Iannucci pens Boris Johnson/COVID satire

[kalowski]

David Copperfield was fucking great.

[Small Man Big Horse]

Well the first performance is over, and I've found one person on twitter who has seen it (and really liked it), so I imagine reviews will start appearing soon.

I'm seeing it tomorrow, but am going in with the lowest of expectations, though I have to admit I'm not really looking forward to it anymore. And yeah, I know, I'm very lucky to able to afford to see it and live in a city like London, I really do, but I just want to see something vicious that tears the tory cunts apart and I'm not convinced that's what I'll get.

[Milo]

Thank you for your service. I think at best it'll be a bit of a ribbing while these utter shitbags deserve to be skinned and deboned while awake. Enjoy!

[Small Man Big Horse]

Thank you for your service. I think at best it'll be a bit of a ribbing while these utter shitbags deserve to be skinned and deboned while awake. Enjoy!

Yeah, I've a feeling it'll be similar to Tony! The Tony Blair Rock Opera and I walked out of that absolutely fuming.

[gabrielconroy]

Looking forward to the review.

For the record, I thought Death of Stalin was excellent with several outstanding performances. David Copperfield was decent enough without being especially interesting. Avenue 5 looked quite dull and I didn't bother with it. Veep was great in parts but basically a less good, broader version of The Thick of It. And more or less everything else was extremely good with several stone cold classics.

He does seem to be on a trajectory of getting duller and more and more establishment, but I hope that's wrong and old Mandy can pull another classic out the bag.

I think part of the trick is not to read his Guardian columns or Twitter ejaculate or watch him on Question Time.

[Small Man Big Horse]

So far I've only found two tweets about it, both positive, but nothing else. It's a bit tricky though as if I search google it comes up with the poem a lot, someone produced Pandemonium The Musical at this year's Edinburgh Fringe, a musician called JOJI is currently touring a show called Pandemonium, plus Pandemonium Books are at a RPG convention this weekend in the US, so I may well have missed other bits of audience feedback.

[phantom_power]

Fed up with centrist melts writing books and plays about things that are glaringly obvious and thinking it is satire or somehow worthy. Boris Johnson was a bad PM you say? The Tories are a bunch of craven, rancid arseholes who just want to make their friends rich and don't care if normal people live or die? Holy smokes! All in a smug, complacent, "doesn't really affect me but I like to view it as through a microscope" shite, exemplified by Marina Hyde and the fawning love she gets from this lot with her toothless, above-it-all dribble

[BlodwynPig]

Fed up with centrist melts writing books and plays about things that are glaringly obvious and thinking it is satire or somehow worthy. Boris Johnson was a bad PM you say? The Tories are a bunch of craven, rancid arseholes who just want to make their friends rich and don't care if normal people live or die? Holy smokes! All in a smug, complacent, "doesn't really affect me but I like to view it as through a microscope" shite, exemplified by Marina Hyde and the fawning love she gets from this lot with her toothless, above-it-all dribble

They need stamping out and hence why "we" should not give them heed.

[jobotic]

Every Guardian centrist article about how awful everything is needs only one comment.

"This is what you wanted"

[phantom_power]

"You could have stopped it but you didn't want to pay a bit more tax"

[BlodwynPig]

"You could have stopped it but you didn't want to pay a bit more tax"

Could have stopped it but you are a bunch of narcissistic loons high on late 90s hubris so exemplified by that dinner party sketch by Chris Morris. You snarky nothings, valueless and indeed dangerous to humanity.

[Small Man Big Horse]

I don't know how to write this without coming across as sounding like a cunt. And I don't want to be a cunt, I actively try not to be one, though I know I have days where I don't succeed. But I hated this. I know I went in thinking it was probably going to be bad but I genuinely did want to like it, and in the opening five minutes there's some material on Brexit which did make me laugh out loud. But the rest of the 85 or so minutes I didn't laugh once. I absolutely fucking hated hated hated it.

And I know I'm a comedy nerb snob and shit and everything and the audience seemed to like it (though there wasn't as much laughter as I've heard in a lot of shows), and it did get a rousing round of applause. Except from me. And I know it's so fucking petty and jesus I'm almost fifty and get over yourself but I don't know, in my head I just couldn't clap at the end. I just stared at the floor and waited for it to be over.

So it's structured and performed like a Shakespeare play, or at least a production that echoed that format (one of the early jokes is Boris giving a Brexit themed "To be in, or not to be in" parody of Hamlet), and most but not all of the language was modern. Boris was Orbis Rex, Matt Hancock was Matt Hemlock, and nearly all the other characters had names akin to that though not all, Cressida Dick was "Cressida Dick Joke", and Sue Gray just, well, Sue Gray. Orbis / Boris was a sex obsessed arrogant twat who believed himself to be a god, and did whatever he could to avoid making a decision on anything, but it never attacked him viciously. "Matt Hemlock" was portrayed as a non-human creature from the bog who was trying to learn how to be human, and was desperate for "mates", and that's why he gave out all the contracts to rich people with no experience.

Rishi Sunak was smart but business obsessed, and there was something about him being a sprite when he was first introduced, but I didn't get that joke, and apart from his disastrous "Eat Out To Help Out" and a couple of jokes about his rich wife he gets off very lightly. Meanwhile Dominic Raab was an Eastend gangster type complete with boxing glove and a great deal of sweary threats. Liz Truss came on a couple of times dressed as the Queen but portrayed as the stupidest person alive, and Dominic Cummings had a brief cameo where he was portrayed incredibly sympathetically and couldn't understand why everyone was obsessed with his rule breaking when so many others had broken them as well.

It was filled with a lot of Armando's well known verbose insults, but they felt forced, tired, and to me the entire thing was toothless and smug. Every so often there would be a serious bit where the cast would come on out of character and mention all the people who died, those who suffered terribly, the children whose lives would never be the same again, but then it went back in to this tepid farce once more. There were also two scientists (Patrick Vallance was one, but I didn't catch the name of the other, I presumed it might be Chris Lilley but they didn't have any personalities, and were played by two young actors) and they came across as the only sane normal people in the entire production as they tried to warn everyone how serious the pandemic was but were roundly ignored.

SPOILERS FOR THE REST OF THIS BELOW:

Spoiler alert

When Boris gets covid he spends about 20 minutes in ICU (and off stage during nearly all that time) and when he wakes up it spends another five or so minutes in the pandemic and then leaps to him being interrogated by Cressida Dick Joke and Sue Gray, and Sue Gray has a mad raspy barely legible voice and that's supposed to be funny? Boris than claims that the parties didn't take place, someone comes on with photos of Boris at the parties but everyone else is blurred out, and he claims they're ghosts.

Then he states he can't be found guilty by the law as he is a god, Grey and Dick Joke tell him to prove it, so he heads off, meets Zeus, Artemis and Jehovah (and one other God whose name I've forgotten, but they turn out to be figments of his imagination and he ends up being dragged to hell along with Rishi, Hancock, Gavin Williams (in a 10 second cameo where it's supposed to be funny that he follows orders blindly) and then Boris tries to escape but everyone drags him back down to hell.

[close]

I mean, there's more to the above than what I've described, but not much, and I just don't have the energy to write about it anymore, I didn't plan to write this much tonight but it just poured out of me. The above is probably littered with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors too but I'm fucking tired and am just going to leave it here with a brief summary: This was horrible. Just fucking horrible. The only person who was really torn apart was Matt Hancock, everyone else was the target of supposedly witty jibes that made me want to walk out.

Fuck. Sorry. I have a real thing about writing bad reviews now as I feel guilty as someone involved might read it, and I know how much a bad review of my own writing effects me. But basically the cast were all great at what they did, and the only person who should feel fucking ashamed of himself is Armando Iannucci, who I'll never watch anything by again.

[extraordinary walnuts]

Thank you for your service, that does sound fucking shocking. Shame!

[shoulders]

Actually shuddered at a couple of points reading there.

[holyzombiejesus]

I don't know how to write this without coming across as sounding like a cunt. And I don't want to be a cunt, I actively try not to be one, though I know I have days where I don't succeed. But I hated this. I know I went in thinking it was probably going to be bad but I genuinely did want to like it, and in the opening five minutes there's some material on Brexit which did make me laugh out loud. But the rest of the 85 or so minutes I didn't laugh once. I absolutely fucking hated hated hated it.

.....

Fuck. Sorry. I have a real thing about writing bad reviews now as I feel guilty as someone involved might read it, and I know how much a bad review of my own writing effects me. But basically the cast were all great at what they did, and the only person who should feel fucking ashamed of himself is Armando Iannucci, who I'll never watch anything by again.

Thanks for that. It sounds absolutely horrific. Just imagining everyone fawning over him at the opening party, Matt Forde sat there taking notes.

[holyzombiejesus]

Actually shuddered at a couple of points reading there.

Yeah, me too! Had quite a visceral reaction to the Hamlet bit.

[Mobius]

Sounds dreadful, but not surprised at all. He's gone downhill over the years and this feels sort of inevitable.

[idunnosomename]

looks like it's curtains for boris!!!

but again, thank you for your service SMBG. hope the staging was at least a little bit entertaining as a night out?

this sort of satire saying Boris is a hellbound cunt might have been more biting before he became prime minister of the country. after the fact... who gives a shit? he was a fucking cunt and acted like a fucking cunt as any reasonable person expected? what do you want? a big clap? I bet you do etc

it's not even about taxes for people like Iannucci. it's just that Corbyn hadn't done the New Labour circuit as a minister like Ed Balls or whoever. him getting the top job was just wrong to so many Labour MPs' sense of order, even if he gave them jobs in his shadow cabinet. I mean there's more to it than that for some of the MPs but not the centrist dads in the party who just just totally shit their pants over him. anyway.

[gabrielconroy]

Christ, that really does sound like warmed up dog shite served on a silver platter to honking seals.

Presenting Cummings in any sort of favourable way is unforgivable. That odious prick got the easiest ride imaginable from every paper from the get go, presenting him as some sort of mega brain, when really he was nothing more than an over-indulged teenage misanthrope with laughably underthought ideas of radicalism. He should by rights have not made it through childbirth, so to hear that Iannucci has more or less written a character apologia on behalf of that goblin is fucking awful.

[Milo]

I've got a vague memory of a sketch, might even have been an Armando Iannucci thing, of a topical comedy writers room where it's all weak puns and what if we do the health secretary but he's like Dracula or something. This sounds like the sort of dogshit they'd come up with. Shit radio 4 comedy for cunts.

Edit: actually I might be thinking of the physical cartoonist played by David Schneider in The Day Today. That but a whole play and not meant to be shit.

[tribalfusion]

Armando Iannucci is absolute garbage and that extended review confirms it yet again.

Much like I wrote in the Gervais thread, I never cared for Iannucci at all but those of you who did, have you gone back and looked at his work and attempted to square what you feel now with what you may have liked at the time?

[shoulders]

Yes, and I concluded the stuff I liked is still good.

Cheere

[Mobius]

Much like Gervais I can still enjoy the old stuff. It's not like they're Russell Brand. They've just gone shit and been twats.

[tribalfusion]

Much like Gervais I can still enjoy the old stuff. It's not like they're Russell Brand. They've just gone shit and been twats.

I agree their work has been shit but does it cause you to wonder whether it was always shit and you overlooked the shit parts at the time?

[Kelvin]

I agree their work has been shit but does it cause you to wonder whether it was always shit and you overlooked the shit parts at the time?

What the fuck are you on about? No. Stop asking such stupid, condescending questions. 

[Jockice]

Every so often there would be a serious bit where the cast would come on out of character and mention all the people who died, those who suffered terribly, the children whose lives would never be the same again.

That alone puts me off. I saw something earlier this year, a farce basically, and they had a ticker tape thing (not sure what they're called) doing the script behind. So that people with hearing problems could follow it, All very well and good and worthy. But every so often when there was a break in the action it would start displaying political statistics (about disability discrimination, as if such a thing actually exists of course) with the words being broadcast as apparent radio news flashes.

I know from experience how difficult creating accessible and disability-aware theatre can be but the disconnect between the actual - extremely silly - plot and these bits annoyed me a bit. I know some of the people involved so I'm not slagging them off or naming them but it just didn't work for me.

[David Pielingtonburygrot]

I agree their work has been shit but does it cause you to wonder whether it was always shit and you overlooked the shit parts at the time?

No

[tribalfusion]

What the fuck are you on about? No. Stop asking such stupid, condescending questions. 

I wrote exactly what I was 'on about'

Your reaction on the other hand speaks volumes

[g0m]

I wrote exactly what I was 'on about'

Your reaction on the other hand speaks volumes

i do think it came across kind of like you were asking "now, do you agree that my opinion was right all along. Bit condescending, even if that wasn't the intent, like

[tribalfusion]

i do think it came across kind of like you were asking "now, do you agree that my opinion was right all along. Bit condescending, even if that wasn't the intent, like

I didn't write that at all nor did I call someone's question stupid and swear. I asked a simple question about as plainly as is possible. 

People on here complain about Gervais and Iannucci very regularly and yet there's very little to no discussion about the continuity in both writers' work by former fans of the same.