Armando Iannucci

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Armando Iannucci (born 1964) is a Scottish comedian, satirist and radio producer. He has produced, hosted and written extensively for television comedy.

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Career

Iannucci was born in Glasgow. His father is from Naples, Italy, while his mother is from Glasgow. He was educated at St Aloysius' College in Glasgow, the University of Glasgow, and University College, Oxford, where he read English, and abandoned graduate work on "17th-century religious language with particular reference to Milton's Paradise Lost" to pursue his broadcasting career.

Iannucci has an extensive history in British radio and television. First receiving widespread fame in the early 1990s as the producer for On the Hour and then The Day Today, he received critical acclaim for both his own talents as a writer and a producer, and for first bringing together such comics as Chris Morris, Richard Herring, Stewart Lee and Steve Coogan. The members of this group went on to work on separate projects and create a new comedy 'wave' pre-New Labour: Morris went on to create Brass Eye, Blue Jam and the Chris Morris Music Show; Stewart Lee and Richard Herring created Fist of Fun and This Morning with Richard Not Judy, with Lee also recently co-writing the controversial Jerry Springer - The Opera; and, perhaps most famously, Steve Coogan's character Alan Partridge, who first appeared in On the Hour, has featured in multiple spin-off series.

Despite his involvement in many facets of British comedy as a producer, writer and performer, Iannucci has remained relatively unknown amongst the British public. His recent projects include Smokehammer, a web-based project with Chris Morris, the short-lived topical satire Gash, as well as three programmes for BBC Radio 3, including Mobiles Off!, a 20-minute segment on classical concert-going etiquette. As well as television and radio work, he also wrote a book in 1997 entitled Facts and Fancies, which was turned into a BBC Radio 4 series called Scraps in which Iannucci read aloud various stories.

Most recently, Iannucci has written The Thick of It, a political satire-cum-Whitehall farce for BBC Four. It starred Chris Langham as a New-Labour MP being manipulated by a cynical Press Officer, played by Peter Capaldi and based on Tony Blair's former Press Secretary Alastair Campbell. It was described by critics on BBC Two's Newsnight Review as a modern-day counterpart to Yes, Minister, which Iannucci championed on the BBC's Britain's Best Sitcom competition. He has also participated as a panelist on Radio 4s The News Quiz, having produced the programme earlier in his career.

In January 2006 he took the post of News International Visiting Professor of Broadcast Media at the University of Oxford<ref>University of Oxford, 2005. "Armando Iannucci to lecture at Oxford on British comedy"</ref>, where he has delivered a series of four lectures under the title "British Comedy - Dead Or Alive?", saying in his introduction to the series that "It used to be that you went to Oxford to get into comedy. Now you get into comedy to go to Oxford".

Iannucci has won two Sony Radio Awards and three British Comedy Awards. In 2003, he was listed in The Observer as one of the 50 funniest acts in British comedy.

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Filmography

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Television

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Radio

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Bibliography

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Print

  • Alan Partridge: Every Ruddy Word by Steve Coogan, Peter Baynham, Armando Iannucci, Patrick Marber (Michael Joseph, 2003) ISBN 0718146786
  • Facts and Fancies (Michael Joseph, 1997) ISBN 0718139518
  • Weekly newspaper column in The Observer
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Audiobooks

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References

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External links

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