Armando Iannucci on how the Americans ruined The Thick Of It

Watch their swear-free remake here

Armando Iannucci has spoken of how the Americas ruined The Thick Of It - exorcising all the swearing and making a ‘really boring’ version of his political sitcom.

Speaking on Richard Herring’s podcast, the satirist told how the BBC sold the rights to the show to the Disney-owned ABC network in the States without telling him.

Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz was recruited to write it, with Spinal Tap’s Christopher Guest as director.

‘I thought, "isn't that slightly too many big creatives? I mean, you need one person in charge rather than two. And what about me?",’ Iannucci, below, recalled.

Armando

He was given an executive producer credit and said he was flown out to Los Angeles to take meetings, but none of any consequence, so flew home saying: ‘This is shit.’

And his instincts turned out to be correct. ‘It was terrible,’ he said. ‘It was so bad because they all the stuff that made The Thick Of It – the performances and the style, the language, was religiously cleansed from the pilot. There was no swearing, obviously.

‘The cameras were all in very traditional position. No improvisation. Nothing.

‘But it wasn't like it was terrible. It was just really boring. We were actually rehearsing the next series of [the British] Thick Of It, when they sent me the pilot on my laptop. I started showing it to Peter [Capaldi] and Rebecca [Front] and Chris [Addison] and everyone. And after four minutes, they just wandered away.

'It was just uninteresting, you know.

‘But that was my first experience of of that kind of thing in America, which then, fortuitously, I fed into my film In The Loop, which is about the Brits going to America, thinking they're going to conquer the world, because they're the Americans love them, and then realising, no, they just been used.’

Made in 2007, the US pilot featured Oliver Platt as Malcolm Tucker, Henry Winkler as a congressman at the centre of a bribery scandal - ousted from office after the first scene – as well as Guest’s Spinal Tap co-star Michael McKean and Family Guy’s Alex Borstein.

Watch it here:

• Listen to Iannucci's full interview on Richard Herring's Leicester Square Theatre podcast here.

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Published: 26 Jun 2024