Armando Iannucci at Research 2010

Introducing keynote interviewee Armando Iannucci this morning, our editor Marc Brenner took great care in choosing a clip of his work that didn’t include any bad words. A futile effort, as it turned out: there was probably more swearing in that one interview than in all the sessions at all past conferences put together.

Iannucci, who has had a hand in the creation of Alan Partridge, The Day Today, The Thick of It, and the Oscar-nominated In the Loop, talked about the role of research in his work, and politicians’ obsession with image, among other things.

The audience didn’t seem to mind the naughty words – in fact I think they quite liked it.

And it was easier than you might think to get Iannucci to comment on the world of MR. “What I do is focus groups all the time,” he said. “Because we have the biggest focus group ever, which is the audience. If it doesn’t get any laughs, it hasn’t worked. The audience is the most cruel and devastating bit of market research you can do.”

His research for his award-winning series The Thick of It involved numerous interviews with politicians and Whitehall insiders focusing on “the boring bits”, to give it an air of authenticity. “We make things up,” he said. “But the disturbing thing is, once we’ve made things up, politicians come up to us and ask, ‘How did you find that out?’”

Discussing the public’s criticism of government, Iannucci pointed out that the public themselves are very often confused and contradictory in their views. People might appear opinionated but they often haven’t really thought things through. “The public don’t know what they want,” he said. “They want to be surprised.”

That’s a thought worth keeping in mind today.

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