Armando Iannucci 3

Was there any temptation to have someone playing a sort of presidential or prime ministerial role?

Well there's always that temptation. But we never see the Prime Minister in the series. We never even hear the name of the party actually. I just thought if we start seeing the President it suddenly becomes a lot bigger than I want it to be. I want these people not to be representing anything other than themselves. The little minister caught up in this, and the little middle government management officials in Washington who are just part of a big machine.

Was there any pressure on you to change the way you did things for the US market?

No. BBC Films decided not to take money in advance from American studios or American distributors because I didn't want to be making the film thinking oh we'd better change that because the Americans will want something a bit softer. I didn't want that clouding the issue. So it's all British money. We just took the risk that we'll make it and then we'll hand over the finished thing and say now do you want it. Which is what we did. We took it to Sundance and we picked up a distributor in Sundance.

What made you decide to make a film rather than a TV special?

I've always wanted to make a film. I loved going to Woody Allen films and I loved going to Spinal Tap and Airplane and The Naked Gun. I like sitting in a room full of lots of people in the dark all laughing at a big screen. I just think that's great. And I've always wanted to do that. I wanted to wait until the story came up that I wanted to do.

But as soon as I decided that the war was the story, it was always a film. I just thought there's a film there and it's a screwball comedy which is how I've kind of surreptitiously modeled the style of this. It's fast dialogue and lots of characters and the plot just cranking up as you go along.

After writing a film, how has that changed or informed your other writing?

I'm going to do another series of The Thick Of It later in the year. We're working on scripts now. I hope I've learnt stuff from making the film that I can then apply to The Thick Of It. It might force me to make those decisions a lot quicker and be a lot more focussed because an episode of The Thick Of It lasts twenty eight minutes, but what we shoot tends on average to be about fifty minutes long.

When you shoot a scene you never quite know what the heart of the scene is going to be. It might be a three minute scene, but actually a key thirty seconds in that scene that is all I need. But you can't tell that until you've shot it and watched it and see how it sits in the rest of the edit. So there is some natural wastage.

But I do find I've been taking out scenes that I really miss and so maybe just it might help me go into the next series being a little bit more efficient at the beginning so that we're not shooting stuff unnecessarily.

How far do you let actors change the words?

We improvise in rehearsals but the writers are always there, and after the rehearsal I'll sit down with them and we'll have a chat about what we thought actually was interesting and funny, and the writer will go away and re-write the script to incorporate anything new that's come up... So that when we go into the shoot we're back to script.

There are elements of the rehearsal in the script. But fundamentally it's: these are your lines. Once we've shot that I then ask the cast again to improvise, but that really is just to see what else might come up.

There used to be shows like Week Ending which anyone could submit sketches to. Where will people get their start in comedy now?

It may not be on radio. It could come from anywhere now, which is both the frightening and the interesting thing. In the past you would have said "Go along to Radio Four," But now I say establish your voice. Come up with a blog. It might be a blog that is a parody of something else or in the style of or has a theme.

Ian Martin wrote a funny web site called Martian FM and it contained a parody of parliamentary reports with lots of swearing. But lots of really funny jokes, topical jokes as well. And someone just sent me the link. I clicked on the link and thought this was really funny and just got in touch with him and now he writes episodes of The Thick Of It.

Or go and record stuff. There's no money in it but it's important that you find out what your voice is. But you now don’t have to wait till someone commissions something on Radio Four to do that. I used to get sent lots of scripts. Now I get sent lots of DVDs and CDs and emails with links on them and stuff like that.

What grabs you then, if somebody has sent something?

It has to make me laugh really in a sort of unexpected way. But also, I can sort of tell when somebody's writing something that isn't really their cup of tea. They're writing it because they think I might like it or someone in the BBC might like it. Whereas I really like it when I see stuff that's made them laugh. I think that becomes infectious.

Do you see ultimately a short form online show being one of the ways you can break in?

I think that is going to happen. There is so much out there you need somebody to say where the good stuff is. And it's interesting that the key web sites are the ones that attempt to do just that. So Google, Guardian Unlimited, the Comedy Central web site, the BBC, start becoming kind of pointers towards where people might expect good stuff.

We’re now in a climate where there is a fear of offending people. Has that affected how you work?

I think the big problem is self censorship. There hasn't been any diktat that has said you mustn't swear, you mustn't say anything offensive. I think what's happened is we just must know about anything that's offensive so that we're ready for it. But what's happened is people who may not have been trained as producers - to be editorially responsible for their content - are not sure what to do and therefore say well let's not do it.

And I think that's the tragedy really, that people are censoring themselves when actually there's no reason to.

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