Annotated 'In The Loop' script

When this year's Oscar nominations were announced, one of the surprises was a well-deserved writing nod for the archly funny British production In The Loop. As director Armando Iannucci's comments on these script pages make clear, getting those words right wasn't easy.

Would an Alan Partridge film equal cashback?

Steve Coogan and Armando Iannucci are rumoured to confirm a big screen transfer for Norwich's finest imminently. A fatally overdue move, or testimony to Alan's timelessness?

Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle Returns!

'There'll be a 2nd series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. Huzzah! Huzzah!' tweeted producer Armando Iannucci earlier today.

Iannucci on Sweariest Oscar-Nominated Script Ever

Movieline's first stop on the Oscar-reaction rounds is Armando Iannucci, the In the Loop director whose caustic political satire today earned an Adapted Screenplay nomination for him and his co-writers Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell and Tony Roche. However, more than just being rewarded for the innovation of its characters and story - which focuses on how one press-office zealot engineers a multinational war effort - the Academy may very well have nominated Iannucci and Co. for their exhaustive efforts in developing Loop's stirring new lexicon of profanity. Their side-splitting effort is the only comedy recognized in its respective category - no doubt an underdog against the likes of Up in the Air and Precious, but one that will be happy just to be in the Kodak Theater March 7.

Iannucci spoke with us this afternoon about his reaction to being nominated, Loop's improv factor, and taking Oscar to the outer limits of screen vulgarity.

Chris Addison, the comedian who plays the weedy Ollie Reeder in The Thick of It, has been given his own topical news show on Five Live, 7 Day Sunday.

As usual, there is a certain amount of "category error" in this choice. As Ollie in The Thick of It, Addison is hilariously funny, but this is because his lines are written by the comic genius Armando Iannucci. On 7 Day Sunday, however, Addison is writing his own lines, assisted by a studio gang who would laugh at a pig's bladder on a stick. On The Thick of It there is snappy dialogue at a thousand miles an hour, but if you talk like that on radio without enough jokes or substance then the listener's mind skitters all over the place trying to concentrate, before giving up. The show's brief was to "pull apart the week's big news stories", but in the event the only news covered was snow. Weirdly for someone who made his name in a political satire there wasn't any. Why not? The Gordon Brown coup should have provided acres of material, but it took ages to get round to, and then got a paltry two minutes.

As with all the other new shows, I feel strongly that one should not judge on the basis of a debut. Addison is witty and will certainly improve when he starts to take things a little slower. But unless he cracks down on the nervous giggling, his team will still sound like they're stuck in a small lift, supplied with nitrous oxide instead of oxygen.

As our real-life Government entered what are quite possibly its death throes, so did the fictitious government in Armando Iannucci's uproarious political sitcom. Rebecca Front arrived to play a hand-wringing minister but the focal point was, as ever, Peter Capaldi's vicious spin doctor, Malcolm Tucker. Weirdly, Tucker's sacking in the penultimate episode proved one of the saddest moments on TV this year.

The Thick of It: the finale

So is this the way Armando Iannucci is going to take his series into the Tory era?

The ailing government is spiralling into the abyss and Malcolm Tucker is both waving and drowning when he tries to charm a group of journalists. Though "charm" is an overstatement: "Journalists...one day you are writing for the papers, the next you are sleeping under them." It's typical Tucker bravado, but you can tell he's feeling insecure. There's a real sense of panic in the penultimate episode of Armando Iannucci's skin-piercing satire. Over at the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship, Secretary of State Nicola Murray (Rebecca Front) is thrilled to have won the support of tennis ace Andy Murray for a healthy-eating campaign. But the arrival of Steve Fleming (a terrifying David Haig), Malcolm's bete noire and fellow spinner, pitches everyone into chaos. There's something almost frightening about The Thick of It when it's this intense. And when Fleming and Tucker have a titanic, foul-mouthed battle, be afraid.

A superb episode of Armando Iannucci's effortless political satire, as Nicola Murray and her opposition counterpart, Peter Mannion, appear on Richard Bacon's radio show. And the results are, as you'd expect, not pretty. But it's the encounter behind the scenes between Malcolm Tucker and Mannion's own wizard of spin, Stewart Pearson, where the real thrust of this episode lies. It's like the meeting of two powerful Jedi. Or something.

It's party conference season and hapless Secretary of State of Social Affairs and Citizenship Nicola Murray is in Eastbourne with her team of self-serving apparatchiks. Of course, she's being stalked by the godfather of spin, Malcolm Tucker, who continues his pitiless assault on Murray's self-confidence. Tucker (Peter Capaldi) manages to torpedo Nicola's big conference speech by hijacking her "applause monkey", a media-savvy, Twitterwise member of the public with a sad story. Yet again, watching Armando Iannucci's withering satire is like being caught in a firestorm of expletives and deliriously offensive jokes. It's a relentlessly testosterone-charged world - Nicola Murray even remarks at one point "it's like being trapped in a boys' toilet" - that's packed with macho posturing from egomaniacal men behaving like competitive baboons. And it's brilliant.