Jesse Armstrong, writer

0:00Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury, that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast, but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds. Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else. I hope you enjoy listening.

0:43My cast away this week is the writer and showrunner Jesse Armstrong. He's created some of the most talked about shows in recent TV history, from his breakthrough success Peep Show, which he made with a long time writing partner Sam Bain, to his epic family saga Succession, which married Shakespearean themes of power, avarice and betrayal with pitch black humour. winning 19 Emmys. He grew up in Oswestry in Shropshire. After moving to Manchester to study American literature at university and to rave at the Hacienda, he spent time working as a researcher in the House of Commons. A career in Westminster wasn't for him, but his experience of life behind the scenes helped the political comedies he worked on, The Thick of It, In the Loop and Veep, hit the right note.

1:27Speaking of which, he says, the hardest thing to get right in any work of art and certainly in a TV show, the single most essential and ineffable thing you're looking for is a tone. Jesse Armstrong, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you very much. I'm very pleased to be here. Well, listen, let's start with getting the tone right, Jesse. Is that something that you have in mind from the beginning, like the atmosphere of a piece that you want to create, or does it come in the making of it? Yeah, I was waiting for you to get to the end of that sentence to find out what wisdom I had coming. And I didn't disagree with it, but I think what's so very difficult about it is you can't sit down and write a tone, right?

2:05I guess it comes from a culmination of your experiences and the other stuff you've watched and what you want to do. And then you have to achieve it through a script, through the casting, through your collaborators in all the different departments of a TV show. And that's, I guess, what the showrunner role is, is somebody who's trying to protect or create that tone. Could you try and kind of explain succession, for example? What's the tone that you're trying to hit there? When I pitched the show, it was Festin meets Dallas. Festin meets Dallas. So it's a Danish art film about a dysfunctional family and Dallas.

2:38Most of you listeners of our age will know what Dallas was. Irresistible. Commissioned instantly. So I guess, you know, it has a sort of grabby, melodramatic family who's going to be the boss of this conglomerate going forward story. but shot like Festin in a rather documentary way. I'm interested in the details of people's lives. Do you listen to music while you're writing? Yes, I do. It's a sort of easing into the warm bath. It can be quite lonely. I've got trying not to have any other distractions. It's sort of a friend when there's no other friends around and makes the day feel a little less ice wall-y.

3:17So I do... As in an ice wall that you're climbing. Climbing, exactly. I can't listen to anything with lyrics and I've found through process of elimination that like Baroque music, you know, is the best for me Interesting, why is that? Do you think frilly? Keeps active? Keeps the brain going? I think so, a bit frilly a bit grid-like a bit progressions recapitulations coming back iterations the good part is when you forget that you're listening and it's gone and you suddenly if you have a, you know feel like you're on a hot streak you suddenly kind of wake up after 20 minutes or a half an hour or 45 minutes, if you're lucky and the records still go around on term table, that's the good bit.

3:57But if you are listening to it, I think there's something, especially succession, there's something about that feeling of 17th, 18th century filigrees and delicateness and, you know, private wealth, public squalor. You feel like you could be, it's quite Venetian, right? And it's kind of sumptuous, the whole thing is. Exactly. And slightly dangerous liaisons, scary social manoeuvrings. All right. Well, let's get into your discs now that you're taking to the desert island. Your first, Jesse Armstrong, what's it going to be? It's the Beatles' A Day in the Life. Why this one? The Beatles were the first band I loved.

4:35I had a cassette of the White Album that I play when I was a little boy, almost 9, 10. And I guess the mixture of some of the melodies and even lyrics are sort of childlike. You know, there's some quite child friendly songs and then there's some extremely avant-garde stuff that blew my head off, I guess, when I was first listening to it. When they were probably at their cultural nadir in the 80s, I was a strong, strong Beatles fan. And this is an interesting combination of both those things, right? Because this is the splicing of another great writing partnership, Lennon and McCartney. Yeah, I mean, it's got, yeah, like all songs you probably love, it's got lots of things.

5:13and I love thinking about their collaboration and you can hear the collaboration in this is absolutely distinct, right? I think it's recorded in 1967 and you can hear something that's both like the ultimate in one way expression of the 60s which also somehow in a sort of darkness and the fact that it's a late last song on the album pretty much somehow feels sort of Joan Didion-y and end of the 60s and something darker coming. But they're like 24, 26, I think Paul McCartney's maybe 24, 25, John Lennon, only a couple of years older, and such young men. And this is an extraordinary avant-garde piece of art that they made together.

6:02A crowd of people turned away But I just have to look Having read the book I'd love to turn you wrong

6:31The Beatles and A Day in the Life So let's go back to the beginning, Jesse Armstrong. You were born in Oswestry in 1970, the eldest son to David and Julia. How would you describe your childhood? I find all the things like this a bit difficult. I feel like, I don't know, maybe I'm a natural contrarian or quibbler. Whatever I say, I feel like I want to correct it and say, that's not quite how it was. That's not exactly how it was. But I'll try and say, happy. Yeah. How's happy? Yeah, happy's great. That's a good start. Not completely uncomplicated, nobody's childhood is, but I'm lucky they're both still with us and I love both of them very much and they're good parents.

7:11So from what I've read, your parents sound a little bit like mine, their ex-hippies kind of vibe. What was important at home then? Are we talking like, you know, music, art, ideas, politics, all of that stuff? Hippie was, yeah, it's gone through different phases. I got maybe a pejorative kind of Neil from the Young Ones ring. They probably wouldn't have liked the full lentil hippie tag. But yeah, basically, I think my dad had moved to the countryside to sort of be in nature in a slightly 60s way. And I met my mum there in a border market town with rural traditions. But there was a slightly separate coterie of people who had moved there in the more like the 70s and early 80s.

7:52Through my young childhood, we lived out of town in the countryside with chickens and edging towards the good life, self-sufficiency. weighing the run of beans as they came in. And what about the kind of, you know, life, the ideas at home? You know, so were they socially engaged? Were you reading a lot? What was valuable at home? Yeah, I guess it was that political era of CND. CND was a big part of life. They were culturally engaged, you know, that we were far from a city. But I guess film and TV were discussed in like a serious way. And there was a lot of really good stuff on TV. What kind of thing do you remember?

8:28Especially my dad still does this. If there's an interesting drama on TV that week, he will watch it and he won't go easy on it. He's pretty a tough critic. And so there was a high premium put on, whether it had been a good play for today. It was an era, right, of Dennis Potter, had a lot of work on. Carol Churchill was writing for play for today. Alan Plater, Jack Rosenthal. There was a lot of Alan Bennett. There were a lot of really great writers writing for TV and it all got taken quite seriously. My dad always wanted to be a writer. He got published a bit later, not in that time. So he would disappear and write and maybe that odour was around the house as well.

9:08We've heard about your dad. Tell me a bit more about your mum, Julia. So she was 19 when she had you, wasn't she? I believe that's right. Yeah, so she was a young mum and I feel very lucky to have been sort of born on a wave of her love and protection through my life. Not everyone gets that, But she's a, I think everyone who knows her thinks of her as a delightful and generous and loving person. Has she always been supportive? Because it's quite an unconventional path, the one that you've taken. I guess I was lucky they were somewhat unconventional, somewhat in the counterculture. And therefore, I never felt any pressure really to do anything in particular.

9:45And my mum was very supportive and she took an unconventional path, you know, because she had me. She was out of education earlier than she probably would have thought. but then later educated herself and ran nurseries, went from being like a nursery worker to managing a bunch of nurseries for people in education and then opened a shop very successfully. So I've got a lot of support in terms of finding my own path from her. All right, let's have some more music, Jesse Armstrong. It's your second choice today. What have you gone for? Is Joy Division, Love Will Tear Us Apart. I find it really hard to choose.

10:19I was thinking about Ceremony, which is the song, I think, that was like a New Order song that they took from the Joy Division. Yeah, you'll know better than me, the catalogue, and you can almost hear when Bernard Sumner's singing it and sort of finding his voice. This is obviously before that era. It's Ian Curtis still singing before Joy Division turned into New Order, which they did when he took his life. And I guess, you know, we were talking about the Beatles, and they were a bit like the Beatles of my generation. This is from about 1980, and their Ibiza album Technique came out in the end of the 89, 90, and they feel like they underwent a similar level of evolution from that kind of post-war Manchester sound to a drug-infused, Balearic dance music, and so feeling that version of a story really appeals to me.

11:40Joy Division and Love Will Tear Us Apart. So Jesse Armstrong, your dad, he was an English teacher and he actually taught you A-level English, didn't he? How was that? It was actually good. I tried to avoid it by going to another place in Shrewsbury in Shropshire, but the commute was too long on the bus. And so I ended up going back to be taught by him. And yeah, I'd wanted to avoid it. But I'm really glad I've had that experience to see what he was like. He was a good teacher and enthused and would range around and bring newspaper articles in and do poems that weren't on the syllabus. And yeah, he was good.

12:15And I'm glad to have seen that. Oh, I love that. He also saw his own writing ambitions realised, didn't he? Because he became a published author. What did he write? Crime fiction and other fiction and some nonfiction. But he got published first doing crime fiction. And yeah, and it was a big deal. He'd always been a writer around House. And so, yeah, it was a big change. And he eventually stopped being a teacher. And did you read what he wrote? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And good. Good. I mean, it's good literary crime fiction. He obviously encouraged you because you took American Studies at Manchester University, which is literature based.

12:51Why did you choose that? Honestly, I was quite attracted by somewhere that it's a four year course and you spend a year abroad. But I'm not very good at languages. Sadly, I'd love to be. But you can go abroad without speaking a foreign language. That appealed. And it's an interdisciplinary degree. You do history, politics and literature. And I think that's a really good thing to do. You know, we specialise very early in this country. In America, they do it later. And to get a bit of all of those three and seeing them intersecting is a really valuable way to study. And I'm not surprised that you look back at it as this kind of exciting place of possibility because your life changed.

13:24You met your writing partner, Sam Bain, and your wife while you were at university. So it was a life changing time for you. I went up quite tentatively. We all lived, I lived in a house for the first two years, didn't go into student accommodation, but four or five of us from Oswestry, we all lived together in a kind of self-protecting huddle in the big city. Like an embassy. Exactly. Shropshire embassy. in Fowlerfield. But I did end up eventually seeing what the outside of the house looked like and embracing the world. And yeah, made some very important relationships there. And where did you spend your time in the US when you had your year away?

14:01UMass, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which has also got a good cultural heritage, including Frank Black from Pixies was there and a few bands. He's got some called UMass. Yeah. One of the things you're very good at, obviously, is what I think of as like the music of a language, right? So, you know, the way that people speak to each other, that must have been interesting to be in a place where you could kind of take that in and get the rhythm and cadence of a new language, you know, be immersed in it. Yeah, that's kind of you to say, and I hope that's true. And yeah, it probably has been useful in my career.

14:35I guess most of us who grow up in the UK now sort of feel bilingual in American language. Although actually when you write a script, an English person, still you'd be surprised at how many turns of phrase, little miniature changes to the language would betray you if you were trying to be a secret agent in America. So yeah, it was useful for me to be amongst, you know, native speaking Americans for a bit for my career. I think I didn't realise it at the time, but it was. That's interesting because you do have, you know, on shows like Succession, you've got this kind of UK-US writers room. So do you teach each other?

15:08Do you run those little idioms past each other? We sure do. And it's great when you have an American who suddenly says, what? After the Lord Mayor's show? After the Lord Mayor's show? And you're like, yeah, you've never heard After the Lord Mayor's show? And like, what the hell does After the Lord Mayor's show mean? So you pick up things which you didn't realise are so idiosyncratic. It's fun. We'd better have some music. What are we going to hear next? Pixies Debesa. So, yeah, it could have been Where Is My Mind, which would have had a peep show remembrance, but this one references the surrealist film and Sean Andalou, which is Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali.

15:46And Frank Black, who from the Pixies, did a course at UMass where I went, where they taught this short film, and I think he took his inspiration from it. so there's a sort of connection there for me in my mind and I love the song.

16:29We'll be right back. Pixies and Debesa. So, Jesse Armstrong, after university, you did a series of jobs, including working as a researcher for the Labour MP Doug Henderson, unpaid at first. What did that gig entail? That's a good question. I'd like to be able to go back and see camera footage of what I did all day. It was sort of, I guess, pretty much just before email or at least before everything came in on email. I can't really imagine what you do in a job when you're not answering emails now. I did research, I did answering letters. The higher end, and I didn't do a ton of this, would be proper research, finding out about an issue.

17:07Who's in the Shadow Home Affairs team under Jack Straw? So I might write him up some notes about an issue that was facing us. He had a weird brief that went from asylum and immigration all the way to dangerous dogs, the Channel Islands and daytime savings. Broad. Broad. And Doug was a good employer and a good man, but I never felt I was a brilliant researcher. So he was in opposition when you first started off, right? Yeah. But then, obviously, the Labour landslide and all of that. Yeah, and I left. But did you see any of the big beasts of that era up close? Where was your office? Yeah, we were in Millbank.

17:45They've knocked it down now, Seven Millbank, I think, along from the BBC studios. Yeah, we had an office right next door to Peter Mandelson. I could hear him talking or shouting to his staff. Harriet Harman was around and her researchers, one of whom was Liz Kendall. Lots of people from that era have gone on to do proper things in government. And yeah, I worked for Doug, who worked under Jack Straw. And yeah, I was a real minion. But even I, I was at the Labour Party conference in probably 96 when Tony Blair had been doing headers with Kevin Keegan on the news. And I was for some reason backstage and I walked around the corner and Tony Blair was wearing leisure wear.

18:25And for a minute, I thought, oh, this is what he, he's like somebody in The Sopranos. He like, he has his suit, but all day, he just, offstage, he just lounges around like Paulie. But yeah, interesting, yeah. Pat McFadden, who's now a senior figure. We'd have meetings with him, with Doug. He's a behind the scenes fixer and useful for me when I came to work on The Thick of It and thinking about not only the kind of Alistair Camberley part of Malcolm Tucker, but the more sinewy, successful, efficient parts of that sort of character. Yeah, and also the atmosphere of the place, you know, what it feels like to be there.

18:58Because we talked about tone earlier. What did you want to kind of bring into the thick of it that you remembered from your time, having that ringside seat? You put your finger exactly on why it was so useful. One of the things that's useful about being in a world like that is just realising it's not that different from another workplace, you know, from working in odd bins, which I'd been doing previously. It's like, oh, there's the boss. The boss says what happens. You basically fall in with the boss. And guess what? You work for odd bins now. And so you kind of think what Oddbind thinks about the world.

19:27I've always found it interesting how even people who are relatively independently minded end up taking on the values of the organisation to a certain extent, to a certain extent that you're part of. So were you a political animal back then, would you have said? I just wasn't. I guess I wanted to be and I liked the world. I was interested in politics. One thing I found odd about it was how the sort of tribal nature. I went to the Labour Party conference and I remember wearing a, I wore a yellow tie and some people found that to be betraying the brand. I just found it, I found it ludicrous that we.

20:04Really? Were people coming up going like. I remember there was just one guy being like, what the expletive you do wearing that, you look like a Lib Dem. And I've just felt like surely we're allowed, you can wear a different, You're not X-raying my soul when you see the colour of my tie. So I found that level of team playing hard to get my head round. But, yeah, maybe those signals are important. Jessie, it's time for some more music. Your fourth choice today. What are you taking to the island next? Billie Holiday singing Georgia On My Mind. Why? It reminds me, it's one of those direct hits of there's nothing like a song for taking you back to somewhere and to a very happy time.

20:40My wife and I spent relatively early in our relationship on holiday in Italy. And there was a garden and I was doing a lot of cooking from the garden and working my way through a book on the essentials of Italian cookery. And, yeah, it's just a very, very fond memory. Billie Holiday and cooking outside. That sounds pretty nice. Yes, please.

21:08Georgia, Georgia The whole day through Just an old sweet song keeps Georgia on my mind

21:31Georgia Billy Holiday and Georgia on My Mind So, Jesse Armstrong, you and Sam had started off writing for sketch shows like Smack the Pony. You then went on to create Peep Show, starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb. Can you remember the call to say it had been commissioned? Yeah, I can't remember many things, but I do remember that, and it was exciting. we did two 15 minute pilots and feel silly now because really young but we'd done a couple of shows we'd done a really we did a really disastrous show on itv probably still the thing that's got the most viewers me and sam of anything that i and me and sam have ever done so we'd had a couple of things that had gone really badly and so it felt like oh maybe this isn't going to work out with us as as writers and and so we took it very very seriously what was the thing with all the of you as that went badly days like these it was the british version of a hit american show um that 70s show it was on after coronation street so it had like a massive lead in anyway so yeah we were we were hard workers we'd met david and robert through things schemes at the bbc we admired their work a lot and really i feel like collaboration is such a big part of of the way i've worked and that show you know me and sam collaborated heavily obviously on on all of it But it was also a collaboration with the comic voices that we'd got to know of David and Robert and versions of themselves that they played in sketches and comic performances.

23:02So it was a really delightful thing to find a lot of creative work, right, is finding your voice and finding the way that you can be funny. You're not going to be funny the same as everyone else. You're going to find your own way. And in their comic personas, we managed to find a way to write probably about as well as we could. The form of Peep Show, obviously, incredibly distinctive. This first-person camera coupled with the character's interior monologue. How did you come up with that? So the original idea was to have David and Robert watch quite a cheap format, watching clips on TV like Beavis and Butthead, talking over them sarcastically, taking the mickey out of what they were watching.

23:39And it needed some elements to link those together was the idea. Me and Sam came up with a bunch, but this was by far the best. And I think it came out of a bit of the scene in Annie Hall where you see their relationship subtitled. There was a weird show on with the supermodel Caprice with a camera on her head, just going around her flat and doing things like thinking about how much yogurt and jam she had left in the fridge. and there was a bit of Sam had a deep interest in Buddhism and he'd been on a silent retreat and he came back, I remember, very struck by listening to the quality of his own thoughts and how odd and repetitive and funny and weird your thoughts are.

24:19Obviously people have done voiceovers and what people are thinking before and it's sort of what novels are, but it felt like with that first-person camera work it lent it a different quality. It also really allows you to emphasise that kind of cringe element, you know, just the discomfort, which is where so much of the comedy comes from. How did you and Sam go about hitting the right spot with that kind of cringe comedy? Because it's quite a delicate balance, that, because it's got to be, you know, obviously it's a given situation taken to an extreme, but you can't take it too far. It's still got to feel believable.

24:54Yeah, and I think there's no graph or set of instructions which will tell you exactly how to do that. It has to be instinctive. If I know one thing, it's that something feeling real will make it better, whether that's in drama or comedy. and the quality of that camera work and the quality of David and Robert's performances, I guess, made situations that you might be familiar with from a sitcom, a bad date, a party that goes wrong, a job that you don't like, and let us make them feel fresh again. And whether that's camera work, you know, a huge number of sitcoms now use the documentary style, you know, office-derived camera work because it makes the audience feel like, oh, this is really happening.

25:39This is actually happening. I mean, that's succession as well, right? Succession too. It's a trick that anything you can do to make the audience feel like, oh, this isn't a representation of reality. I mean, not all art profits from that. Sometimes you want style to be to the fore, but there's a version, and I think it's quite useful for a certain kind of comedy, to suggest like, oh, no, this is actually happening. At the beginning, a bit like what you do on a team-written show, So we would spend some weeks together, as we'd say, breaking, figuring out the shape of the season and the shape of each episode.