Armando Iannucci

I always approach watching American television series with a degree of trepidation, when they are good, they are exquisite, yet often they flatter to deceive. I should at this point admit that some of my favourite television of all time and indeed recent times has emanated from the other side of the Atlantic, with HBO often the responsible party.

Now before I get carried away and start helplessly gushing about The Sopranos, The Wire or Curb, it was a recent HBO show with a distinctly British backbone that I started to watch this week. Veep is the latest offering from one of the finest comedy writers and satirists of this generation, Armando Iannucci.

Having written and directed some of the finest programmes of the last two decades, Glasgow-born Iannucci was awarded an OBE this year in the Queen’s birthday honours list. Veep, which is an American incarnation of Iannucci’s’ tried and tested The Thick of It formula marks almost twenty years of his glorious riffs on political matters and figures. In 1994 he made his first indelible mark on our screens as part of the writing team (along with Chris Morris and Steve Coogan) and as producer of The Day Today. A show that may appear slapstick at first glance, much like the radio show On the Hour (also part written by Iannucci) that preceded it and Brasseye after, The Day Today remains one of the most articulate dissections of British news casting to date.

Although Morris is the star of the show, the writing throughout should not be overlooked. It is elegantly nuanced, even down to the ludicrous but inexplicably common nasal tones that the array of reporters speak in. This program too, was the first time a character by the name of Alan Partridge made his way onto our screens, by means of the sports desk. Again Iannucci is rarely credited for Partridge, although he went on to co-produce and co-write the follow-on shows Knowing Me, Knowing you with Alan Partridge and I’m Alan Pardridge also directing the entire second series of the latter.

Perhaps feeling somewhat detached from the brilliant political satire that had elevated his pre-Partridge works to such dizzying heights, Iannucci set about his next landmark project, The Thick of It. A wonderful comedy that featured characters with the same woeful ineptitude of Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge in relatively high level positions in British Government, Iannucci seemed to settle back into his satirical best. A highlight of The Thick of It was undoubtedly Malcolm Tucker, (played with aplomb by Peter Capaldi) a character afforded more expletives than any other.

Beyond the colourful language, the humanity of Iannucci’s characters, conveyed through both the dialogue and excruciating situations he creates, allow the viewer to really connect. The success of the BBC series, led first to a feature film In The Loop which saw core characters including Tucker, survive and be set to intermingle with American counterparts. A successful marriage of British and American cultures, something that is often difficult to capture on film, it should have come as no surprise when Veep went into production.

Only eight episodes have aired to date but this may well be the most successful adaptation of a British comedy series for a U.S. audience since The Office. Perhaps to it’s advantage though, Veep remains Iannucci’s project and while this may not be his finest work to date, it is a firm indication that he is far from finished creating wildly amusing television and film.