Armando Iannucci: The King of Spin

Before I met Armando Iannucci, I imagined an iconoclastic, angry man whose ability to skewer the pretensions of the politicians - as seen in his television series The Thick of It, and its Oscar-nominated film spin-off In the Loop - is derived from his contempt for them. On the contrary, he is highly strung and a little nervous, with a serious case of imposter syndrome, and if he knows how to write scenes of excruciating embarrassment, it's because that's just how he feels himself.

We meet at his agent's Soho office. Iannucci, short, balding and 46, with extravagant eyebrows, a big nose and neatly tied schoolboy's shoes, leads the way into a glass-walled box, which is adorned along one side with pink Post-its bearing the storyboard of the new film he's writing. I squint at them, trying to work out what it's going to be about: '53-year-old hen night', 'Chinese warehouse' and 'In park throwing turd'. 'This is all highly confidential,' says Iannucci, with mock seriousness. But when he's not joking, Iannucci seems ill at ease. He takes a seat across the other side of the huge boardroom table from me and, when I move to sit next to him, shifts about uncomfortably.

Armando Iannucci is essentially a backroom boy, albeit one who is responsible for creating much of the best radio and TV comedy in the past two decades. The News Quiz, The Mary Whitehouse Experience, The Day Today, I'm Alan Partridge and Friday Night Armistice were all on his CV before he came up with his best creation, The Thick of It, along with its thoroughly modern monster, the foul-mouthed spindoctor extraordinaire Malcolm Tucker.

For years, he says, he's been used to doing the 'walk of shame' - following a celebrity up a red carpet and watching the paparazzi lower their cameras as he hoves into their viewfinders. And it seems he likes it that way. Because, although In the Loop did not win the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay (the award instead went to Geoffrey Fletcher for Precious), Iannucci found the whole experience of being in the spotlight unsettling, 'sort of funny and stupid. But it must be horrible if you're someone in the public eye who has to do this every day.'

He found it hard to consider himself the equal of his celebrity co-Oscar nominees. He arrived early for the nominee lunch in LA, where the organisers run through the protocol, and started taking photographs of the giant Oscar statues, keeping an eye out for the security guards he was convinced were about to usher him to the exit. 'I kept thinking I was about to be found out; someone was going to come up to me and say, "Could you go, please? Who are you?'' '

This feeling of being an interloper was enhanced by the reaction of his friends who, when told about the nomination, all then asked him, 'And do you get to go to the ceremony?' as if there was a kind of alternative Oscars for people who aren't eligible to be filmed. Iannucci's insecurities are a rich mine of comedy these days, but when he was younger, they almost forced him into a different career. The son of an Italian immigrant father and a Scottish mother, he was brought up in Glasgow with two brothers and a sister, and sent to an independent Jesuit school, St Aloysius' College. He lacked confidence at school and would immediately give up any subject he didn't think he was going to be good at, but he was a natural performer when it came to comedy.

'We did these charity concerts at school, and I used to steal jokes off the radio to do stand-up routines.' (He liked The Burkiss Way, Radio Active and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.) 'I always thought it would be great to do comedy, but there was another part of me thinking, "Yeah, but that's ridiculous. You're not John Cleese, it's only famous people who do comedy, how dare you?" None of us had left home, we were from Glasgow and my brother went to Glasgow University. I grew up on English public school satire - Dudley Moore, Peter Cook - and really loved it, but trying to join them seemed absurd.'

Instead, he took what he considered a more appropriate academic path, studying English at Oxford, where he achieved a First. A career in academia beckoned, but while writing his DPhil on Milton's religious poetry, Iannucci spent more and more of his downtime in cafés with David Schneider, with whom he still collaborates, writing jokes.

Highly intelligent, he is also highly strung. He says he had terrible trouble sleeping, and still does (too much energy, he thinks), and wandered around in a daze as a student. 'Maybe that's why it took me so long to get into comedy? It took me a while to think, "I should take this a bit more seriously." '

He started performing with the Oxford Revue, and it was while he was at the Edinburgh Festival that he was talentspotted by Radio Scotland and hired to present a music show called Bite the Wax with radio presenter Eddie Mair.