Pleased To Veep You

Armando Iannucci has arguably been the most influential figure in British comedy over the past 20 years. Variously acting as creator, writer, producer and director, he has had a major input into such iconic shows as The Day Today, I’m Alan Partridge and The Thick Of It, the latter of which gave us one of the greatest UK TV characters ever in Malcolm Tucker, the uniquely profane press secretary played by Peter Capaldi.

Tucker and several other Thick Of It characters were relocated to Washington for the 2009 film In The Loop, for which Iannucci and his co-writers received an Oscar nomination. Of late, Iannucci has turned his attention to American politics, and the second season of his sitcom Veep – which revolves around fictional Vice-President Selina Meyer, played by Seinfeld star Julia Louis Dreyfus – is about to commence on Sky Atlantic.
It is a brilliant addition to an already glittering CV, providing a real insight into US politics, as well as being wickedly funny, full of stinging observations, barbed one-liners and, yes, some ingenious swearing.
In a busy year, Iannucci also co-wrote the hit movie Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa, which gave a further outing to another of the great British comedy characters. Iannucci’s outstanding career was recognised in 2012 with an OBE, which resulted in a bizarre Twitter row with Tony Blair’s former press secretary, Alastair Campbell, on whom Malcolm Tucker appears to be based.
Campbell criticised Iannucci for “joining the establishment he claims to deride.” He then added, “Three little letters can have more impact than you realise”, to which Iannucci retorted, “WMD”.
All of this and more was on the agenda when Hot Press spoke to Iannucci recently ahead of the second series of Veep.

PAUL NOLAN: In the new series of Veep, Selina experiences a boost in her popularity while her party has some poor results in the mid-term elections. Having been elected on a tidal wave of hype, Obama has had a rough time of it lately. Are people’s expectations too high sometimes?
ARMANDO IANNUCCI: He was at one point promising that tides would be reversed, and global warming would go away, wasn’t he? When you start making those claims, unfortunately the more prosaic reality is going to hit. There is a bit of that. I think in America there’s also this disillusion with government generally, in that it’s not getting anything done. The system there relies on people compromising, there’s no one body that has absolute power. But if people refuse to compromise – which is what they’re doing now – nothing gets done. It’s just a wasteland of nothing, and that’s what’s frustrating the public.
Presumably you based the show around the Vice-President because the VP has more of a back seat role, and therefore there’s plenty of comedic potential.
But he also has quite a bit of influence. That’s the thing about the Vice President’s role – it’s not defined. It’s only defined by the President, who can give you as much access and influence as he likes, or not. So George Bush gave Dick Cheney lots of power in his first administration, but when he went into Iraq and it backfired and so on, he gradually took it away. Which for me makes it more interesting, cos it gives you that sense where, in America – the land where it’s all about coming first – wandering around with a job description that says you’re number two is a bit of a slight.
On the other hand, you could be number one at any time...
Exactly. So everyone does have to be nice to you. There’s a sort of so near and yet so far quality, where you’re right next to the president, but you don’t quite know what the president is up to. It’s a mixture of hope and frustration.
Does making the character a woman just add an extra layer of complication?
I think it does. We did it because we didn’t want it to look like an impression of anyone, like it was Al Gore or Dick Cheney. So let’s make it forward looking rather than backward looking. And then of course, once you’ve written that role, you then think, we now need a very good comedy actress to play it. We tried not to make it about being a woman politician, but we do recognise that being a woman in politics, you’re analysed in a different way.
Was Julia Louis Dreyfus someone you had in mind early on?
We didn’t have anyone in mind, but then when we thought, ‘Right, this is real, we’ve got to cast this now’, she was the first person I saw, and we hit it off instantly. I didn’t look for anyone else. It’s several things – it’s not just her experience and her instinctive talent as a comedian, but also, strangely enough, having had such a high profile for the last 10 or 15 years, she kind of knows what Selina goes through, whenever Selina walks into a crowd. She knows she has to keep smiling and be nice to everyone, and just grin and bear it. Generally be absolutely delighted to speak to people. So she kind of has an insight into Selina’s predicament.
It’s another side to her from Seinfeld, which was a purely social thing. In Veep she has to have authority at certain times. But she does it brilliantly.
Yes, and the second season is all about pushing that even further. Giving her responsibility, and seeing how that responsibility impacts on her emotionally and politically. And actually, her coming to terms with the kind of life that she wants to live, and what that does to her privately, and to those that she works with and so on.
In terms of themes, one that’s everywhere at the moment is the financial crisis, and another big one in America is the rise of Tea Party extremists. Did you consider at any point working those in?
Funnily enough our third season, which we’re about to start shooting, is seeing Selina going all around America, and that’s when we are looking at bigger issues, like the South, oil, gun control, abortion etc. We’re looking at the life outside of Washington in the third season. But as season two progresses, it starts looking at those. There’s a big financial fall and a government shutdown later on.
Have you considered doing a project based around the financial crisis?
Veep is taking up all of my time at the moment, so it’s hard to look beyond it. I am keen to look at that world of new information and information exchange, and how these are the new oligarchs really. The Googles and the Apples and the Facebooks and so on, and where that’s going. I think that’s kind of interesting to look at.
Chris Morris directs a couple of episodes of this season of Veep.
Yeah, I can’t do everything, and I directed a lot of the first season. But I wanted to have a bit more of a clearer head to look at the whole thing on the second season, so I just got people in who knew my style. People I’d worked with before, and who understood the voice of the show, so that we could be collaborative. Chris also directed one in the first series as well.
Is he working on anything himself at the moment? He’s been very quiet lately.
He’s always working on something, but he’s always very vague as to what it is (laughs).
When it comes to the essential difference between The Thick Of It and Veep, it seemed in Westminster, the main enemy was the media. In Washington, it seems to be the political process itself.
Politics now works on this bizarre 24 hours a day system, where there’s no time to think and assess, it’s all about response. As with most journalism as well now, because we’ve a website to fill, a blog to keep doing, a Podcast to make. There’s very little time to stand back and analyse, and that’s why I think a lot of politics seems to be just stumbling from one thing to another, trying to think of how to deal with it. That’s what I suppose the programmes are partly saying. In a sense, it doesn’t really matter what party you’re in or what your beliefs are, fundamentally you’ll just be waking up to a new thing that you have to deal with that day. And good luck to you.
But it does seem the labyrinthine nature of politics in the US is much more severe.
It’s impossible to get anything done unless both sides agree, so that’s the problem. And yet you’ve got all these people in Washington who are paid lots of money, so they’ve got to look like they’re doing something. A lot of politicians in America, in the House of Representatives and in the Senate, introduce bills knowing that they don’t stand a hope in hell of getting past. But they introduce them, and put a lot of work into them, because they then want to go back to their state and say, ‘I introduced this bill’. It’s a strange form of finger-twiddling going on, where people have not really got anything to do, so they’re just making noise. It’s very, very strange.
Have you had any notable US politicians say they’re fans of the show?
Joe Biden had lunch with Julia Louis Dreyfus, and his office all introduced themselves as the show’s characters. It was, ‘Hello, I’m the Vice President’s Dan’ and all that sort of thing. So I know that it has a decent following. I don’t know what to make of that!
I saw the Alan Partridge movie recently, and when I first interviewed you in 2003, you said you couldn’t really imagine yourself going back to the character. But he seems to be irresistible.
I know, but he just always made me laugh, that’s the thing. And we did leave him for about seven or eight years, but he still seems to just live in the back of our heads. There’s always some new aspect to the character. I think because he’s aged as we’ve aged, therefore there’s a whole new set of experiences he’s had since we last saw him. It’s kind of like he’s renewing himself in a way – it’s like Dr Who but played by the same actor. Alan himself is regenerating (laughs).
You must have been pretty pleased with the success of the film.
Yeah, we were fairly nervous, because it had been such a long time that you can’t tell whether there is an audience still, or if there’s a whole new generation who just don’t know who Alan Partridge is. So it was interesting.
You’ve always kept the quality control very high whenever you’ve revisited him. Even over the last few years, Mid-Morning Matters and the TV specials have been superb.
Oh, absolutely. We would be the first ones to beat ourselves up if it wasn’t good enough, because every time we take Alan out of his box, we don’t want it to look like we’re just flogging him to death. We want to show by the nature of the work we’re doing that it’s justified.
There was a significant Irish involvement in the film, with Declan Lowney directing and Colm Meaney acting. Was Colm Meaney’s character always intended to be Irish?
No, at one point he was Welsh, and then he was Irish. I mean, Malcolm Tucker was never meant to be Scottish, it’s just that Peter Capaldi got the gig cos he’s very good, and he just happened to be Scottish.
One of the things I liked about the film was that the reality of a hostage situation actually intrudes. At one point Alan is watching television and he just zones out due to sleep deprivation.
We thought we’d play it out for real, rather than look for comic moments for the hostage scene. We did get the police in, and we got people who’d been involved in sieges and asked them what happened, what’s the procedure, who’s got the responsibility for doing this, how do you try and resolve it, etc. We thought that was good information to have as we were writing it. We felt we mustn’t stray from that, we mustn’t introduce an element that is there to make the plot work. We must stick to what does happen, and Alan has to deal with it that way.
The hour-long Thick Of It special last year, which took the form of hearings from the fictional Goolding Inquiry, had elements of both the Hutton and Leveson Inquiries...
It was touching on the inquiries culture, where the attitude is, ‘If there’s a problem, let’s have an inquiry’, as if somehow that deals with the problem. I was pleased with how it came out actually. There was a particular dilemma we set ourselves, which was, they’re all on camera, they’re all on show, none of them can be themselves, and they’re all sitting down and static. How can we make a 60-minute drama out of that, and have it be very funny? That was the challenge, so it was all about making each piece of evidence actually comedically move the story along. Everyone’s performance was great, but Malcolm being caught out was just exceptional.
You could see on Peter Capaldi’s face, he was going through mental somersaults to try and explain the situation.
I know, it was extraordinary. I was directing that episode, and I remember on the day thinking it was alright, but I can’t remember at the time thinking ‘Oh my God that’s amazing’, because you’re looking at 101 other things. It was only when I was in the edit, I was just absolutely mesmerised, and I thought it was one of the most extraordinary pieces of acting I’d seen. He basically did nothing and yet everything with his face, for a long time (laughs).
What did you think of Leveson? Was it a bit strange seeing Steve Coogan called as
a witness?
(Laughs) I don’t know, I suppose the boundaries between reality and artifice start blurring a little bit, but in this day and age… The thing about Leveson that wasn’t really picked up on was just how arrogant the newspaper proprietors were when they were up in front of them. They were really immature and contemptuous of the whole thing, even though it was a judicial inquiry and they were under oath and so on.
And you’re not just talking about Rupert Murdoch?
No, all of them. It was just an air of, ‘Well, if you’re going to ask me something, I may as well answer it’. In a really offhand manner. I found it quite enlightening really. It wasn’t something that was widely analysed, but it was something I noticed as it went on.
There wasn’t really much to the report in the end. It was sort of, ‘Well, on the one hand there’s this, but on the other there’s that…’
There never is (laughs).
Were you surprised to see Peter Capaldi being chosen as the new Dr Who?
When David Tennant stepped down, I wondered if Peter might be asked. It was interesting that Steven Moffat said that he did think of Peter, and then three or four years later came back to him. He’s such a good actor. In person he’s a very genial, amiable and gentle kind of guy, very funny, but he can deliver these dramatic and mesmerising performances as well. So it’s really going to be quite a finely-tuned Dr Who; it can be funny and yet it can be magisterial, which will be great to see.
Speaking of great actors, James Gandolfini passed away this year. He was excellent in In The Loop.
In real life, a very fun guy. Again, very gentle, and you realise that Tony Soprano is just a part that he plays, and he’s a very good actor. Very much into physical and visual comedy – he was always looking for the funny angle on things. Strangely enough, the last film he shot, which just came out, is one he did with Julia Louis Dreyfus. Julia’s been saying it will be a revelation to lots of people, how funny he is, and what a good comedy actor he is.
You got nominated for a screenwriting Oscar for In The Loop. How did you find the whole experience?
Well, it was delightful, it was a huge laugh – but on the other hand we felt completely honoured. Part of you thinks, this isn’t real, and another part of you thinks, we did well, didn’t we? We should be here! Let’s enjoy it. What’s funny is that because it was for writing, there was a group of us, and the distributor had laid on a stretch limo to take us to the ceremony. So we were thinking, this is hilarious. But then we thought, hang on, anyone who hires a stretch limo anywhere around the world, does it to pretend to be doing what we’re actually doing – which is going to the Oscars (laughs).
Did you have A-list stars coming up to you all evening, saying ‘I love your work’?
No, there wasn’t that, alas. I was in a lift with Sandra Bullock, who had just won. I said ‘Congratulations’ and she said, ‘Thank you!’ (laughs)
Were you surprised by Alastair Campbell’s reaction to your OBE? He’s always seemed to have a somewhat jaundiced view of The Thick Of It.
Well, it was very strange. What annoyed me was that he seemed to think Malcolm Tucker was the show, and that my views were Malcolm Tucker’s views, but also that Malcolm Tucker was a good thing. Whereas I think that Malcolm Tucker is an appalling creature, and my views aren’t the same as his. But also, Alastair Campbell, former press secretary and director of communications for the prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, seemed to regard himself as not part of the establishment. More than that, it was just me on a Saturday morning tweeting him back, and then going out for a walk, and not realising that it had caused some kind of media meltdown (laughs).
Of course, Labour have been replaced by the Conservatives and the Lib Dems. Before the last election, the Lib Dems seemed in danger of being hip for about five minutes, with yourself, Brian Eno and Ian Hislop among those expressing different levels of support. But is there some disillusion with them now too?
There is. I think there’s just been a disappointment that, given they’ve had this once in a lifetime chance to have some say in government, it’s been more about trying to not rock the boat of the coalition, to show that coalitions can work. As opposed to trying to stop some quite destructive legislation going through. From my perspective anyway, that’s what’s been the disappointment really. But I’m never going to say who I’m voting for again.
I’d imagine you felt a bit edgy about that.
I did. It was only very last minute, and I genuinely felt, well, wouldn’t it be good if this age-old toing and froing of government stopped, and there was possibly a hung parliament. So I just thought, anything that takes us to that might be quite a good thing. I mean, we’re going to have another coalition – it might be a Labour-Lib Dem one. If you look at the arithmetic, it just doesn’t add up (to an overall majority). There’s no one party that now has a sufficiently consistent level of support for them to be confident about getting a majority.
But the more serious thing from my perspective is just how fewer young people are participating in politics. How many young people are deciding not to vote, almost as a conscious reaction to how they see politics. That’s a much more worrying trend, and that’s something that all the parties are going to have to look at and try and address. Because at the moment, from a young voter’s point of view, I can see what they mean. It looks so bizarre and so part of another world that doesn’t seem to connect to day-to-day life. Why would you want to take part in it? And I think that’s going to be the big problem – the parties are actually going to run out of voters quite soon.

Veep Season 2 starts on Sky Atlantic on October 16 at 10.30pm