Creator and director Armando Iannucci joined his lead actors Chris Langham and Peter Capaldi to discuss the first series of The Thick of It before it launched on BBC Four.

BBC Four: Why has it taken so long for a comedy series to be made about this government?

Armando Iannucci: I think there was phase when television bosses were told that anything to do with politics shouldn't be on the telly because it was boring and people would switch off. Gradually, probably as the BBC neared its charter renewal period, they discovered that people were quite interested in politics, they just weren't interested in party politics.

BBC Four: How long had you been thinking of the show?

Armando Iannucci: Four or five years really. When I did my deal with the Beeb last year, the first thing I said I wanted to do was something set in the world of politics that was rough and messy, slightly improvised and realistic. There's been a spate of dramas about politics like The Project and The Deal. I felt they were interesting but they were always very 'acted' pieces. They were fake dramas. I wanted the viewer to feel like they were actually in a room watching politicians and civil servants do what they do. In the last 10 years there's been a lot of concentration on the politics of personality - impressions of Blair and of Prescott or whoever. I felt that it would be good to do something where we weren't looking at personalities, we were looking at the process that we're saddled with at the moment.

BBC Four: Did you have any programmes in mind as being precedents to The Thick of It?

Armando Iannucci: I always describe it as Yes Minister meets Larry Sanders. Whenever I watched Larry Sanders it was very funny, but I also thought that it showed what it must be like doing a chat show in America. It was a sitcom but it didn't feel like one. The characters felt real. I liked the idea of doing something where the viewer felt that that's what it must be like.

BBC Four: As actors, did you enjoy the improvisational nature of the show?

Peter Capaldi: I personally found it very difficult, very challenging and ultimately very satisfying. Unlike a lot of improvised things that I've been involved with, there was clearly a plot, so when you were let loose there were very specific objectives you had to try and achieve. Also, I thought the writing was brilliant in the scripts anyway. And because the writing was so good, the turn of phrase and gags were so fantastic, I felt we couldn't come up with anything as good. Fundamentally 80% of the final cut is the script that we started with. The improvisation just makes it feel more real and not written.

Chris Langham: I share with Peter a fear of improvisation, because I'm frightened of being caught out, of people seeing that I'm actually not very good at what I do. The thing about doing an improvised piece is that there's no time for technique. What's brilliant about Armando deciding to do it in this way is that we were sort of replicating what it must be like to actually be in government. One gets the impression that day-to-day life in a ministry is much more kick, bollock and scramble than it is five-year plan. So the terror of improvisation really fuels the reality of that energy. Politicians are driven by the fear of 'What do I say next?' That look of terror in my eyes is exactly the look of terror in the eyes of most politicians on most days.

BBC Four: What do you think MPs will make of the programme?

Chris Langham: I think there's a historical curve in the way we see politicians. There was a time when they were kind of untouchable. When Peter Cook did his impersonations of Harold Macmillan, to a large proportion of the population it was quite shocking, akin to making gross jokes about the Pope. We went from an image of politicians as being godlike to being disillusioned with them as being venal, corrupt and power mad.

The view of politicians in this programme is quite compassionate I think. What you end up seeing, partly because of the improvisational style, is them as humans. They are vulnerable, often very, very tired people, who've been saddled with enormous responsibility and are completely out of their depth.

Armando Iannucci: I've been told from people who have worked in politics that it's accurate, so it should come as no surprise to them. But as Chris said, we're not showing people being corrupt or committing crimes, we're just showing how they get by in that sort of situation.

BBC Four: There's a lot of swearing in the series. Was that a conscious decision?

Armando Iannucci: Not really. It was just that if we were going to make it look real, it should feel real. Martin Sixsmith, who was our 'reality advisor', sent me an email saying that the language was spot on. Even as we were doing it Alistair Campbell was sending that email to Newsnight that was full of swearing.

Peter Capaldi: It's a high-stakes business so I think that language is appropriate to what's going on. It's how people speak. But also when you get into the groove of it is very hard to stop!

Armando Iannucci: When we did the first series of I'm Alan Partridge there was an episode where he's doing a two-way handover to the other DJ and at the end says, "F*** it". It went through all sorts of procedures at the BBC because it was a comedy. They expect it in drama but not in comedy. But if you're meant to be doing something that's a comment on real life I think that distinction has gone.

BBC Four: You've said you were aiming for realism, but did it still feel like you were making a comedy show?

Peter Capaldi: It wasn't the sort of thing where you'd have a set up and then a punch line. It was more of a critical mass that was being added to.

Armando Iannucci: I actually found myself taking out witty lines in the edit because they didn't feel part of that world.

Chris Langham: But it's still a situation comedy in the sense that a series of completely believable events happen in an order that require the characters to bend themselves into pretzels in order to accommodate them. There is a sort of schadenfreude thing too. Don Hinkley, the old guy I wrote with when I first started on The Muppet Show, taught me everything that I know about comedy. He told me that pain is always good as a comic trigger. In a sense these are very painful programmes.

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