10 things we learned from Jesse Armstrong's Desert Island Discs
Jesse Armstrong is the mind behind some of TV’s greatest comedy masterpieces. He co-created Peep Show and Fresh Meat with his writing partner Sam Bain, wrote for political satire The Thick of It, and was the creator of the comedy-drama series Succession, which followed the fictional media family the Roys. It is now considered one of the best TV shows of all time.
Here are 10 things we learned from his Desert Island Discs…
1. His parents were hippies – sort of
Jesse Armstrong was born in 1970 in Oswestry, Shropshire, where his father had moved “to be in nature in a slightly sixties way”.
“We lived in the countryside with chickens, edging towards The Good Life.” But he’s reluctant to call them proper hippies. “Hippie is a word that’s gone through different phases,” Jesse tells presenter Lauren Laverne. “It has a pejorative ‘Neil from The Young Ones’ ring to it. They probably wouldn’t have liked the full lentil hippie tag.”
2. His mum encouraged him to find his own way
“I feel very lucky to have been born on a wave of her love and protection through my life,” Jesse says of his mum Julia. “Not everyone gets that.”
Some people found that to be betraying the brand. I just found it ludicrous. There was one guy being like, ‘What the expletive are you doing wearing that? You look like a Lib Dem.’Jesse on wearing a yellow tie to a Labour Party conference.
After giving birth to Jesse, “she was out of education earlier than she would've thought,” but later retrained and ran nurseries. “I've got a lot of support in terms of finding my own path from her. Everyone who knows her thinks of her as a delightful and generous and loving person.”
3. His father David was an English teacher – and ended up teaching him
“I tried to avoid it,” Jesse admits. “I tried going to another place in Shrewsbury. But the commute was too long, so I ended up being taught by him.”
Studying A-Level in English in his father’s class turned out to be a gift. “He was a good teacher. He’d bring newspaper articles in and do poems that weren’t on the syllabus. I’m glad to have seen that.”
4. Working for a politician taught him how power really works…
After studying at Manchester University, Jesse worked as a researcher for Labour MP Doug Henderson. “I’d like to go back and see camera footage of what I did all day,” he jokes. “It was just before email. I can’t imagine what you do in a job when you’re not answering emails.”
It was a broad brief “that went from asylum and immigration all the way to dangerous dogs, the Channel Islands and daylight savings,” Jesse explains, “but I never felt I was a brilliant researcher.”
What he found difficult was the tribalism. At a Labour Party conference, he once wore a yellow tie. “Some people found that to be betraying the brand. I just found it ludicrous. There was one guy being like, ‘What the expletive are you doing wearing that? You look like a Lib Dem.’”
Armstrong was confused. “Surely you can wear a different tie. You’re not x-raying my soul when you see the colour of my tie.”
5. … and came in very useful when he wrote for The Thick of It
That insight into human behaviour fed directly into political satire The Thick of It – the show created by Armando Iannucci, which Jesse contributed to as a writer. “I’ve always found it interesting how people end up taking on the values of the organisation they’re part of.”
If you do a made-up version, you can take from all these people’s lives, it's all there to be stolen from or inspired by, depending on how gently you want to put it.Jesse on why Succession worked best as a fiction.
Politics is “not that different from another workplace, from working in Oddbins which I’d been doing previously. There’s the boss. The boss says what happens. You fall in with the boss. And you end up thinking what Oddbins thinks.”
6. Peep Show was partly inspired by the supermodel Caprice and a Buddhist retreat
Jesse and his longtime writing partner Sam Bain co-created the acclaimed comedy Peep Show, known for its first-person perspective cameras and the inner monologues of its characters Mark and Jeremy, played by David Mitchell and Robert Webb.
It was the product of several strange influences. “There was a weird show with supermodel Caprice, with a camera on her head just going around her flat and thinking about how much yoghurt and jam she had left in the fridge.”
Around the same time, Bain had been on a silent Buddhist retreat. “He came back very struck by listening to the quality of his own thoughts and, and how odd and repetitive and funny and weird your thoughts are.”
Out of that eclectic mix, Peep Show was born.
7. Succession had its origins in real people – but soon it became fictional
The road to getting Succession made was long and arduous. It started as a “kind of documentary” about Rupert Murdoch – “I found that hard to write” – and then Jesse attempted to write a play about the Murdoch family. “That proved very hard to get made. So, it died.”
Over the years, as his interest in powerful men such as Robert Maxwell and Sumner Redstone continued, he realised it would work best as fiction. “If you do a made-up version, you can take from all these people’s lives,” he says. “It's all there to be stolen from or inspired by, depending on how gently you want to put it.”
8. A writers’ room can feel like walking on the moon
Succession was Jesse’s first experience as a showrunner, the person responsible for the creative direction of the show. That involved overseeing around 200 crew members as well as “an iceberg’s worth of other people”.
Which can be a terrifying thought when sitting solo with a laptop and imagining the show into being. “You can't think about that. You’re dead if you start thinking about the person who might have to stay up an extra night to make the set for the scene which you've suddenly realised is crucial. You must develop a little bit of an ice chip in your heart.”
But it’s exhilarating too, especially being in a room full of writers. “When a room is working well, it’s like you’re walking on the moon,” he says. “You’re bounding around, picking up rocks, and everything’s veined with gold.”
9. But writing can be a lonely experience too
“It's not the hardest thing in the world writing or making a TV show,” Jesse says as he reflects on moving to New York to write Succession, “but sometimes it felt hard to me, especially leaving family behind. The dislocation of that, and the great joy of having something that people respond to, but the growing responsibility of trying to keep the quality up becomes its own pressure.”
It’s why he chooses LCD Soundsystem’s New York, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down as his sixth disc choice. “As we'd say in the writer's room, it's very on the nose,” he jokes.
10. Winning 19 Emmys doesn’t make you confident
Despite everything Succession achieved, Jesse still harbours doubts about his own ability. “All the good writers I know are riddled with self-doubt,” he says. “It's like, you don't know how possible it is for me to be a really bad writer because you don't see all the drafts where it's really bad.”
Every new project comes with “this 70% feeling that this is going to be a disaster and I'm going to be exposed as the fraud I always thought I was.” The key is to hold onto that “10%, 20%, if you're lucky 30% feeling of, ‘if I could do the version of this which I think it should be, it could be really great.’”
