not an easy man to pin down,’ said Yentob, as if his quarry were a master criminal or an international terrorist. ‘For ten years, I’ve been trying to talk to one of Britain’s greatest comic talents.’ Iannucci, in his heyday, would have enjoyed dissecting this sort of bombastic hyperbole. This week, he connived in the hoax.
Yentob ran through Iannucci’s CV. He was raised by affluent Glaswegians (plenty of colour photographs suggesting a comfortable income), and after studying at Oxford he moved to BBC radio. His breakthrough show, On The Hour, mocked the smug, elitist culture of news journalism. And the TV adaptation, The Day Today, is still worth watching. The anchorman, a Jeremy Paxman replica, speaks in a lordly voice-of-God manner, and he peppers his reports with daft straplines. ‘Wake up and smell the news.’ His presentation is deadly serious, but the stories are crazy. ‘The Bank of England reports that the pound has been stolen.’ The anchorman mocks the war on drugs by exposing the ‘scandal’ of undercover dentists who operate at night while being harassed by cops with torches. ‘It’s going to take more than a big syringe to cure Britain’s mouth.’ When the show aired in 1994, it seemed as fresh, original and inventive as anything since Not the Nine O’Clock News.
As a follow-up, Iannucci chose a different target: Westminster spin doctors and the notorious Malcolm Tucker. We got an example of Tucker’s invective during the opening credits. ‘Feet off the furniture, you Oxbridge twat,’ he snarls at a junior employee. Some of Iannucci’s admirers found Tucker a rather predictable and childish creation. His overuse of the f-word became a national institution, as did his perverse habit of threatening male staff with various forms of scrotal mutilation. Iannucci revealed that these tedious motifs were supplied by a special ‘swearing consultant’. This expert earned a handsome wage for simply typing naughty words onto BBC notepaper. The Thick of It always had a credibility problem. A dangerous pest like Malcolm Tucker wouldn’t last a week in any normal workplace, let alone in Whitehall. Bullied staff would run to the tabloids. Undercover hacks would record his foul-mouthed ravings. CCTV footage would be leaked to documentary-makers, and so on. Tucker would be sacked, arrested, jailed and deprived of his pension.
But the show’s popularity suggests that the myth of Malcolm Tucker addressed a profound need. Viewers wanted to believe that they were ruled by violent, self-serving yobs and that our political culture excludes anyone with a sense of duty or public service because the profession is full of control freaks who want to seize power and crush the weak. This is an influential distortion, and its effect is to corrode trust in Westminster and to make the marginalised feel angry and helpless. The same method is used by leftie activists who pose as saviours by convincing the poor that the world is set up to exploit them. The true purpose of Tucker was not to illuminate democracy but to sabotage it.
Iannucci followed this up with a feature version, In The Loop, which attracted the interest of Hollywood and led to a long-running series, Veep, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus. The shift in Iannucci’s choice of targets is revealing. In The Day Today, he attacked the arrogance and pomposity of TV journalism. In Veep, he mocked a clueless activist struggling to cope as the president’s deputy. Weaker targets, feebler satire. Next, he made a glib, heartless costume drama, The Death of Stalin, which looked like The Thick of It with gold epaulettes. A sample of its satirical quality was offered: Jason Isaacs, as General Zhukov, bursts into a room and observes a colleague’s hairstyle. ‘Did Coco Chanel take a shit on your head?’ Another classic from the swearing consultant, perhaps.
The true purpose of Tucker was not to illuminate democracy but to sabotage it
Yentob narrated Iannucci’s story as if recounting the deeds of a mighty Pharaoh. ‘Around this time,’ he said, ‘he got an insight into his own process, and he was diagnosed with ADHD.’ The great satirist failed to spot that every ‘ADHD symptom’ is simply an aspect of ordinary human behaviour.
In 2020, a new challenge appeared. ‘When Covid struck, he felt compelled to respond.’ Borrowing from Paradise Lost, Iannucci wrote Pandemonium – ‘an epic version of the pandemic’ – in which Britain is led by a Tory named Orbis Rex (‘world king’ in Latin). Iannucci explained his goal in attacking Boris and his boffins. ‘Not to treat them like clowns or buffoons but to hold them up to a higher standard.’ A snippet was recited by one of Iannucci’s minions. Boris: ‘We shall put on our armour or, if none is available, improvise with sheets and cladding. Or with cloth barriers and plastic bags. Or with paper.’
The satirical element here is hard to spot. Pandemonium ran briefly at the Soho Theatre (capacity 150) before sinking without trace. This was Iannucci’s last known attempt at satire. Yentob finished by covering his adaptation of Dr Strangelove, which opened in the West End last autumn. Kubrick’s nightmarish caricature was transformed by Iannucci into a flimsy sitcom about incompetent warmongers bickering in the Pentagon. A true satirist never tires of finding new egos to puncture. When Iannucci saw the subtitle of the show, ‘the master and his art’, he should have run a mile.
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