‘Veep’ Creator Armando Iannucci: U.K. Government Has “Weaponized” the Word Woke and “Doesn’t Listen to Us”
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The conservative U.K. government has “weaponized” the word “woke,” Veep creator Armando Iannucci told the Edinburgh TV Festival on Wednesday.
Events like the festival’s prestigious MacTaggart Lecture, which tend to focus on big issues that deserve attention, make “what we make better,” the writer and producer known for The Thick of It and The Death of Stalin said via Zoom, during a panel featuring four previous Edinburgh Festival MacTaggart keynote speakers.
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“My worry is that there is now this word ‘woke’ that the government has weaponized to try and stop all of that,” he added. “With Boris Johnson exiting as U.K. Prime Minister in early September, he talked about foreign secretary Liz Truss, the favorite to succeed him. “I want someone to ask Liz Truss if she wants Doctor Who to just be a white man.”
He added: “If she can be brave enough to just sit down with an interviewer.”
Iannucci also argued that media people don’t always ask all the tough questions. “Journalists are slightly scared of being seen as not objective,” he suggested. “I suspect that now the rules of conversation have changed.”
In his MacTaggart keynote in 2015, Iannucci had talked about the theme of TV’s new golden age. “That’s the good news for creatives. Everyone wants to make television. The bad news is, everyone wants to make television,” he said back then. “Cheaper, user-friendly technology means we’re living in both the golden age of TV and a global bucket of swill. For every Sherlock and Breaking Bad, there’s a billion more people filming their brother squirt baked beans from his nose and anus.”
Recalling that 2015 speech on Wednesday, Iannucci argued that years later, the same industry issues are in focus again, including a freeze to the BBC license fee, the need for broadcasters to cut costs and a plan to privatize Channel 4 despite industry opposition. “The government now doesn’t listen to us or regards our opinion as worthless,” he argued. “I just feel angrier than I have ever been.”
The other people Iannucci spoke alongside Wednesday as part of the Zoom panel were writer Jack Thorne (His Dark Materials, The Eddy, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), David Olusoga, a professor at the University of Manchester known for presenting a BBC history series, and Dorothy Byrne, the former head of news at Channel 4.
In his keynote last year, Thorne gave a damning indictment of how the British TV industry has dealt with disability, both in front of and behind the camera. “TV has failed disabled people, utterly and totally,” he said, adding that the TV world was “stacked against the telling of disabled stories with disabled talent.”
Torne said of his on-stage comments on Wednesday that he “crowdsourced” his speech by showing it to friends and asking for their input. “We have excluded communities,” he highlighted and urged everyone: “Think about how you are treating people through your complacency.”
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