Comedy writer Armando Iannucci has
been appointed as the next news International Visiting Professor of Broadcast
Media. Iannuchi, who wrote and directed I’m Alan Partridge with Steve Coogan, will
hold a lecture series beginning in January entitled ‘British TV Comedy: dead or
alive?’ Iannuchi graduated from University
College in 1982 and
worked for the BBC in the eighties.His past projects include On The Hour,
The day Today, the Friday and Saturday night armistice and the Armando Iannucci
Show. His satirical political comedy series The Thick Of It is currently being
aired on BBC4 and will be shown on BBC2 in the beginning of 2006.There has been much critical acclaim
for Iannucci’s work and he has won two Sony radio awards and three British
Comedy awards, one of which was a special award for his contribution to
television comedy.He and Chris Morris were jointly awarded
a 1992 Writers’ Guild award for the programme On the Hour. Together they
produced the critically acclaimed show The Day Today.Speaking about the theme of his
lecture series, Iannucci said: ‘If British TV has a heritage, then comedy is
its most precious commodity.’ ‘Today, though, British Television Comedy is at a
crossroads. Just as it gets more daring and varied in format and technique, and
just as audiences get more and more sophisticated in the breadth of comedy they’re
willing to watch, viewing figures for comedy shows are in decline.’‘Over the next five years, TV comedy
has the chance either to reclaim the mass-appeal, large viewing-figure slots
that were previously theirs by right, or become a fragmented web of innovative,
interesting but niche programmes. These lectures will outline precisely
how British TV comedy arrived at this crossroads, and the possible routes it
can take.’ARCHIVE: 4th week MT 2005
BBC comedy visionary awarded Murdoch professorship
