Our Armando in comedy

I am in the room where the next series of I'm Alan Partridge will be written. There is a white board on the wall, on which vague plot ideas have been jotted in marker pen. "Alan trying to find a hobby." "Obsessive-compulsive disorder." "The man whose office he passes through to get to his work." There is a Partridge autobiography in the pipeline. Apparently, it will be called I Bounced Back.

"We're not officially making another series," says Armando Iannucci, who has co-written the character from day one. "What we're doing is spending the next three months working out what it could be. We've spent the past three months just bringing Alan up to date, working out what has been happening to him."

Trouble is, the cat's out of the bag. Steve Coogan has been telling anyone who will listen that when we next meet Partridge, he will not be so down on his luck. Already you anticipate that this will be the comedy event of next year. "It has got to be at least as good as the last series, if not better," says Iannucci, "which is daunting."

The room is in Talkback's Tardis-like premises north of Oxford Street. Through the French windows there is a balcony with chic metalgrille flooring. The place reeks of money. No wonder Iannucci was able to afford a drop-in cast of 150 for his new series.

The Armando Iannucci shows take the form of eight loosely linked comic essays. In one of them, Iannucci might discuss how we are all losing the ability to communicate with one another. Are we getting bored with reality? Do we judge people by appearances?

This is a new Iannucci. After producing On The Hour, The Day Today and Knowing Me, Knowing You, he came out as a performer with his Armistice shows. "But I didn't particularly want to be seen as a guy in a smart suit making jokes about Peter Mandelson. This series is much more me. I wanted to make something that didn't feel like a sketch show or a sitcom. It had a sense of being a signed piece, almost like a column, in that it had an argument."

One of the themes is personal achievement: have we achieved what we set out to achieve by a certain age? Surely Iannucci has more than achieved in his 37 years? "Have I? I don't know. I can see why you've said that. If I died now, I could say, 'At least I did I'm Alan Partridge.' It pleases me that people talk about it. What I've always felt is I haven't quite found my voice. This series, I feel, is most like me, how I think and what I'm like. I started off as a performer and I got into producing-very early on. Before I knew it, I was making these programmes, but I just always thought, 'but yeah, that's all incidental. I didn't plan that.'"

There is one programme, about not feeling you quite belong, that Iannucci says is him all over. People laugh at your clothes, you say the wrong things in the pub about football, your fellow guests are much funnier than you at dinner parties. "I don't know whether this is a product of being not quite Italian and not quite Scottish. I've always felt slightly detached from whatever community I'm in, without being weird.

"I'm not a sick loner. As a teenager I read lots of books and listened to classical music. I'm just constantly worried that I'm not quite keeping up. I've had that happen, when you're at a meal and everything you say is just not working. Everyone else is dreadfully articulate. You actually think, I hate all of you and I don't know why you're my friends."

He tells of just such a dinner at the BBC, when he sat opposite Alastair Campbell, the man whose voice he has since ventriloquised in a column in The Daily Telegraph. "There was Germaine Greer and Alastair Campbell and Ned Sherrin and John Birt, and there was me. I said virtually nothing throughout that whole evening. I didn't connect in any way." The only other time he met Campbell was when, at the 1996 Blackpool conference, Coogan was invited to ask Tony Blair questions as Alan Partridge.