Jesse Armstrong on finding comedy in conflict

Jesse Armstrong is best know as one half of the country’s most talented comedy writing team. Alongside Sam Bain, he has produced TV shows such as "Peep Show", "The Thick of It" and "Fresh Meat" and films such as Four Lions. Now Armstrong has written his first novel, "Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals," a comedy following an idealistic troupe of young people travelling to war-torn Bosnia in 1994, hoping to put on a play that will end the civil war. Armstrong spoke to Sameer Rahim about the relationship between the political and the personal, and how to make a war novel funny.

Sameer Rahim: In earlier works such as The Thick of It and Four Lions, you explore how personal dynamics can shape political beliefs. The same theme crops up in Love, Sex and Other Foreign PolicyGoals, where your narrator Andrew goes to Bosnia because he cares about what’s happening in the war, but also because he wants to sleep with a girl called Penny.

Jesse Armstrong: I guess I’m interested in politics—I’m interested in ideas and ideology. I’m aware that it’s easy for the personal, the immediate and the emotional to trump the theoretical. We often end up doing things—and this is something that’s in the novel—for mixed reasons and personal ego. It’s funny to me when those things conflict. When we’ve constructed an ideological position for ourselves and we find that position coming into conflict with an immediate goal or desire.

SR: Andrew and his group seem attractively idealistic, if naive.

JA: I hope so. Personally, when I was writing the book I liked them. I’ve got a lot of time for anyone who does anything, who takes action in the world. The majority of people watch and talk and listen and don’t act. The characters in the book, their motives are not pure but I don’t feel superior to them in any way.

SR: The election campaign started this week. In The Thick of It you mine humour from political conflict. Do you miss the show now that’s ended?

JA: Maybe yes. It was a wonderful opportunity, it was a great way to write about politics. It was this great cast of people to put thoughts into the mouth of. It was also an extremely material-hungry show; hard though always enjoyable to work on. So I do miss the show but I don’t miss the many, many drafts that we worked on.

SR: The show has become a touchstone for political commentators. The 2012 budget is known as an “omnishambles.” Harriet Harman’s pink bus was called a classic “Thick of It” moment. Do you feel the show got co-opted by the political and media class that it satirised?

JA: I do recognise that feeling. If you’re making a satirical show and you’re aiming to change something, I’d say you’re on a fool’s errand. I was never under any illusion that we were going to stop people from putting presentation above policy. I guess you hope to be part of the general conversation, but I do sometimes think about how any portrayal does lead to a certain glorification and that sometimes it feels like special advisors and communications people see Malcolm Tucker as attractive—which he was sometimes because of Peter Capaldi who played him. But he shouldn’t be attractive. His means and methods and aims shouldn’t be attractive.

SR: How is it different working on a novel from working in TV or film?

JA: The biggest difference is that in a TV show you’re part of a team. So writing a novel is liberating but it’s also scary to write so much on your own. Me and Sam Bain [Armstrong’s writing partner] always write our scripts separately, but this was a long time to be alone. I think it was F Scott Fitzgerald who said that writing prose is like swimming underwater. It’s a long time without coming up for breath; it’s a long time that you’re not in contact with anyone, and you wonder whether what you’ve done is total crap or any good at all.

SR: In the pre-Iraq war era in which this novel is set was there more confidence in the ability of westerners to intervene successfully in foreign conflicts?

JA: Absolutely. It’s a comic novel and this is not a comic area, but I’m interested in the idea of intervention. I was part of the same generation as that New Labour generation who saw the eventual success of intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo and Sierra Leone and the tragedy of non-intervention in Rwanda. Maybe that was related to why it wasn’t as obvious as it should have been to some people that Iraq would turn out to be the disaster it has been. That was certainly a motivating thought for me.

SR: Did you visit Bosnia?

JA: Not in the 1990s. In the late 1980s, I travelled through there and again when I was researching the book. Like lots of people I watched the conflict on television. I suppose terrible things happen in the world all the time and some of them we feel a particular connection to and some of them we don’t. I was a youngish man, about the age of the characters in the book. That it was happening in Europe in places that I had travelled through I suppose made it feel particularly real and horrible.

SR: One of the jihadi characters in Four Lions talks about Bosnia as a motivating factor in his radicalisation. It does seem like an origin-point for our problems with fundamentalism and intervention.

JA: If you become interested in anything you become interested in its relevance. Because I read a lot about the subject, I did start to feel it was an origin-point. There were jihadis who went to Bosnia, it was a radicalising event for some people. Similarly when they had the referendum in Scotland, I began to feel how important the role of politicians can be. Obviously Scotland within the UK isn’t analogous to the Yugoslav republics except in the most distant ways. But I started to see connections everywhere.

SR: How did you negotiate the balance between the humour and the dark subject matter? Or do they feed off each other?

JA: Absolutely. I’ve always found it easy to write comedy in the area where people have strong emotions. Even though there might be terrible things happening elsewhere, so long as you keep a handle on your tone and you are making jokes, finding humour, in the right things, then it’s good to be writing in an area where stuff matters to people.

SR: Andrew is reading War and Peace in Bosnia. Were there other war novels that inspired you?

JA: I thought about Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop a bit. I thought about Second World War novels like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Those are good examples of writers not being afraid to write a funny book about terrible circumstances.

SR: Those two are anti-war books—but this isn’t really an anti-war book.

JA: Vonnegut makes play of the ridiculousness of writing an anti-war book. He says you might as well write an anti-glacier book, I think. But I hope this is an anti-war book, in a way. I’m anti-war! But the book also points out that things are more complicated than that. In certain situations, unless you’re a pacifist, which I’m not, you have to say at which point you do engage.

SR: What are you working on now?

JA: We’re working on the last series of Fresh Meat and the last series of Peep Show. So we’re feeling quite elegiac. In Fresh Meat the characters are finishing university and it’s time for them to leave. And Peep Show? It feels weird but eventually we had to do it. Writing this series has been really energising, really exciting. Whether we deeply regret ending it in about a year’s time, I don’t know. We’ll see.

Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals is published by Jonathan Cape