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