The Cat Laughs Comedy Festival 2009

A selection of video interviews conducted at the Kilkenny comedy festival, plus footage from the comedians' football match.

Interviews with Rhod Gilbert, Reginald D Hunter, Sarah Millican, John Bishop, Alonzo Bodden, Eddie Bannon and Bruce Dessau can be found here
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Ross Noble: Like A Tiny, Simian Tommy Cooper Losing His Mind!

The List

Despite just losing his farm in Victoria, Australia to the recent bush fires and flying into the UK on the morning of this interview, Ross Noble maintains he’s completely primed for questioning.

‘Oh, wait, I’ve put too much pressure on meself,’ the Geordie comic suddenly falters. ‘I was about to say you’ve got me at my absolute peak. But if I don’t answer your questions like a young Peter Ustinov ... I’ve overdone it, haven’t I?’

Suffice to report, the 32-year-old ex-pat remains as eccentric, entertaining and endlessly digressing as ever, temporarily indulging my pseudo-diagnosis that his apparent boundless capacity for free association bollocks might relate to his dyslexia.

‘If someone wants to hook me up to some electrodes, lab monkey style, I’d be keen to find out,’ the ex-circus performer replies. ‘I can’t write fast enough to record anything, so I end up just leaping from subject to subject. I’ve always seen it as lack of organisation rather than a gift.’

He has however, just been gifted a new muse, his inspirational baby daughter.

‘Yeah, I’ve had this desire to put everything I see in my mouth,’ he reveals. ‘It’s quite weird because I’ve always had a childlike outlook on things. My old London house always looked like Tom Hank’s flat in Big.’

‘I love having a baby because I get to play with her all the time. I can’t wait until she’s a bit bigger and can join in. At the moment it’s just a lot of face pulling on my part.’

For his new show, Things, Noble commissioned Iron Maiden’s illustrator Derek Riggs to design a typically eye-catching poster, which in turn inspired his hydra-headed, tentacles creeping set. ‘I told him I wanted a big monster with a turtle’s body, wings and claws,’ he marvels ‘and for it to have four heads, all of ‘em mine, chasing me down the road’.

Irrespective of the inherent flakiness of Noble’s imagination, “people and things being fired out of cannons” and monkeys remain consistent preoccupations.

‘Monkeys always appear at some point, less because I’m into wildlife and more because I like Planet of the Apes” he admits. ‘For three or four weeks, whenever a monkey was ready to make an appearance I would restrain him. Then there’d be several people at the stage door afterwards angry that I hadn’t mentioned them. I don’t know how you win.’

Well, you can’t fight your primal instincts.

‘You nearly said you can’t fight monkeys,’ he enthuses. ‘They’re always going berserk, that’s the beauty of the monkey, very little middle ground. They’re either cheeky or ripping somebody’s face off.

'I’m a huge fan of animal attack shows. It’s one thing seeing a monkey attack somebody violently, quite another seeing it do it in a pink lame costume, a little fez or something. A tiny simian Tommy Cooper losing his mind!’

So what are his plans for the future?

‘Probably buying a new house to be honest because mine’s fucked. That would be top of the list, though at least I don’t have to worry about housework for now. I’m going back in June to do some sort of benefit. We lost our home but my family’s safe and I’ll do what needs to be done for the folks that weren’t so lucky.’

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Abie Philbin Bowman: Eco-Friendly Jihad

Metro (Ireland)

“The point of comedy and political comedy in particular is to air inconvenient truths. A political joke by definition is something that someone doesn’t want said or doesn’t want laughed at.”

As the creator of Jesus: The Guantanamo Years, for which he sported a crown of thorns and orange jump suit, Abie Philbin Bowman conceived the Messiah as a stand-up comedian returning for a comeback tour, detained at US immigration then dispatched to the infamous Cuban outpost as a bearded Palestinian with an unparalleled history of martyrdom. So he’s had plenty of opportunity to reflect upon comics’ role as agitators of free speech and the right to offend. Especially as his current show, Eco-Friendly Jihad, is even more controversial.

As a talk radio host on i105-107’s The Third i and self-confessed “hardcore political junkie” who recently sought the views of the Ku Klux Klan on Barack Obama’s presidency, Bowman has, coincidentally, been subjected to delays himself at American customs, endured a bomb hoax while appearing in Belfast and just generally riled conservative opinion. “I couldn’t believe it when the DUP criticised me for dressing in orange and talking about Jesus,” he admits. “It was such good publicity.”

Apparently, the show attracted its best response in Pakistan. “It was phenomenal,” enthuses the comedian, who is the son of political broadcaster John Bowman. “Whatever you say in London, Boston, Dublin or Edinburgh, you’re never going to be arrested for stand-up. But there I was talking about innocent people being locked away without trial just as they were banging up judges, lawyers and anyone speaking out against the government. What’s more, Jesus is a prophet in Islam, so to mock him is blasphemous. Thankfully, my premise is that he’s actually a lovely bloke, smart, charismatic and horrendously misunderstood by those fighting wars in his name.

“If I’d made jokes about Allah I would have had a frosty reception. But while I was mocking fundamentalism, I got the sense that they weren’t laughing at Christianity but drawing parallels. We’re in a unique position in Ireland to understand the Islamic experience, because we’ve also had extremely conservative religion until quite recently. We’ve had our entire culture labelled with the badge of terrorism because of a tiny few who most thought were violent thugs and extremists. And we understand the reality. In places like Belfast and Israel, people can be quite blasé in some ways about terrorism, they’re like ‘yeah, it happens but the chances of being killed are tiny’.”

Having completed a masters thesis on comedy as a weapon of non-violent struggle, Bowman namechecks Michael Moore, Mark Thomas and the late Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa as noteworthy exponents. But he believes the most successful have been the likes of Morgan Spurlock taking on McDonalds in the film Super Size Me and Stetson Kennedy, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and countered the group’s recruitment by relaying humiliating details of their rituals to writers of the Superman radio serials.

Although Jesus has invariably united audiences against the inhumanity of Guantanamo, Eco-Friendly Jihad is proving more divisive. Portraying an environmentalist who converts to al Qaeda, Bowman introduces the notion that carbon rapacious Western lifestyles are now the gravest threat to our existence and that their complete destruction is radical but necessary.
“The grim irony is that if bin Laden and the Taliban took over America tomorrow, they’d save half a million lives a year through banning alcohol and tobacco under Sharia law,” he points out. “ And if they wanted to kill as many as the tobacco industry does, they’d have to hijack 580 planes over 12 months.”

“There’s also a fundamental contradiction between the idea of making poverty history and halting climate change. Making poverty history is about transforming Africa into Sweden and stopping climate change is about transforming Europe into Afghanistan. We’ve all grown up with the belief that to be good people we should try to save lives, help others out of poverty and protect the planet. But we’ve gotten to a point now with 6.5billion on Earth where those things are actually mutually exclusive. So something has to give but nobody wants to talk about it. Which is precisely why it’s a great subject for comedy.

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Russell Brand: Scandalous

The Scotsman

Three months on from Sachsgate, it seems apparent that Jonathon Ross’ career has weathered the scandal, give or take a forthcoming £4.5million pay cut, while far from being neutered, Russell Brand is still defiantly performing off the leash.

The consistent tabloid fixture has always skilfully dissected his own press, with an ego-driven personality that he admits “doesn’t work without fame”. Unveiling his new live show in Glasgow next weekend, Brand will unashamedly make the incident in which he and Ross left their ill-fated message on Andrew Sachs’ answerphone its centrepiece, prancing and singing “I am the news, I am the news!” to ITV’s News At Ten theme.

Largely because of his actions though, television and radio comedy is now facing increased editorial oversight and press scrutiny, with the BBC, overwhelmingly the biggest producer of comedy in the UK, perceived as an increasingly unattractive place for talent to thrive. Just ask Carol Thatcher about her proposed revival of the Beeb’s Black and White Minstrel Show.

“The butterfly effect that seems to be happening across the media in Britain over this incident is unbelievable,” Ed Byrne remarked of Sachsgate on Radio 5 last week. Referring to a Radio 4 show he appeared on recently, the Irishman explained: “Just in the briefing beforehand – ‘you can't say this, you can’t say that, you can’t say the other.’ All because one overpaid man and one oversexed man say one thing that somebody let out on air. The ripple effect of it I’m stunned by.”

This is corroborated by other comedy writers I’ve spoken to. One with a string of television and radio credits, who wishes to remain anonymous, told me that “talking to other writers and producers since Sachsgate, there is a definite heightened awareness of going ‘too far’, especially in projects within the BBC. I was working on a TV sketch show and the creator told me that plans to make it a bit edgier might now be scrapped because of current public sensitivity.”

A second, working on a satirical comedy made by BBC Scotland, describes how “a lot of gags written by myself and other writers, after the Russell Brand thing, it’s almost like everything is being doubly scrutinised by the BBC. Any gag that might be slightly offensive is axed. It came across as ‘look, this is what you can actually write about’, which left us with the grand sum total of sod all. It really affected the quality of the show because we couldn’t slag anyone off.”

He refers to the issuing of a periodic “banned list” of subjects by the BBC. A spokesperson for the corporation denies that such a list exists, save for guidelines regarding highly restricted material concerned with matters of state security and what one BBC employee I spoke to intriguingly referred to as “the Royal Vault”, alongside material restricted because of complaints.

Producers at the independent production companies Angst and Hat Trick, creators of satirical BBC panel shows Mock the Week and Have I Got News For You respectively, maintain they are unaware of such a list and have never been subject to it.

Nevertheless, the following example predating Sachsgate reveals how the BBC will inhibit comedy for less noble reasons than protecting a 79-year-old actor's privacy. “In 2002, on a radio show I write for, people were writing a lot of gags about River City,” explains the Scottish writer.

“The BBC issued a directive saying don’t do jokes about River City for the next few weeks because it’s failing in the ratings and we don’t want to put the boot into our own show. Every so often they’ll issue a list of things they want you to steer clear of. Some weeks they’ll say, don’t do jokes about the Labour Party, the Lib Dems or the SNP for reasons of political bias. Sometimes it’s adhered to, other times there's a kind of two-fingered salute and the gags go in anyway.”

This would be amusing, were it not so completely dispiriting to see a national broadcaster, concerned about retaining its licence fee, beating itself up in endless self-recrimination. The unintended comedy highlight of last year came on Newsnight, during the sustained media witchhunt for further “offensive” programming. Presenter Emily Maitlis channelled Frankie Boyle on Mock the Week as she repeated a joke of his about the Queen, asking the BBC's director-general Mark Thompson “I am now so old my pussy is haunted. Is that editorially tasteful?”

Last week, Frank Skinner presented a Panorama investigation into television standards that disappointingly simplified the issue of offence by predominantly focusing upon swearing, effectively setting out to appease yet instead inviting accusations of “dumbing down”. As the comic Sean Lock lamented on a radio discussion of the programme, Skinner – who has experimented with removing some swearwords from his stand-up set – appeared to be endorsing comedy by focus group. Lock argued he would never reduce his expletive count on account of audience demand, only when he himself deemed it funnier.

Rather better was Sue Perkins’s Huw Weldon Lecture, Wit’s End: British Comedy at the Crossroads, broadcast a fortnight ago on BBC2. She argued that British comedy is at a crossroads. But then historically it has always been. To be ground-breakingly funny you often risk provoking offence and “if you tell comedy where to go, it won't be funny anymore”. The comedian did voice her concern about “retrospective outrage” of “comedy starting to accept and enshrine the idea that a viewer can complain about a programme they’re not familiar with”.

And like Skinner, she wondered if there couldn’t be some system of counter-complaint, whereby the mildly chuckling majority can register approval of a programme to Ofcom too. Or if the perennially affronted can’t be familiarised with their television’s off switch. Regardless, the BBC is promising a tougher review of editorial guidelines this spring. Prior to Sachsgate, Jana Bennett, the BBC’s Vision Director announced that there would be less swearing on its output in 2009.

In the short term, broadcast comedy is undoubtedly still reeling from the furore and there is a grain of truth in Joan Rivers’s assertion to Skinner that television will always just be a “distillation” of live comedy. Watch Frankie Boyle or even a less savage comic like Jason Manford live, and they will gleefully inform you how that particular joke failed to survive the edit on Mock the Week or 8 Out of 10 Cats.

Yet comedy is all about surprise and invention, and one hopes the most accomplished writers and performers are forever finding ways to circumvent and subvert notions of taste and the status quo, while perhaps managing to entertain greater numbers of viewers and listeners without compromising their talent.

In America last week, The Late Show With David Letterman finally broadcast a Bill Hicks routine about abortion and religion that was controversially cut in 1993 – a mere 15 years after the comedian’s death. And give a little credit to Jo Brand. A recent appearance on Live At The Apollo, performing a gag about the BNP’s membership list leaking onto the internet, provoked outrage from the far-right party who claim it amounted to incitement to racial harassment.

And Russell Brand? Can you truly hate a scarcely repentant rascal who thanks his audience for “coming to see me in a medium where I still flourish”? “He’s a twat,” my anonymous Scottish comedy scribe rebuts.


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Edging Towards The Mainstream: Jesse Armstrong, Sam Bain and Simon Blackwell

Scotland on Sunday

They’ve co-written two of the most eagerly anticipated films of 2009, controversial, feature-length comedies about a phoney war and British suicide bombers. As the critically acclaimed writers behind political satire The Thick of It and cult sitcom Peep Show, they’ve pilloried foul-mouthed incompetency in Whitehall and elicited award-winning laughter from a man eating barbecued dog.

Yet chatting over a rather more palatable lunch in the smart, upstairs surroundings of a central London restaurant, Sam Bain, Jesse Armstrong and Simon Blackwell admit that they were “terrified” at the thought of 250 Glaswegians sitting stony-faced through recordings of The Old Guys, their new Friday night sitcom for BBC One. More intimidated even than meeting Sopranos star James Gandolfini.

“I was in awe,” admits Blackwell. “This great hairy man.”

“He’s not someone you meet and think ‘oh my God, you’re so not like your character’” Armstrong concurs.

In The Loop, starring Gandolfini, Tom Hollander and most of The Thick Of It cast premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Thursday. Directed by Armando Iannucci and scripted by the Glaswegian with Armstrong, Blackwell and Tony Roche, the cinematic spin-off focuses on politicians and bureaucrats in Britain and the US scrabbling around in the build-up to war, with petty rivalries and cynical career manoeuvring overshadowing an almost incidental conflict. Slated for release in the UK this spring, one critic has already announced that “it might even be the best British film of the year”.

As is their habit, the writers were on set throughout the shoot and former Labour researcher and New Statesman columnist Armstrong recalls struggling to focus as Peter Capaldi, playing temperamental spin doctor Malcolm Tucker and fellow Scot Paul Higgins as his psychotic lieutenant, prepared themselves in rooms either side of him.

“As he often does, Peter started singing Sinatra to himself,” he explains. “And Paul was repeating some of Simon’s lines which didn’t make it into the film: ‘I’ve got a puppy fucking machine, puppy fucking, puppy fucking ...’ Slightly distracting when you’re trying to come up with new material.”

Meanwhile, Four Lions, the working title for the jihadist comedy penned by Armstrong and Bain for Chris Morris begins production this summer for a cinematic release later in 2009.

The pair remain tight-lipped about the extent to which Morris – whose Brass Eye paedophile special caused such a tabloid furore in 2001 and who has spent three years interviewing terrorism experts, police, the secret services and imams as well as ordinary Muslims – has adapted their initial script, aside from enthusing that “his level of research was amazing” and “it’s incredibly exciting”. Blackwell though, who has seen a copy, purporting to show “the Dad’s Army side of terrorism”, describes it as “very funny. It hits precisely the right tone.”

So why then are they so concerned about The Old Guys? Especially as it stars sitcom veterans Roger Lloyd Pack (Trigger in Only Fools and Horses) and Clive Swift (Richard in Keeping Up Appearances) as Tom and Roy, growing old disgracefully while lusting after their neighbour Sally, played by Jane Asher. The IT Crowd’s Katherine Parkinson completes the cast as Tom’s daughter Amber.

“Having that citizen’s jury out there is scary,” says Armstrong of the trio’s first self-originated studio sitcom, recorded at BBC Scotland in Glasgow. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t watch it and think, ‘bloody hell. Could this work without a laughter track? Could we be more subtle? But it’s the show we’ve always wanted to write.”

According to Bain, “with Peep Show, a sitcom only watched by a million or so people, we’re protected by a sort of layer of cool and the fact that visually, it’s shot in an interesting [point-of-view] way. With a more conventional show like The Old Guys, the audience have got to invest in the characters immediately. Even though there’s nothing stylistically radical about Frasier or Seinfeld, they feel sophisticated because the characters are interesting. That’s our aspiration too.”

Blackwell expands upon the potential pitfalls. “I’ve done a lot of gag and sketch writing in front of a live audience,” he explains. “But never a narrative. The temptation is to just fill it with as many jokes as possible because you want that constant laughter. The danger then is that it becomes like a stand-up routine and you don’t get a satisfying story.”

The trio first collaborated on a failed pilot for the late über-producer Harry Thompson, whose mantle for overseeing cutting-edge comedy at the BBC has arguably now passed to Iannucci. Blackwell, who was handed his first break on Iannucci’s Radio 4 show Weekending, went on to be a joke writer under Thompson’s tutelage on Have I Got News For You. After he’d worked with Armstrong on The Thick Of It, he and Bain, who met at Manchester University, enlisted Blackwell’s help when their workload became too onerous to complete all six episodes of Peep Show’s last series.

Easily inhabiting the self-absorbed mindset of dysfunctional flatmates Mark and Jeremy, played by David Mitchell and Robert Webb, he remains a useful ally explains Bain, because being Oxford-based, he “doesn’t understand London rates of pay”. Moreover, having introduced a gun and the spectre of male rape into their sitcom too, Armstrong is keen to stress that “Simon takes all the credit for that particular episode”.

Although The Old Guys was conceived without a specific channel in mind and actually pre-dates Peep Show, with Bain and Armstrong coming up with the idea in 1999, they acknowledge that Iannucci and The IT Crowd writer Graham Linehan put a “certain amount of friendly pressure” on them to try writing for a more mainstream audience.

“I genuinely don’t think we’ve made any concessions though,” Armstrong states.

“We took out some swearwords,” Bain interjects, “but that was because it sounded wrong in the actors’ voices.”

“It sounded like we were trying to get a laugh from making your granny say ‘fuck’” Armstrong concedes, before adding: “We never had a cast in mind though. But we did feel ‘wouldn’t it be fun to write for a generation with loads of brilliantly talented comic actors?’We reckoned that if we wrote for that age group, we might be able to punch above our weight, get somebody really amazing. And that’s how it turned out with Roger and Clive.”

Despite both Peep Show and The Old Guys having been provisionally titled All Day Breakfast at different times in their development and focusing upon the domestic setting of two bachelors, he reckons that the pairings “complement and rub up against each in other in different ways.”

“One of the fun things about writing comedy is that you can actually forget about their age to an extent,” Bain agrees, “You shouldn’t think ‘right, what would an old person do?’

“You’ll only end up writing all your jokes about colostomy bags,” Armstrong rejoins.

Nevertheless, despite a greater tendency towards farce than their Channel 4 sitcom, some storylines in The Old Guys, such as Tom contemplating visiting a prostitute or embarking upon a civil partnership of convenience with Roy seem exceptionally edgy for the BBC’s flagship channel. And one episode, involving the death of a supporting character, is remarkably dark.

“We were slightly worried about whether the audience would feel they were allowed to laugh there,” admits Blackwell. “Thankfully, big relief laughs followed those early nervous chuckles. Hopefully, in every episode there are moments where you think ‘I wouldn’t expect this in a BBC studio sitcom’. Not because it’s gratuitously edgy but because it’s emotionally interesting.”

Producing the show is Absolutely alumni Jack Docherty.

“He’s a comedy hero of ours, through we’d never tell him,” grins Blackwell, noting that “there’s an awful lot of exciting comedy coming out of Scotland at the moment, it’s like Naked Video and Absolutely in the 80s.”

Early notices have compared The Old Guys unfavourably to another pair of incorrigible old rascals though.

“It was strange when we started production because there were pictures of Still Game everywhere,” recalls Armstrong. “I hope people can find a place in their heart for both shows because they’re very different. But when we told cab drivers in Glasgow, it was like ‘oh right, you’ve come up here to do Still Game. But we’ve already got Still Game, so fuck off!’”

Such frosty receptions should inspire their next projects. In addition to writing the sixth series of Peep Show this summer, Bain is working on a “relentless” one-act play “because he hates ice cream”, Blackwell has contributed to ITV’s forthcoming call centre comedy Mumbai Calling and Armstrong plans to write a film about Rupert Murdoch for Channel 4, recreating “events that haven’t happened yet at a future Murdoch family gathering. Perhaps I’ll have an idea what it’s like after I’ve not written it and the legal team have not okayed it.”

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Joe Rogan: Ultimate Fighting Comedian

Metro (Ireland)

Hard-hitting US comedian Joe Rogan holds a second black belt in tae kwon do and brown belt in Brazilian jujitsu. The Ultimate Fighting commentator discusses squaring up to Wesley Snipes, isolation tanks and performing during the Apocalypse.

Why do you think you’re perceived as a controversial comedian?

Not many comics are willing to go far out. When you start talking about dark areas like government corruption or the positive effects of psychedelic drugs, you risk offending your audience. And when you’re just starting out, other comedians won’t thank you for getting a crowd riled about abortion and genocide. Telling jokes about farts and getting drunk, you won’t develop a rabid following but you won’t start any fights.

Your new TV show, Game Show In My Head, sounds a bit like Jason Byrne’s Anonymous. How does it work?

It’s a really funny show man. The contestant has an earpiece in and they don’t know what they have to do until I tell them. One time, I sent a guy over to a camera crew and told him he’s a news reporter. Unfortunately, the story he’s reporting on, the witnesses have fled. So he has to find people that weren’t there and convince them to pretend they were part of it. Next, I tell him the event was ‘a UFO flew overhead, you were abducted and they performed tests on you’. He’s laughing and saying ‘how the hell?’ But he pulled it off almost immediately because people are willing to bare-faced lie with a camera in their face.

Apparently you’re planning an End of the World Show with the comic Doug Stanhope leading up to the arrival of December 21, 2012. How come?

It’s when the Mayan calendar ends and when many believe our human age will change. All the crazy events in our world, the Iraq War, the Internet and all our technological innovation, we’re moving towards some kind of huge event, perhaps a catastrophe, maybe the next level of evolution. Also, Terrence McKenna – a brilliant man, everything I know about psychedelic drugs I learned from him – developed a mathematical algorithm, the Timewave Zero-Novelty Theory, which holds that all human innovation is building towards ‘ultimate novelty’. Through this programme he independently predicted it would occur on the same date. So who knows? We plan to commemorate just in case.

Why do you enjoy Ultimate Fighting so much?

It’s the most visceral sport in the world, one that stretches back to ancient times. The human drama of a guy fighting for his life, fully committed in mind, flesh and will is hugely exciting to me.

What happened to your proposed fight with Wesley Snipes?

He changed his mind. It was ridiculous but I thought it would be fun. ‘What? Snipes wants a fight?’ If you’re sparring in a gym and punches are pulled because you’re a famous actor you have a distorted perception of your abilities. I’ve fought hundreds of karate and tae kwon do tournaments. I’ve kickboxed and I do jujitsu. I’m pretty good. If I didn’t do jujitsu for two years and let him train constantly, I’d still choke the hell out of him. His ego was writing cheques his body couldn’t cash.

Why do you own an isolation tank?

For self-analysis. It was designed by John Lilly, a pioneer in inter-species communication who developed it to communicate with dolphins. He figured it out while on acid. The water is heated to the same temperature as your skin and you’re in total silence and darkness. It feels like your brain is untethered from your body and you begin looking at life more objectively. There’s some pretty deep places I reach, which, if they were in pill form, the government would try to ban.

You're known for confronting comedians who steal jokes. How big a problem is gag-theft?

It’s a real problem. Club owners let these vampires suck from other artists because they just want the money. This one famous actor-comic, the reason he can become his characters in movies so easily is because he’s an emotional mess, he needs constant attention. He even steals from people who are his best friends! He was the first comic I ever heard of, where, if he was in the room, other comedians wouldn’t perform. Here’s a guy who was super-famous, but because there was no Internet back in the 80s to expose him, if he did your joke on TV, it became his joke. I’m sure he lives in hell though, like anybody on ego drugs like cocaine. If he ever got in my isolation tank he would lose his mind and jump out screaming.


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Armando Iannucci: Skin Deep

The Herald


In a high-security Californian laboratory, men and women of disconcertingly uniform appearance sing beneath a giant pink vat, the looming vessel filled to the brim with surgically removed body parts. This is “man’s highest creation” maintains Armando Iannucci.“The coming together of music, theatre, design, people and coughing.” This is opera.

The Glaswegian writer and producer of such acclaimed comedy creations as Alan Partridge, The Day Today and The Thick Of It, is at Leeds Grand Theatre to see final rehearsals of Skin Deep, a satirical operetta on cosmetic surgery for which he has penned his first libretto. Composed by David Sawer and directed by Richard Jones, the Opera North production opens this Friday, six days before Iannucci’s In The Loop, his debut feature film and cinematic “cousin” to The Thick Of It premieres at the Sundance Festival.

“Putting right what nature got wrong”, Skin Deep has been painstakingly pieced together over five years. Chatting in a rehearsal space adjacent to the theatre, Iannucci can’t disguise his pleasure at finally seeing his work unveiled.

“It’s only now I’m seeing it assembled,” the still-impish 44-year-old enthuses. “I’ve been used to hearing it played on the piano and with everyone singing sitting around on plastic chairs. Only now I’m seeing the costumes and set designs, so I’m beginning to get even more excited.”

Featuring the Dance of the Seven Bandages and the Ballet of Transplant Organs, Skin Deep is the tale of Dr Needlemeier, whose anti-aging elixir, composed of his patients’ boiled off-cuts, requires one more vital ingredient: essence of Hollywood star. After the world’s most famous actor, Luke Pollock, leaves Needlemeier’s alpine clinic “only half the man he was”, scandal breaks and the Swiss doctor flees to America.

Traditionally, opera runneth over with passionate tributes to captivating youth and beauty, though demands for vocal power and range have invariably led to the casting of older, bulkier singers than the plots might seem to suggest. Iannucci has exploited this incongruity before, in a sketch for the 2001 Channel 4 series The Armando Iannucci Shows, in which he imagined attending Ibiza Uncovered: The Opera.

“Richard was watching it at home and thought ‘God, I’ve done productions like that’” Iannucci chuckles. “So he got in touch. We had similar thoughts about what we wanted to do with the story, so the idea came together quickly.”

Since Skin Deep was conceived, the growing popularity of gastric bands, botox and other cosmetic procedures has seen reality threaten to outstrip satire.

“People no longer hide their work, they flaunt it, because it’s about wanting to live the life of a celebrity,” Iannucci sighs. “Parents give 18-year-old daughters cosmetic enhancements for their birthdays.”

He remembers visiting Beverley Hills for a proposed US remake of The Thick Of It, where his hotel “backed onto a plastic surgery clinic. It had a passageway so that guests could be whisked away for their operation, then whisked back to their room to recuperate.

“It was all done quite surreptitiously. Except I was in the bar at 6pm, meeting someone for a drink, and standing there was a surgeon in his scrubs who’d clearly spent the day cracking people’s skulls open and slicing things off.”

A classical music fan since discovering Holst’s Planets at school, Iannucci gorged himself on the library collections at Hillhead, then Govan and became a passionate Wagnerite in his teens “as a reaction” against the Verdi, Puccini and Rossini beloved by his parents. A columnist for Gramophone magazine, he recently took up the piano and remains stuck at grade one, but can trace the effects of his musical exasperation back to his earliest radio work for BBC Scotland. Through 1998 on youth shows like No’ The Archie Macpherson Show and Bite The Wax, he developed the irreverent sound editing that became a hallmark of On The Hour, the landmark radio precursor to The Day Today responsible for launching his career and those of Chris Morris and Steve Coogan among others.

“That BBC Scotland stuff was a product of my frustration that I can’t play an instrument,” he explains. “I’m obsessed by music even though I can’t articulate it, I can’t demonstrate it audibly. Internally though, I like rhythms and pacing, so messing about with audio is probably the next best thing.

“This has given me the chance to mess about with rhythms again,” he says of Skin Deep’s rhyming verse. “Of course, I didn’t dictate what David was doing musically, but we sought a lot of long, languid lines because he wanted it to be quite a slow production. I wasn’t composing but I was dealing in something other than just the words, pointing towards where the music might be going.”

As arguably the UK’s most successful comedy producer of the last 20 years, Iannucci is accustomed to getting the last word but happily bowed to Sawer’s experience this time around.

“Mine is literally the first word,” he acknowledges. “I’m not precious about it, I told David to just chop away. I’ve been getting emails from him saying ‘we need three more lines, each of four syllables, rhyming with ‘ow!’’

Although a creative departure, fans will immediately recognise Iannucci’s hand in Skin Deep, not least in the character of the American news reporter, “a sort of cousin to Barbara Wintergreen” – the character Rebecca Front played in On The Hour and The Day Today – “with lots of puns and wordplay”.

Somewhat surprisingly, Iannucci, who is currently executive producing the BBC’s forthcoming Comedy Vehicle for Stewart Lee, co-creator of Jerry Springer: The Opera, which he downplays as “more of a musical really”, is only a recent convert to the art form, having remained stoically unmoved until he witnessed a Scottish Opera performance of La Traviata.

“I’d always thought opera was a bit mad,” he admits. “But that night, I just thought ‘ah, I see it now’. Live you get the full impact. It’s not just the music. It’s the staging, the acting, the costume, the words, the scenery, the whole ambition of it really.”

Having announced his ambivalence towards Mozart in a keynote speech to the Royal Philharmonic Society in 2006, he concedes that he and Sawer have sought inspiration in the composer’s comedies.

“Well, I’m sort of coming round to him,” he smiles. “The Magic Flute remains one of the most ridiculous things ever though. We also thought about things like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where you begin with very distinct sets of characters and then you mix them up, with mistaken identities and people dressing up. The earliest thought that occurred to me when we started talking about plastic surgery was the notion of face-swapping.”

Unlike breast enhancement, opera is still widely perceived as a pastime for the rich, a fact that roundly irritates him.

“Yes, the most expensive seats are expensive,” he states. “But people pay more to see a football match every fortnight or Coldplay at the O2. Companies like Opera North and the Almeida in London put a lot of effort into making sure it’s available for anyone who’s interested.”

Reflecting Scottish Opera’s forthcoming mini-season in Glasgow, which includes Death of a Scientist about government weapons expert Dr David Kelly, he dismisses the notion that opera cannot be topical.

“If you think about Mozart, Verdi, Puccini and Gilbert and Sullivan, they were all taking on contemporary political and social themes. I remember going to see John Adams’ Nixon in China and thinking this is what opera should be doing. We should be singing about the credit crunch.”


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