Armando Iannucci

Armando Iannucci

Date of birth: 30-11-1963
Half-Italian, half-Scottish Armando Iannucci abandoned his Oxford graduate studies in English to take up a career in broadcasting - and has since become one of the most important catalysts in bringing comedy to the screen.

He started his career in the early Nineties as a radio producer, working on The Mary Whitehouse Experience, Quote... Unquote, The News Quiz and On The Hour. This spoof news show transferred to TV as The Day Today and spawned Alan Partridge, whose award-winning shows on TV and radio Iannucci produced and co-wrote.

Iannucci has also fronted his own satirical shows, including The Saturday (or Friday) Night Armistice on BBC Two, his self-titled show on Channel 4 and his Radio 4 show Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive. He is also a regular on Radio 4 panel shows such as The News Quiz and The 99p Challenge and has worked on a number of Radio 3 shows, because of his passion for classical music.

More recently, he created the political satire The Thick Of It, about a beleaguered Minister trying to cope with the pressure imposed by his army of spin doctors, and the spoof clip show Time Trumpet.

In 2006, he was made Visiting Professor of Broadcast Media at Oxford University, and was appointed as a BBC executive to develop new comedy shows.

He is also a columnist for The Observer, and a collection of his earlier newspaper work for the Telegraph and the Guardian was published in a 1997 collection, Facts And Fancies, which was also adapted for a Radio 4 series.

Iannucci has also directed a number of TV commercials, for clients incluting Nationwide.

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© PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Pandemonium by Armando Iannucci

Review of the cod-Shakespearean Covid satire at Soho Theatre

Boris Johnson would like to see himself as a hero of Greek myth, though he sits more squarely in tragedy, with the qualities that made him – frivolous bonhomie, mainly – proving his undoing when the fates test him.

It is a notion that Armando Iannucci’s Pandemonium grasps with both hands. Originating from a mock epic poem he wrote a couple of years ago, this is a cod Shakespearean/Restoration comedy retelling of the weak, chaotic, self-enriching, rule-flouting response to Covid that exposed how inadequate Johnson and his similarly feeble acolytes proved when confronted with a deadly serious issue.

As the ongoing Covid inquiry daily proves – so timely for this production – their cosplaying at politics as if it were some Oxford Union game proved a woefully lethal liability.

This we already know – which is something of a setback for a satire that can make few new points. But through Iannucci’s deliciously flowery but pointed, anger-fuelled writing and Patrick Marber’s spritely direction, Pandemonium, boasts the tone of a particularly pungent political cartoon. It can be crude, juvenile even, but always lands on its targets. And god knows they are big enough.

Never underestimate the simple power of giving someone a dumb nickname, such as Carrie Hisbaby, Jacob Rhesus Monkey, or Less Trust, who withers like an evil Oz witch when confronted with the simple question: ‘Have you costed any of this?’

Paul Chahidi – best known as vicar Francis Seaton in This Country - takes the lead as Orbis Rex, the ‘World King’ with messy hair and delusions of divine provenance. He’s dithering when we first meet him, torn over whether he wants Albion to be ‘free from Europe’s clammy grip’, his decision based not on what’s best for the country but what will make him look best. In a parody of Hamlet’s soliloquy – ‘to be in, or not to be in’ – he wonders if, by opposing his troubles, he might ‘sort of’ end them. 

The indecision continues. When his scientific advisors are suggesting what to do in the first flushes of the pandemic, they besiege him: ‘Do we lock down now… or is your brain made of gravy.’

Orbis sees his battle against the Covid monster as part Godzilla, part Agincourt, him as Henry V heroically leading a volley of vaccines, rather than arrows, into the body of the beast. Reality may differ.

The show has an impish, mischievous feel with a versatile supporting cast who are, to woman, strong, lively performers. But special credit must go to Amalia Vitale, who delivers a brilliant physical comedy performance as Matt ‘Hemlock’, an oleaginous beast from the slime pit trying to ape human behaviour. While Natasha Jayetileke, below, portrays ‘Rich Sooner’ as a tiny goblin type, bewitching the PM, and a very imperious Suella Bullyboy.

It’s all rather fun, though the originality is largely in the presentation rather than the essence, with even Iannucci’s keen brain unable to find a fresh commentary on the basics of the pandemic response.

And while his attitude to the feckless leaders is bitterly comic, he does shy from not incalculable human cost of the virus – with a couple of sincere interludes reminding us of the real heroes of the NHS and everyday folk – and the tragedy of ‘saying goodbye by broadband’ when funerals were forbidden. 

Elsewhere, there are a couple of lulls that are unforced errors, when the show feeling like a sketch that’s got a bit too big for its boots. And the climactic descent into Hell of the protagonists may be wishful thinking, but it’s a tonal change from the rest of the show.

So Pandemonium is flawed, but at a time when Johnson and his media cronies are trying to rewrite the narrative that they ‘got the big calls right’, this is a reminder that no, no they didn’t. 

• Pandemonium runs at Soho Theatre until January 13, although the run is sold out

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Published: 12 Dec 2023

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