“I want to show that the work of Charles Dickens isn’t just quality entertainment for a long-dead audience,” says Armando Iannucci at the outset of the low-key BBC documentary Armando’s Tale of Charles Dickens, from 2012.
He continues: “I believe that the true Dickensian world is our world. Dickens speaks to us now.”
This is an assertion not fully borne out by the Scottish satirist’s adaptation of the book Dickens fondly referred to as his “favourite child”.
The Personal History of David Copperfield is a sprightly and theatrical adaptation that serves up an ensemble of kooky characters better equipped to entertain than to offer any insights into 21st-century life.
Iannucci is well-practiced at skewering the politics and social mores of the moment — as evidenced by painfully sharp-witted and potty-mouthed shows like The Thick of It and Veep.
More recently, however, he has let his eye wander along history’s timeline, expanding the scope of his comedy to encompass both the past (a territory first explored in 2017, with The Death of Stalin) and the future (which will be the setting of his forthcoming sci-fi series Avenue 5).
For now, Iannucci seems to have given up on tackling the present. (And really, given the state of things,