IN THE THICK OF IT
Back in the 1960s and 70s, when he was the prince of satire, Peter Cook always looked the part. Louchely suave, with an ironic smile playing on his handsome features, he was the very picture of the anti-establishment establishment. By contrast, if you passed Armando Iannucci in the street, you’d probably mistake him for the subdivisional manager of an insurance firm.
Iannucci doesn’t look like a trend-setter, much less the leading satirical voice of his generation. Short, balding and dressed in unobtrusively smart-casual clothes, the writer-director-show-runner is, for a man who’s all over the place, a rather invisible character.
Recently, actor Brian Cox, star of the HBO hit Succession, said Iannucci was the “godfather” of the show. Iannucci does not feature in the show’s credits for the very good reason that he played no part in the writing, producing or anything else. But what Cox was referring to was the inspirational reach of his fellow Scotsman’s style – the mixing of improvisation with well-written scripts, black comedy with straight drama. It’s an approach that Succession’s showrunner, Jesse Armstrong, developed while working as a writer on Iannucci’s political satire The Thick of It.
