Jesse Armstrong is the co-creator of the award-winning Peep Show. He has also written for Smack the Pony and the children's show My Parents Are Aliens.

Before becoming a full-time writer in 1997 he worked for a Labour MP and a member of the shadow Home Affairs team.

BBC Four: How did you become involved with The Thick of It?
Jesse Armstrong: My writing partner Sam Bain and I were doing some research at a magic convention. Armando Iannucci called while we were watching this guy explain how to pull a card from the bottom of a pack and asked if we were interested in being involved in a political sitcom. With my background in politics and comedy, doing this sort of show with Armando was pretty much as good as it gets. Very unkindly, Sam says that I was "visibly aroused" by the idea.

BBC Four: Was working on this a very different process to your previous work?
Jesse Armstrong: Very much so. For a start, I wrote the first episode and the bits I did on the others on my own rather than with Sam. But it was equally collaborative because the plotting process was done with Armando and the writing was going back and forth with him and on the other episodes with Simon Blackwell and Tony Roach.

There was always the notion that these were going to be more rough-and-ready, open-ended scripts. They were much longer than a half-hour because Armando had in his mind that stuff was going to come out and that it was going to be improvised around. So in many ways it was more collaborative than things I'd done before, but in a different way.

BBC Four: How did the improvisation work?
Jesse Armstrong: It was an education for me to see that. I think it's how Armando always works, it's how he did Alan Partridge. It's fascinating to go into the rehearsal room with the scripts that the actors haven't yet seen. They come in and read a bit of the scene they are going to do and rehearse it so they roughly know the shape but don't necessarily know all the words. It's good because the text doesn't get set in stone and the actors feel free to mess around with it.

BBC Four: How did you work on the characters?
Jesse Armstrong: The show was Armando's idea and he had a sort of architecture of people in it. But we were in early enough to talk a bit about who the characters would be in a collaborative way. He always had Chris Langham and Peter Capaldi in mind for the two leads so it was always being moulded around those characters. All the characters came to be heavily influenced by the people who played them.

BBC Four: Did you have any real-life characters in mind?
Jesse Armstrong: Not that I can say, I don't think… I used to work for Doug Henderson, who is still an MP and we worked in the shadow Home Affairs team with Jack Straw, but I don't think any of our characters relate directly to anyone I knew. But definitely, that very strong sense of the team around ministers and your tight-knit relation - the way that Charlie Whelan used to look after Gordon Brown - that he's your man and you have to stick with him and look after him, that was very familiar to me.

BBC Four: Did you do any other research to make this rather closed world realistic?
Jesse Armstrong: I'd read a lot of political stuff like Andrew Rawnsley's Servants of the People and Peter Oborne's book on Alastair Campbell. So I went back to those with my highlighter pen, finding bits I thought would be good. I also know a few journalists and politicians who I spoke to as part of my own research. Everyone involved did heavy research. Martin Sixsmith was also around to look at the scripts and to give big pointers, but also very helpfully was on set to say who should be carrying the red boxes and explain whether or not they would have a chauffeur at this moment. Is this what an outer office would look like? All this stuff that was very important so it doesn't feel wrong.

BBC Four: Were there any other TV shows you had in mind while writing?
Jesse Armstrong: I'm a big fan of Robert Altman's Tanner 88, but in a way, Armando had such a clear vision of what he wanted, it's got a great look, that what I thought wasn't that important. He always said it's sort of The West Wing meets Yes Minister. But it's also obviously influenced by that sort of hand-held, gritty, docu feel which I think Tanner 88 is great for.

BBC Four: I know that three more episodes have been commissioned. Have you got any fears about the show losing its bite?
Jesse Armstrong: I don't think so. The other day we had a brainstorm about the next episodes and there's just so much stuff there. Also, I feel that we've only just skimmed the surface of the personal relationships. We definitely want to shake things up so that it's not a similar dynamic every week.

BBC Four: And are you at all afraid of it going too far?
Jesse Armstrong: There are ideas which we know are funny that we know we can't do. But I am sure Armando will make sure that realism stays a very important part of the plotting and playing of everything - hopefully we won't go over the top or be too funny in a bad way.

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