'Fight, Fight, Fight'! - Comedy legend Armando Iannucci calls for originality in BAFTA lecture

The glut of crass and unimaginative comedy currently on television in the UK can be disheartening, particularly for a country which prides itself on its sense of humour. At the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Annual Lecture earlier this month Armando Iannucci, brilliant co-creator of The Day Today, The Thick of It, Time Trumpet and Alan Partridge, spoke out as a beacon of hope for creativity, lodged in the toxic swamp of Russell Howards and Frankie Boyles.

He repeated the outlines of his lecture on Radio 4’s Media Show with Steve Hewlett and to John Plunkett on the Guardian’s media podcast. His main point throughout was that complacency at the BBC will strangle new comedy.

He urged the British to follow the example of American broadcasters, such as HBO whose profits and existence rely on creativity to drive subscription. The BBC’s license fee, therefore, ‘will be unworkable in ten years or sooner’ he claimed to John Plunkett (Guardian Podcast) as viewing is more complicated now and a stable fee instils a complacency in the BBC who still think of themselves as ‘the only place in town’ when it comes to comedy.

New challenges, however, are now coming from Channel 4, ITV(who now have a comedy commissioner for the first time) and Sky (who Iannucci chose over the BBC for his new Alan Partridge series).

Unlike commercial broadcasters, he claimed the BBC can get tangled in its own thick bureaucracy and threatened with political duty. Broadcasters need complete political independence as politicians are separate from society, they ‘have no idea what the average member of the public culturally consumes...they are specially bred adminadroids’, he said at the lecture. This was demonstrated in Jeremy Hunt’s reasoning behind his support for the Murdoch’s BSkyB bid; seeing only ‘the cash nexus’ and business opportunity, entirely blind to the necessity of competition and diversity for creativity in programming.

 

David Cameron was so aware of Hunt’s poor reputation that he has since replaced him in the reshuffle with Maria Miller, who, as a political non-entity, will have a clean slate on which to deal with Lord Justice Leveson’s report into the practices of the press. A report which, if comments on exclusive early copies are to be believed, will seriously damage the press’s ability for imagination.

Iannucci sketched out an adventurous business model for the BBC where they expand overseas, sell to foreign markets and bring the profits back to invest in originality and risk. He urged the media not to treat the BBC as a body exempt from money making, profit should not be a ‘weasel word’ but a means to a culturally beneficial end.

Ultimately was asking for those in power to fight for imaginative programming, ‘we are at our best not in committee by at our most idiosyncratic’. It was a speech of very high ambition, clearly from the perspective of a writer and not a pragmatic businessman. Nevertheless, his argument must be compelling for both the left, who want to see the BBC expand, and the right, who want it to stop being a financial burden. Regardless of the politics, it is hard to argue about comedy, originality and imagination with a man of his stature and weight in British culture.  

 (NB. There’s a generous quote from ‘Ketmaniac’)