The Man Behind Alan Partridge

You might not be that familiar with Armando Iannucci, but chances are that most of your favourite comedy shows can be attributed either directly or indirectly to his influence. A cursory glance at the family tree of contemporary comedy reveals that Steve Coogan, Chris Morris, Patrick Marber, Rebecca Front, Doon McKichan, Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews can trace the moment their careers were kick-started back to either groundbreaking Radio 1 news spoof On The Hour, or its sublime TV spin-off The Day Today, shows on which Iannucci functioned as deviser, writer, performer, producer and de facto director.

However, Iannucci’s most celebrated fictional creation is undoubtedly the über-nerdy East Anglian radio DJ/TV presenter, Alan Partridge. Devised alongside fellow comic conspirators Coogan and Marber – and later developed further by longtime Chris Morris collaborator Peter Baynham – over the past decade Iannucci and co have tracked Partridge’s rapid ascent from the On The Hour sports desk to the lofty heights of his own prime-time TV chat-show, Knowing Me, Knowing You, only for the character to suffer a severe reversal in fortunes and end up residing in an isolated travel tavern, scraping a living doing the graveyard shift for Radio Norwich in I’m Alan Partridge.
Late last year, the Baynham/Coogan/ Iannucci triumvirate once again resurrected the character for a second series of the sitcom, the results of which sharply divided critics and fans alike.
“I think perhaps we left it slightly too late after the first series,” reflects Iannucci one year on. “The character had kind of grown in people’s minds, and there was that huge expectation to follow up the first series, the success of which took us all totally by surprise. So it was a very difficult show to make, and we did torment ourselves as to what the storyline should be, how the new characters would slot in etc etc. I mean, I remember during the recording of it thinking that it seemed very funny, but it felt funny in the way that an episode of Steptoe And Son is funny.
“It’s difficult to remain objective about something when you’re so closely involved with it, but I suspect that in the longterm I’ll come to feel that the second series was more laugh-out-loud funny, more hysterical, but I might just regret the fact that we didn’t push the form along. Maybe we were too aware of what pushes Alan’s buttons, and it became overly self-conscious. But, y’know, it’s horses for courses – you never, ever know how these things are going to pan out.”
Though primarily renowned as a behind-the-scenes operator, Iannucci is no mean performer in his own right, as anyone who caught his magnificent 2001 Channel 4 solo run, The Armando Iannucci Shows, can attest. Criminally underseen at the time of its original broadcast (though due a repeat showing soon), the programme, with its sardonic sketches about assault victims being reunited with their assailants, nursery homes for middle-aged men, and foolproof weight loss programmes (“I just farted two stone!”), was a thematically stunning and stylistically innovative look at how we live our lives in the early 21st century.
“It was a conscious attempt to get away from the Day Today/Saturday Night Armistice news parody stuff,” elaborates Iannucci. “I wanted to do something that was deliberately un-trendy and slightly uncategorisable. And I liked the idea of there being the appearance of an argument running through each episode. I liked that the audience was brought on a sort of imperceptible journey, so that by the end you’re in a place completely different to where you started, but if you did trace it back to the beginning you’d see that there’s been a logical progression.
“I wanted to avoid hitting the audience over the head with the theme, so that it wasn’t like, ‘This week – CARS!’ after which there would be the predictable twelve variations on the one topic. We took a much more subtle approach. Also, I was into the idea of mixing styles, going back and forth between naturalism and a more heightened approach.”
Though usually shunning the often wilfully inflammatory approach favoured by his protégé, the peerless Chris Morris, Iannucci nonetheless courted controversy in early 2002 with Terror’s March Backwards, a one-off satirical special for The Observer which – given that this was a collaboration with the perennially mischievous Brass Eye creator – attracted the inevitable opprobrium from the Daily Mail/Daily Express axis.
“I remember in the months after September 11, Chris and I would meet every so often for a coffee,” recalls Iannucci, “and just pull out stuff from the papers, thinking ‘we should do something on this’. There were certain things we wanted to address, like the whole ‘this changes absolutely everything in world history’ consensus which emerged about five seconds after the event.
“Then there was Blair’s obsession with America against all sensible advice, not to mention Bush saying, ‘This is a new kind of war’ and then just bombing seven shades of shite out of a third world country in the same way every other war has been conducted for the past fifty years. I don’t know, sometimes you just get annoyed at the way the media latches onto one line of thought at the expense of any real debate.”
They say that good satirists, like good doctors, should ideally like to be put of business. Perhaps Iannucci’s finely honed parodic instincts are reason enough not to feel quite so gloomy about a second term of GOP government.

Knowing Me, Knowing You and I’m Alan Partridge: Series 2 are available now on DVD. The Armando Iannucci Shows begins its repeat run on Channel 4 later this month