Jesse Armstrong

Presenter0:00

Hello, 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.

Presenter0:43

My castaway 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 longtime 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. Speaking 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.

Jesse Armstrong1:41

Thank you very much. I'm very pleased to be here.

Presenter1:43

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?

Jesse Armstrong1:53

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? I 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 if it's a TV show. And that's, I guess, what the showrunner role is, is somebody who's trying to protect or create that tone.

Speaker 12:04

No.

Presenter2:05

Right.

Speaker 12:05

Uh

Presenter2:24

Could you try and kind of explain succession, for example? What's the tone that you're trying to hit there?

Jesse Armstrong2:30

When I pitched the show, it was Feston meets Dallas. Feston Meets Dallas. So it's a a Danish art film about a dysfunctional family and Dallas. Most of your listeners of our age will know what Dallas was. Irresistible. Commissioned instantly. So I guess you know, it has a sort of grabby

Presenter2:41

Irresistible. Commissioned instantly.

Jesse Armstrong2:48

melodramatic family, Who's going to be the boss of this conglomerate going forward story, but shot like Feston in in a rather a documentary way and interested in the details of people's lives.

Presenter3:00

Do you listen to music while you're writing?

Jesse Armstrong3:02

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 f friends around and makes the day feel a little less ice wally. So I do.

Presenter3:18

And that's in an ice wall that you're climbing.

Jesse Armstrong3:20

Exactly. I can't listen to anything with lyrics and I've found through process of elimination that like Baroque music is the best for me.

Presenter3:31

Interesting. Why is that? Do you think frilly keeps active, keeps the brain going?

Jesse Armstrong3:35

I think so. A bit frilly, a bit

Presenter3:36

Yeah.

Jesse Armstrong3:37

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 half an hour or 45 minutes, if you're lucky and the records still go around on turntable. That's the good bit. But 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

Presenter4:07

Oh yeah.

Jesse Armstrong4:08

Delicateness and private wealth, public squalor. You feel like you could be, it's quite Venetian, right? It's quite.

Presenter4:15

It's kind of sumptuous, the whole thing is.

Jesse Armstrong4:17

Exactly. And slightly dangerous liaisons, scary social manoeuvrings.

Presenter4:24

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?

Jesse Armstrong4:30

It's the Beatles A Day in the Life.

Presenter4:32

Why this one?

Jesse Armstrong4:33

The Beatles were the sort of the first band I loved. I had a cassette of the white album that I play when I was you know a little boy, almost nine, ten. 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 eighties, I was a strong, strong Beatles fan.

Presenter5:01

And this is an interesting combination of both those things, right? Because this is the splicing of another great writing partnership, Leonard and McCartney.

Jesse Armstrong5:04

Is that

Jesse Armstrong5:08

Yeah, it g I mean it's got l yeah, like all songs you probably love, it's got lots of things and I love thinking about their collaboration and you can hear the the collaboration in this is absolutely distinct, right? I think it's recorded in nineteen sixty seven and you can

Jesse Armstrong5:26

to hear something that's both like the

Jesse Armstrong5:28

ultimate in one way expression of the sixties, which also somehow in a sort of darkness and the fact it's you know, late the last song on the album pretty much

Jesse Armstrong5:40

Somehow feels sort of Joan Didion-y and end of the 60s and something darker coming. But they're like 24, 26. I think Bomcart is maybe 24, 25, and John then only a couple of years older, and such young men. And this is an extraordinary avant-garde piece of art that they made together.

Speaker 16:02

A crowd of people turned away

Jesse Armstrong6:08

But I just have to look

Jesse Armstrong6:11

Having red to the ball

Jesse Armstrong6:16

And love to serve you.

Presenter6:32

The 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?

Jesse Armstrong6:44

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

Presenter6:54

Takes nothing.

Speaker 16:55

Yeah.

Presenter6:55

What's the

Jesse Armstrong6:57

Happy.

Presenter6:58

Yeah.

Jesse Armstrong6:58

Yeah.

Presenter6:59

Yeah.

Jesse Armstrong6:59

How's happy? Yeah, 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.

Presenter6:59

Yeah, that is great. That's a good stop.

Presenter7:11

So from what I've read, your parents sound a little bit like mine, they're 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?

Jesse Armstrong7:21

Hippie was, yeah, it's gone through different phases. I got maybe a pejorative kind of kneel from the Young Ones Ring. They 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 been in nature in a slightly sixties way and I met my mum there in a border market town with rural traditions. But there was a a slightly separate coterie of people who'd moved there in the

Speaker 17:39

Ian

Jesse Armstrong7:50

more like the seventies and early eighties. Through my young childhood we lived out of town in the countryside with chickens and edging towards the good life, self-sufficiency, weighing the runner beans as they came in.

Speaker 17:57

Uh

Presenter7:57

Self-sufficiency.

Presenter8:02

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.

Jesse Armstrong8:08

Oh yeah.

Jesse Armstrong8:09

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 T V were discussed in like a serious way and um there was a lot of really good stuff on T V as it

Presenter8:26

What kind of thing do you remember?

Jesse Armstrong8:28

Especially my dad still does this. If there's an interesting drama on TV that week, he will watch it and have, 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. Isn't he a writer of Dennis Potter had a lot of work on? Carol Churchill was writing the 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. And my dad was 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.

Presenter8:47

Yeah.

Presenter9:08

We've heard about your dad. Tell me a bit more about your mum, Julia. So she was nineteen when she had you, wasn't she?

Jesse Armstrong9:13

I believe that's right, yeah, so she was a young mum and um I feel very lucky to have been sort of born on a wave of 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.

Presenter9:34

Has she always been supportive? Because it's quite an unconventional path, the one that you've taken.

Jesse Armstrong9:37

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. And 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.

Presenter10:11

All right, let's have some more music, Jesse Armstrong. It's your second choice today. What have you gone for?

Jesse Armstrong10:15

Is Joy Division Love Will Tear Us Apart? I found it really hard to choose. I 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 like 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, you know, a drug-infused, balaric dance music. And so feeling that version of a story really appeals to me.

Speaker 311:30

The candle software.

Speaker 311:33

Turn away on your

Presenter11:37

Right, I'm in the fall.

Presenter11:41

Joy division and love will tear us apart. So, Jesse Armstrong, your daddy was an English teacher and he actually taught you A-level English, didn't he? How was that?

Jesse Armstrong11:49

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 in it. 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. And I'm glad to have seen that.

Presenter12:16

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?

Jesse Armstrong12:23

uh crime fiction and and other fiction um and 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 our house. And so yeah, it was a a big change and he's yeah, eventually stopped being a teacher.

Presenter12:38

And did you read what he wrote?

Jesse Armstrong12:39

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And good, good I mean it's good literary crime f f fiction.

Presenter12:44

He obviously, you know, encouraged you because you took American Studies at Manchester University, which is literature-based. Why did you choose that?

Jesse Armstrong12:52

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.

Presenter13:17

And I'm not surprised that you look back at it as this kind of exciting place of possibility because your life changed. You met your writing partner, Sam Bain, and your wife while you were at university. So it was a life changing time for you.

Jesse Armstrong13:31

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 Oswestree, we all lived together in a kind of self protecting huddle in the big city.

Presenter13:43

Big city. Exactly.

Jesse Armstrong13:45

Uh

Presenter13:45

Uh

Jesse Armstrong13:45

Yeah.

Presenter13:45

Yeah.

Jesse Armstrong13:45

Shropshire Embassy in Fadderfield. But I did end up eventually seeing what the outside of the house looked like and embracing the world. And yeah, th made some very important relationships there, yeah.

Presenter13:47

Yeah.

Presenter13:57

And where did you spend your time in the US when you had your year away?

Jesse Armstrong14:00

UMass, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which has also got a good cultural heritage, including Frank Black from Pixies, was there and a few bands.

Presenter14:09

He's got a song called You Master. One of the things you're 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

Jesse Armstrong14:10

Yeah.

Presenter14:22

interesting to be in a place where you could kind of take that in and get the rhythm and cadence of a new a new language, you know, be immersed in it.

Jesse Armstrong14:31

Yeah, that's kind of you to say, and I hope that's true. And yeah, it probably has been useful in my career. I 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 native speaking Americans for a bit for my career. I think I didn't realize it at the time, but it was.

Speaker 314:53

Yeah.

Presenter14:53

Uh

Presenter15:01

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? Do you run those little idioms past each other?

Jesse Armstrong15:10

We sure do. And then 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 not 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 yeah, you pick up things which you didn't realize that it's so idiosyncratic, it's fun.

Presenter15:28

We're better have some music. What are we going to hear next?

Jesse Armstrong15:30

Pixies Debaser. So, yeah, it could have been Where is My Mind, which would have been a Peep had a peep show remembrance, but this one references the surrealist film Anchen Andelou, which is Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. And 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.

Speaker 116:09

Got me moving, I want you to know. Signs in the eyeballs, I want you to know. Girl, it's so proving, I want you to know. Don't

Jesse Armstrong16:20

I don't know about you.

Speaker 116:21

Uh

Jesse Armstrong16:22

Share and lose you. I am moon.

Speaker 116:26

Shut up and loose.

Presenter16:31

Pixies and Debaser. 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?

Jesse Armstrong16:45

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. Like the higher end, and I didn't do a ton of this, would be proper research, finding out about an issue who'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. Abroad. Abroad. And Doug was a good employer and a good man, but I never felt I was a brilliant researcher.

Presenter17:29

So he was in opposition when you first started off, right? But then, obviously, the labor landslide and all of that. Yeah.

Jesse Armstrong17:31

I started off.

Jesse Armstrong17:32

Oh.

Jesse Armstrong17:36

Yeah, and I left.

Presenter17:37

But did you see any of the big beasts of that era up close? Where was your office? Pay me a picture.

Jesse Armstrong17:43

We were in Millbank. They've knocked it down now, 7 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 Harmon 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.

Jesse Armstrong18:25

For a minute, I thought, oh, this is what he, he's like what somebody in the Sopranos. He likes, he has his suit, but all bay, he just offstage, he just lounges around like Paulie. But yeah, I met 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.

Speaker 118:30

Well babe, he just

Speaker 118:39

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 118:42

Yeah, when

Jesse Armstrong18:46

not only the kind of Alastair Camberley part of Malcolm Tucker, but the more s sinewy, successful, efficient parts of that sort of character.

Presenter18:49

The

Presenter18:54

Yeah, and also the atmosphere of the place, you know, what it feels like to be there, because uh 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?

Jesse Armstrong18:57

I see the

Jesse Armstrong19:05

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 realizing it's not that different from another workplace, you know, from working in Oddbins, 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 Oddbins now, and so you kind of think what Oddbins thinks about the world. I've always found it interesting how even people who are relatively independently minded end up taking on the values of the organization to a certain extent, to a certain extent that you're part of.

Presenter19:37

To certainly

Presenter19:39

So were you a political animal back then, would you have said?

Jesse Armstrong19:42

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

Presenter20:04

Really? Were people coming up? Going like

Jesse Armstrong20:05

I remember there was just one guy being, oh, what what the expletive you do wearing that? You look like a lib dem. Uh and I've just felt like surely we're allowed you can wear a different it you're not x-raying my soul when you see the color of my tie. So I found that level of team playing hard to get my head round, but yeah, maybe those signals are important.

Presenter20:25

Jess, it's time for some more music. Your fourth choice today. What are you taking to the island next?

Jesse Armstrong20:29

Billie Holiday singing Georgia on my mind

Presenter20:31

Why?

Jesse Armstrong20:32

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 my wife and I spent relatively early in our relationship on holiday in Italy and um

Jesse Armstrong20:47

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.

Presenter20:57

Billy Holiday cooking outside. That sounds pretty nice.

Presenter21:01

Yes, please.

Speaker 121:09

Georgia, Georgia.

Speaker 121:14

The old days through.

Speaker 121:19

Just an old sweet song keeps your young mamma.

Jesse Armstrong21:24

Uh

Speaker 121:30

Y

Presenter21:33

Billie Holiday and George are on my mind.

Presenter21:37

So Jesse Armstrong, you and Sam had started off writing for sketch shows like Smack the Pony. You then went on to create peep shows starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb. Can you remember the call to say it had been commissioned?

Jesse Armstrong21:51

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 we were young, but we'd done a couple of shows. We did a really disastrous show on ITV. Probably still the thing that's got the most viewers of anything that I or 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 writers. And so we took it very, very seriously.

Presenter22:22

What was the thing with all the viewers that went badly?

Jesse Armstrong22:24

Days like these, it was the British version of a hit American show, That Seventies 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.

Jesse Armstrong22:37

Through things, schemes at the BBC, we admired their work a lot and really.

Jesse Armstrong22:43

I feel like collaboration is such a big part of the way I've worked. And that show, you know, me and Sam collaborated heavily, obviously, on all of it. But it was also a collaboration

Jesse Armstrong22:54

with the the comic voices that we'd got to know of David and Robert and the and versions of themselves that they played in sketches and comic performances. So it was a really delightful thing to find a lot of creative work writers 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.

Presenter23:21

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?

Jesse Armstrong23:29

So the original idea was to have David and Robert watch quite cheap format watching clips on T V like Beavis and Butthead talking over them sarcastically, taking the Mickey out what they were watching. And it needed some elements to

Jesse Armstrong23:42

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 with by listening to the quality of his own thoughts and how odd and repetitive and funny and weird your thoughts are. You know, obviously, 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.

Presenter24:30

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 is quite a delicate balance that, because it's got to be, you know, obviously it's a given situation taken to an extreme.

Jesse Armstrong24:33

You know, just

Speaker 324:44

Yeah.

Jesse Armstrong24:49

Hmm.

Presenter24:50

But you can't take it too far, it's still got to feel

Jesse Armstrong24:53

Yeah.

Presenter24:53

Believable.

Jesse Armstrong24:54

Yeah, 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 Roberts' performances, I guess, made situations that you might be familiar with. 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. This is actually happening.

Presenter25:40

I mean that's succession as well, right?

Jesse Armstrong25:42

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. We would spend some weeks together, as we'd say, breaking, figuring out the shape of the season and the shape of each episode. And I love that process on succession, and I love doing it with Sam to go and spend time laughing with your friend and coming up with funny stuff can be a great joy.

Presenter26:22

It's time for some more music, Jesse. Your fifth choice today. What are we going to hear next? And why are you taking it with you to your island?

Jesse Armstrong26:28

It's De la Soul, three is the magic number, and it's for my kids. They're older now, but Schoolhouse Rock and American sort of educational work is what they sample in this song. And we used to play this song around the house, and I also used to play Schoolhouse Rock, which is good to dance to with kids. So it makes me think of them.

Presenter26:57

Three

Presenter26:58

That's a magic number

Presenter27:00

Great.

Presenter27:02

It's the magic number.

Presenter27:04

Somewhere in this hip-hop community was born three makes the me and that's a magic number. What does it all mean? Difficult preaching is posthumous pleasure.

Speaker 327:14

A pleasure in preaching starts in the heart, something that stimulates the music and a measure, measure in the music, racing three quarters.

Presenter27:21

De la Sol and three is the magic number.

Presenter27:24

Jesse Armstrong, in twenty ten you co wrote Four Lions with Sam and Chris Morris. It's a black comedy about four young men who want to become suicide bombers. Do you think that film would be made today or could be made today?

Jesse Armstrong27:38

Well, it almost wasn't made then, so I don't think there's much difference. It was Chris's perseverance through a lot of no's to get to a yes. I I think it would be really hard, but I think it could.

Presenter27:48

How do you handle the challenge of

Presenter27:51

Finding comedy in such dark places and getting it right. And do you think it's important to do that?

Jesse Armstrong27:57

Not essential. It was it was Chris's idea. Me and Sam were surprised that he thought there was a story in there that could be funny. His research real cases, real people was so complete that you've got to be tonally perfect, right, if you're in that area. And your knowledge has got to be...

Speaker 128:15

Right, if you're

Speaker 128:16

And

Jesse Armstrong28:19

so that you as a white non Muslim person are completely comfortable in all the areas that you're of culture and society that you're dealing with, so that you're

Jesse Armstrong28:33

completely confident and Chris was. So he knew the area, he knew the places where the jokes could be and where they couldn't be. So we were we were really led by him. But it was his achievement to see the way that you could step through a minefield of wrong decisions to find the way to make a really interesting and true film I think.

Presenter28:56

Jesse, your life changed with succession. Another dark comedy, this time a comedy drama, about a patriarchal media mogul and his family. The show did grow out of quite a different idea, though, that you'd had several years before. Tell me about that initial screenplay that you'd come up with about the Murdoch family, I think.

Jesse Armstrong29:14

Yeah, initially there was an idea from a producer to do a kind of documentary about Rupert Murdoch's business secrets where he'd sort of talk to camera and tell people his business secrets. I found that hard to write so I tried writing it as a play about that real family around Rupert Murdoch. That also proved very hard to get make like most things are in film and TV and so it died and when Peep Show was over, almost a decade on, actually it was a bunch of things. There's a documentary called Jinks about property developers, bad men in New York and it's also reading a bunch about Robert Maxwell, owner of the Daily Mirror for a long time and British more minor media mogul, the American media owner Summoner Redstone, all these figures are passing away into history now, blown away by tech, but they were the dominant figures in Britain and the US and starting to feel there was a variety of man. They're all men who exerted their life force, their design not to face up to mortality through their businesses. I'd always thought, oh, you should do the real version. The real version is more interesting. But it suddenly started to seem like, oh, but if you do a made-up version, then you can take from all these people's lives and guess what, all of history and creature and exactly. It's all there to be stolen from or inspired by, depending on how gently you want to put it.

Presenter30:32

Exactly.

Presenter30:39

Well, I want to find out what happened next and talk about that. But first, I think we should have some more music.

Jesse Armstrong30:43

Um, L C D Sound System New York, I love you, but you're bringing me down.

Presenter30:47

So, this is the downbeat one from the New York Lords of the Dance Floor. This is introspective, which I like. Tell me about this choice.

Jesse Armstrong30:54

Yeah.

Jesse Armstrong30:55

Yeah, James Murphy and L C D Sound System. I first got into James Murphy via his Leeks. He had a sort of wine bar near where I would stay in New York when we were making succession and where Tony Roach almost lived above it. And they did delicious leaks. And I don't think I knew the band at that point, but I liked the leaks.

Presenter31:10

And I don't

Presenter31:12

So you came for the leaks and you stayed for the East Coast electro.

Jesse Armstrong31:14

And you see.

Jesse Armstrong31:16

Exactly.

Jesse Armstrong31:18

This is a downbeat song and as we'd say in the writer's room it's very on the nose because New York I do love you but it's not the hardest thing in the world writing or making a TV show but sometimes it felt hard to me especially leaving family behind and 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 of something that you think, you know what, this is about as good as I can do and I really want it to carry on being good and that becomes its own pressure which can be a lot. It's almost too directly singable by me. Do you want me to sing it instead?

Presenter31:55

Yes, please.

Speaker 331:58

Got New York, I love you, but you're bringing me down.

Speaker 132:12

New York, I love you, but you're bringing me down.

Speaker 132:20

Uh

Speaker 332:20

Like a rat in a cave

Speaker 132:20

RAP

Speaker 332:24

Pulling minimum weight

Speaker 332:31

New York

Presenter32:31

L C D Sound System, New York, I love you, but you're bringing me down.

Presenter32:36

So Jesse, succession then. We've talked about tone, we've heard about your own family. Growing up in Oswestree, how on earth does a boy from Shropshire go about getting under the skin of the kind of people who live in the Roy family's world?

Jesse Armstrong32:50

I'd say research, research, research. You need a little bit of confidence and maybe being around the political world and seeing like, oh, these people off the telly are basically just people and if you sort of know what people are like, you can imagine yourself into a different world. But they're very different, these people who are so rich, very different. And they're the world they mo they they're in.

Presenter33:10

Why is that?

Jesse Armstrong33:13

Ha ha.

Jesse Armstrong33:15

Succession is a it has a satirical edge, it has a comic edge in it, it is, I hope, appropriately tough on the characters and what they do in the world.

Jesse Armstrong33:24

But I always feel a certain degree of sympathy for those kids, the kids of a Redstone, of a Murdoch, because you are put into a world, especially these families, right? It's not just money with them. Money brings its own stuff. But this is money plus power plus cultural buzz and excitement that happens around your Sunday dinner table in a way that makes it so magnetic. How do you break away from that? You've got all the psychological stuff that ties you to a mum and a dad anyway, plus probably being closer to that heat brings financial benefits. Plus, it's where the most famous and glamorous people in the world are buzzing around and tending to your father and acknowledging him and referencing him and it's everywhere. So the already difficult job of defining yourself in a separate way from your family, you know, that's in a way that if the show is a tragedy succession, it's a tragedy about trying to escape your certain fate, about how do you escape that name, whether it's Windsor or Lear or Murdoch or Maxwell. It's so, so hard to get away from that and define yourself outside of it.

Presenter34:40

And on that show, you know, you were taking on a new role. You weren't just writing, you were also showrunner, which is happening more in the UK now, but more of an American idea. You've described it as being like the leader of a cult, not John, in some ways. What does it actually involve?

Jesse Armstrong34:52

See you.

Jesse Armstrong34:55

I didn't really know what the hell it was going to involve. The primary thing is you're in charge of the scripts, you know, and coming up with the show. So I wrote the pilot, set that tonal world. With Adam McKay, who directed the pilot, we cast the episode and with HBO, and then with Mark Milod, long-term director, you keep an eye on the tone and the look and the direction of the show. But mainly my role, or what I felt was the key to my role, was running the writing room and overseeing the scripts written by myself and my colleagues. And then you have some sort of practical day-to-day, which comes as rather a shock, sort of production jobs about running what is quite an enormous organization, a big TV show. But the heart of it.

Presenter35:37

How many people would you say working on the city?

Jesse Armstrong35:39

On a crew, maybe on the sort of crew on the day, 200, but there's probably another iceberg's worth underneath of other people around a show like that.

Presenter35:46

Yeah.

Presenter35:49

And what's that like for you to sit with your laptop, Bruno? Stop making this up now then.

Jesse Armstrong35:52

Uh

Jesse Armstrong35:54

Yeah, you can't think about that. You can't think about that and you're dead if you start thinking about the person who might have to stay up an extra night to write the set for the scene which you've suddenly realized is crucial. You must develop a little bit of an ice chip in your heart and trust that the teamsters and the other unions are looking after the backs of the people who are going to have to work late.

Presenter35:55

What happens?

Presenter36:13

Mm. And you're a you're a line by line writer, aren't you?

Jesse Armstrong36:14

Are you really

Jesse Armstrong36:16

Yeah, I mean I write solo, you know, the room does incredible work for the creation of the show and it helps you you know when a writer's room is working well it's like you're walking on the moon. You know you're suddenly released from the thing that could take you a week to figure out at your desk on your own. You're suddenly you're bounding around and picking up rocks and everything's veined with gold and it's like you can have these golden moments of the ideas are coming from everyone and you're all on the same wavelength and it can feel quite magical.

Jesse Armstrong36:44

And you can get really good days and hours working writing alone, but it but when it's not working and you feel you're not going to equal the best version of the of the thing you're trying to make, I would find that very, very difficult and the theoretically consoling idea that oh, it'll be all right'cause you've done it before actually becomes another rod for your back and it's like well

Speaker 136:44

Yeah, and you cut.

Jesse Armstrong37:07

Listen, you don't know how possible it is for me to be a really bad writer because you don't see all these drafts where it's really bad and there's no

Presenter37:14

How many drafts on an average episode have been on them?

Jesse Armstrong37:16

Well, there might be 50 so-called drafts, but they're not really drafts. You know, there's only 20, yeah.

Presenter37:21

Minor changes each time. Chassie, on that note, I think we'd better hear your next disc. What is it, number seven?

Jesse Armstrong37:27

It's not a song, it's a poem. It's called Snow Line, it's Dream Song 28, I think, by John Berryman.

Presenter37:32

And this particular poem, does it bring back any memories for you?

Jesse Armstrong37:35

John Berryman is not my necessarily my favourite poet, and this isn't necessarily my favourite poem even of his, but when we were travelling in the car and we'd have a playlist, I had it either by accident or design on amongst playlists to play on long journeys. And so we'd go from Arctic Monkeys or Jesse Jay or something, and suddenly the kids and family would be hit with he was quite a troubled alcoholic poet, John Berryman, and you'd suddenly be hit by this rather wonderful reading. And I think it initially elicited groans, but slowly people got used to it.

Presenter38:10

For Wright's reasons, it has not been possible to include the recording of John Berriman's poem in this podcast.

Presenter38:18

So Jesse Armstrong, the cast and crew can stay in your life, but of course when something ends you have to leave the characters behind. Are you someone a a writer who finds that difficult?

Jesse Armstrong38:28

No, I find it much harder to leave the actors who I felt you had to keep a certain distance from. There's a professional necessity for you don't know what's going to happen in a TV show and I didn't know what would happen at what point through the life of it. And so it's kind in a way to keep a certain respectful distance. You can be much closer with the writers who know all the secrets of how difficult and easy certain parts of it are. And the crew are all, you know, it's the travelling circus nature of show business a bit, that you have these very close bonds with people that feel really meaningful and then they slightly dissolve as the show ends. The characters, honestly, I don't feel this in a callous way, but I hardly give them a thought. They were very, very intensely real to me. But as soon as we leave, as we did in the final episode, Kendall, who's the younger, one of the sons, leave him on the tip of Manhattan, my interest in him honestly has ended.

Speaker 139:06

So

Jesse Armstrong39:27

So brutal. Well, it's not brutal. It's tender. I love him, but it it creatively the story is over and he's not real to me anymore in that regard.

Presenter39:39

And having had so much success, particularly with succession, does that give you confidence when you begin your next project? Is that something that you can kind of carry forward into you know, you said that it doesn't help when people say to you, you've done it before, every time? Do you go nineteen Emmys? Surely that's enough.

Jesse Armstrong39:52

Yeah.

Speaker 139:52

Uh

Jesse Armstrong39:52

Yeah.

Jesse Armstrong39:57

I was going to say no, but I think it basically doesn't. All the good writers I know that I've ever met are riddled with self-doubt and lack of certainty about whether what they've just done is good. I think you go in maybe with this 70% feeling that it's like, oh, this is going to be a disaster and I'm going to be exposed as the fraud I always thought I was all along. You need that 10, 20, if you're lucky, 30% feeling of like, if I could do the version of this, which I think it should be.

Jesse Armstrong40:26

could be really great. And maybe I don't know if it's a good thing, it might be a bad thing, but I think maybe that little bit of confidence that you know that that's how it feels, maybe that grows in you. But honestly, that may be

Presenter40:38

Okay, so trusting the excitement. Trusting the excitement. Following the kind of, oh God, this could be really good.

Jesse Armstrong40:41

The excitement.

Jesse Armstrong40:44

Yeah, also knowing that the negative feelings are not necessarily true. But honestly, it's not like everyone always gets better in their career and does better and better stuff. So that may be an illusory if that's any any sense.

Presenter40:55

Luckily, you don't need to worry about that, Jesse, because you're off to a desert island. It's almost time to cast you away. I feel like you have imagined the life of one cast away from everything that they knew before, because you once compared writing a novel to, and I quote, a solitary march to the South Pole, filled with quite a strong, all-pervading sensation that you're about to die. So you enjoyed it.

Jesse Armstrong40:58

And

Jesse Armstrong41:00

Good.

Jesse Armstrong41:15

Writing a T V show sometimes feels tough, but writing a novel is very lonely.

Presenter41:20

You know, life on the island, life is a castaway.

Presenter41:23

What are you hoping for? What do you imagine?

Jesse Armstrong41:25

I'm hoping for much more like Alex Garland and Danny Boyle's The Beach and not like one of those cartoons from the sun which is just like one desert island with a palm tree sticking out of it and a shark fin going round.

Presenter41:35

I was thinking

Presenter41:36

And then we have

Presenter41:38

So so you want their kind of

Jesse Armstrong41:40

Oh, I want spring paradise. Yeah, please, if that's available.

Presenter41:40

Like spring paradise.

Presenter41:42

Yeah.

Presenter41:43

Okay, sure. I always think it's in the eye of the the imaginer. What will you miss most?

Jesse Armstrong41:49

People, my dear family, I love very much. Yeah, I'll miss them unbelievably. I think it'll be unbearable.

Presenter41:56

And will your biggest challenge be physical? Will it be emotional?

Jesse Armstrong42:00

Well, I'm sort of

Jesse Armstrong42:02

Gluttonous coward with no inner resources. So I think it's all going to be quite tough. I think I'll blow away like a leaf.

Presenter42:07

It's another ice wall. That's what we've got here.

Jesse Armstrong42:09

That's what we've got here.

Presenter42:10

No crampons.

Jesse Armstrong42:12

Yeah, it's yeah, my desert island is a just a a piece of floating ice.

Presenter42:12

It's ego.

Presenter42:18

So you don't have any practical skills? Oh, I mean, I'm not.

Jesse Armstrong42:21

Yeah, not really, not to speak of. It's going to be tough.

Presenter42:24

Hmm.

Jesse Armstrong42:24

doing I mean getting that first spark

Presenter42:24

Yeah.

Presenter42:27

Oh yeah.

Jesse Armstrong42:27

That's going to be the first and I think I'm going to give up.

Presenter42:31

Just it'll be hot again tomorrow.

Jesse Armstrong42:34

Yeah.

Presenter42:35

How will you deal with the isolation? I mean, you know, writers do spend quite a lot of time alone.

Jesse Armstrong42:39

Poorly. I hope I go mad quickly rather than slowly. I'd like to maybe get a coconut and sort of hollow it out and turn it into a crash helmet and walk around, weave myself something, a cloak and start seeing Jerusalem and march around. Yeah. Rather than slowly sinking into a hole of terrible depression, I think I'd like to go mad quickly.

Presenter43:01

Cross our fingers for that then.

Jesse Armstrong43:02

Thank you.

Presenter43:02

We'll give you one more track before you go, Jesse Armstrong. Your final choice today. What's it going to be?

Jesse Armstrong43:07

It's Vivaldi's violin concerto in D major.

Presenter43:10

Oh why?

Jesse Armstrong43:10

I like to write with music going on. I found that Baroque music is the best for me. And then we also actually ended up using this as the entrance music for Logan's funeral when the coffin comes in. Some people felt it was a bit upbeat, but I quite liked its oddly triumphal sound in that scene.

Presenter44:29

Part of the first movement of Vivaldi's violin concerto in D major, performed by Valte Golozzi and E. Muzzici. So, Jesse Armstrong, I'm going to cast you away to the island now. I will of course give you the books to take with you the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, and one other book of your choice. What's that going to be?

Jesse Armstrong44:46

It would be the Norton Anthology of Poetry. I think you should give people who don't pick either that or another poetry anthology a really hard time. And what

Jesse Armstrong44:56

What the hell are they thinking? Clearly, you can just go back to this again and again and again. I think any prose work, do you really want to read even Madame Bovry's like six times? I think you can just go back to poetry again and again and again, and it'll keep on giving. Also, I did my research, I considered the Oxford Book of English Verse. The Norton is considerably bigger, and I think I could use it to potentially crush a mouse. I think it comes in at about two kilograms. And so, I think, I know you're not allowed a luxury that you could use.

Presenter45:27

Hmm.

Jesse Armstrong45:28

practically, but the book I think I could use as a as a weapon.

Presenter45:32

Did you say crush a mouse?

Jesse Armstrong45:34

Yeah.

Presenter45:36

You think a mouse is going to be your biggest phone, does that?

Jesse Armstrong45:40

Well, I'm not taking on anything bigger than a mouse personally. So I think I'm happy to scavenge on rodents as long as I don't have to take.

Presenter45:43

Okay.

Presenter45:48

You could whack a crab with it.

Jesse Armstrong45:49

Yeah, I could whack a crown. That's a much happier version. Thank you.

Presenter45:53

It's yours, Jesse. I like the choice.

Jesse Armstrong45:53

Jesse, I like the ch

Jesse Armstrong45:55

Can you waterproof it?

Presenter45:56

Yeah, I can't. Why not? Do you know what? I'll even do it myself. Do you remember this sticky back plastic from the 80s?

Jesse Armstrong45:57

Why not?

Jesse Armstrong46:01

It's 2,500 pages, I think.

Presenter46:03

That's fine. It's all right. I went to convent school. Don't worry. I've got eight years of putting sticky plastic on textbooks in my back pocket.

Jesse Armstrong46:07

However.

Jesse Armstrong46:11

But this is just turning out great.

Presenter46:13

No problems. You can also have a luxury to take with you, what you fancy.

Jesse Armstrong46:18

A football. I'm not very good at football, really, but I've played all through my life. I'm still managing to play. I'm like a sort of concrete bollard that other more skilful players have to briefly navigate. But I think maybe if I do Keepe Uppies on a beach for about twenty years, maybe there'll be an incremental actually I guess as I get older, maybe I'll just manage to s maintain my level if I do keepy uppies until there's a rescue.

Presenter46:42

There's a result.

Presenter46:43

And finally, which one track of the eight that we've heard today would you save from the waves first?

Jesse Armstrong46:49

It would be the Billy Holiday.

Presenter46:51

Jesse Armstrong, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs.

Jesse Armstrong46:55

Thank you so much.

Presenter47:09

Hello, it was lovely chatting to Jesse, and I hope he's very happy on the island with his football. Simple pleasures. There are more than 2,000 programmes in our archive that you can listen to. We've cast away many other TV writers over the years, including Russell T. Davis, Sally Wainwright, and Abby Morgan. You can hear their programmes if you search through BBC Sounds or on our own Desert Island Discs website. You'll also find the stars of Peep Show, Robert Webb, and David Mitchell in there too, along with the actor Brian Cox, who played patriarch Logan Roy in the hit series Succession. The studio manager for today's programme was Steve Greenwood, the executive production coordinator was Susie Roylands, the content editor was Mugabe Turia, and the producer was Sarah Taylor. Join me next time when my castaway will be the actor, Adele Aktor.

Speaker 148:14

Hello, Alex von Tunselmann here with a brand new series of History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone. Including the little-known story of a famous author caught up in a horrific accident, which would require all his courage.

Speaker 348:32

Dickens remained in the river.

Speaker 348:35

Helping the rescue, assisting the wounded. He didn't search out to be heroic. He didn't play on his heroism.

Speaker 148:45

Subscribe to History's Heroes on BBC Sounds.