Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker.

My guest today has made a hugely successful career out of finding dark humour in serious places.

Armando Yanucci writes, produces and directs.

He does TV, radio and movies.

He attracts veneration from some of the greatest actors and comedians in the

business, hardly surprising given the popularity and critical acclaim garnered by shows such as

The Thick of It, Veep, and his latest series Avenue 5. Yonucci also managed to make a successful

satirical movie about the death of Stalin.

And in a strikingly different vein, his last film was a remake of Charles Dickens's David Copperfield.

Sometimes it has seemed like there's no boundary. Yanucci isn't prepared to cross in his search for

truth through humor. But right now, in a world

grappling with a pandemic, with racial discrimination and political polarization, maybe that's wrong.

So is there ever a bad time and place to be funny? Well, Armando Yanucci joins me now. Welcome to

Hard Talk. Hello. Good to have you on the show at a very

difficult time. I just wonder, with reference to coronavirus and everything else that is happening right now,

do you need to be in a certain frame of mind to write, and in particular, to write funny? I mean,

that's interesting. I mean, that's interesting.

I mean, it's good.

I've got some structure to the day,

because we're actually in the middle of writing a new series of Avenue 5,

which is the sci-fi comedy we do for HBO.

But on the other hand, that show's premise is about 6,500 people being trapped in a space shit that they can't get out of

...