Veep and The Thick of It creator Armando Iannucci is still angry. In fact, he told delegates here at the Edinburgh TV Festival on Wednesday that he is “angrier than ever” at the direction of the UK’s politics and broadcasting, seven years after his blistering MacTaggart lecture urged the BBC to fight back against its critics and railed against a sale of Channel 4 — both topics now back on the agenda.
Iannucci was one of many creatives to vocally criticize the British Conservative government over its plans to sell network Channel 4 into private hands. As he did on Twitter last year, Iannucci pointed to the fact that well over 95% of submissions to the government’s own consultation on the sale were against it but the government is pushing on, making things bleaker than when he addressed the festival in 2015.
“The government doesn’t listen to us and thinks our opinion is worthless,” he told the audience today via a video feed alongside former MacTaggart lecturers Jack Thorne, David Olusoga and Dorothy Byrne.
Iannucci reaffirmed his belief that science series Stargazing Live showed the best of the BBC, just as he had said seven years ago, but noted the show “was the first thing that got cut after the license fee was trimmed.”
“I just feel angrier now than I’ve ever been,” he said.
Later in the MacTaggart Legacy session, which featured four former speech givers, Iannucci addressed why journalists are often seen as failing to pose hard questions to politicians. “Journalists are slightly scared of being seen as not objective, and [they] are being insulted and attacked for asking tough questions.”
Historian, producer and broadcaster Olusoga, who delivered the 2020 lecture and focused on industry failures around diversity, warned that the liberal arts sector remains complacent in its approach to dealing with the issue.
“The industry likes to brush problems to a side, avoiding problems they’re uncomfortable with,” he said. “There are many issues this industry deserves to be challenged on. The liberal arts sectors are more complacent than others.
“We still haven’t got to that moment of honest introspection,” he added. “We have given ourselves a free pass on multiple issues. We are very complacent.”
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