Armando Iannucci

Armando Giovanni Iannucci OBE (/jəˈnuːtʃi/; born 28 November 1963) is a Scottish satirist, writer, director, producer, performer, and panellist. Born in Glasgow to Italian parents, Iannucci studied at the University of Glasgow followed by the University of Oxford. Starting on BBC Scotland and BBC Radio 4, his early work with Chris Morris on the radio series On the Hour transferred to television as The Day Today. A character from this series, Alan Partridge, co-created by Iannucci, went on to feature in a number of Iannucci's television and radio programmes, including Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge and I'm Alan Partridge. Iannucci also fronted the satirical Armistice review shows and in 2001 created his most personal work, The Armando Iannucci Shows, for Channel 4. Moving back to the BBC in 2005, Iannucci created the political sitcom The Thick of It and the spoof documentary Time Trumpet in 2006. Winning funding from the UK Film Council, in 2009 he directed a critically acclaimed feature film, In the Loop, featuring characters from The Thick of It. As a result of these works, he has been described by The Daily Telegraph as "the hardman of political satire". Other works during this period include an operetta libretto, Skin Deep, and his radio series Charm Offensive. Iannucci created the HBO political satire Veep, and was its showrunner for four seasons from 2012 to 2015. For his work on Veep he won two Emmys in 2015, Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series. He followed this with the feature films The Death of Stalin in 2017 and The Personal History of David Copperfield, a 2019 adaptation of the novel David Copperfield. In 2020, he created the comedy series Avenue 5 on HBO. Iannucci was born in Glasgow. His father, also called Armando, was from Naples, while his mother was born in Glasgow to an Italian family. Before emigrating, Iannucci's father wrote for an anti-fascist newspaper as a teenager and joined the Italian partisans at 17. He came to Scotland in 1950 and ran a pizza factory in Springburn in Glasgow.