Profile: Armando Iannucci - Through thick and spin

ARMANDO Iannucci compared making his first film In The Loop to undergoing colonic irrigation, and announced: "I wouldn't want to do it again."

He may be forced to reconsider after last week's news that the film has been short-listed for an Oscar. "Bloomin heck. In The Loop nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar. Bonk me purple, " he posted on his Twitter feed.

In the universe of furious profanity that Iannucci has created, purple bonking might seem rather low-key. "I don't swear a lot,'' he says. It's a surprising confession for the man who spawned Malcolm Tucker, the sulphurous government spin-doctor whose verbal venom drives the plots of In The Loop, and its TV progenitor The Thick Of It.

Small, softly-spoken and self-deprecating, the 46-year-old Iannucci looks more like a middle-manager or a photocopier salesman than the brains behind some of the most distinctive comedy of the age.

This is the man who helped create the cringeworthy Alan Partridge and Chris Morris's Paxmanesque newsreader, with his meaningless, irresistible headlines ("Teacher uses big-faced boy as satellite dish!"). Quietly, over the past two decades, Iannucci has crafted some of the most unsettling comedy of our time.

Peter Capaldi's Tucker, with his blistering blitzkrieg of abusive language, his tumbling torrents of radioactive invective, has become one of television's great comic characters. The monstrous Malcolm is a psychopathic bully for whom politics is just the exercise of brute force. When he explodes – he seldom does anything else – he has ministers and civil servants scurrying for cover. The cringing ministers, cowed civil servants and tyrannical press advisers skewer the New Labour "project".

In The Loop takes the successful formula of the TV show to Washington DC. It follows a ministerial delegation to the US in the run-up to a crucial UN vote to invade a Middle Eastern country. Iannucci scouted the film himself in the US capital and discovered that the American government was run "by 23-year-olds".

Remarkably, given his portrayal of politicians as both vain and sheep-like, he seems to have some sympathy for them. "We seem to expect too much of (politicians]," he has said. "We expect them to work really hard but not get paid. We dislike it when they use spin but we also hate it when Gordon Brown doesn't know how to look at a camera."

But this middle-aged, politically middle-of-the-road, mild-mannered family man has nevertheless captured the spirit of the age. The expenses scandal, the duck house, the drained moat, all sound like jokes from The Thick Of It. Political reality now follows Iannucci's script.

So is there a skeleton in Iannucci's closet, a festering secret that generates his bile? Friends and colleagues attest to his kindness. He seems a very well-adjusted cynic. Armando Iannucci may simply be a very clever man, who at heart is disgusted with the idiotic way we run our public and political life.

Iannucci lives in rural Buckinghamshire with his speech therapist wife, Rachael, and his children Emilio, Marcello and Carmella. Friends say that, with age, Iannucci bears an increasing physical resemblance to his father, also called Armando, an immigrant from Italy who settled in Glasgow, married a local girl and worked as a tradesman making fire surrounds and kitchen furniture. Coincidentally, Capaldi, a fellow Glaswegian, grew up in a home fitted out by Iannucci snr.

A self-described "big-nosed Jock wop", Iannucci junior was educated in Glasgow at St Aloysius' College, where he was taught by Jesuits, and initially planned to become a priest. After graduating with a first in English literature from Oxford, he became involved in stage comedy as a "displacement activity" while he was meant to be writing a doctoral thesis on the religious poetry of John Milton. Though he abandoned his PhD after he was approached by the BBC, his interest in the poet and his love of language survived. Amongst his many TV projects, he is currently working on a documentary on Milton's Paradise Lost for a BBC2 poetry series, and the shed in which he writes his material is only 100 yards or so from where Milton's cottage once stood.

After being spotted performing at the Edinburgh Fringe, Iannucci was approached to make programmes for BBC Radio Scotland. Shows like No' The Archie MacPherson Show and Bite The Wax were cutting-edge for Scottish radio, but he left Radio Scotland after being told by a senior colleague that he had "no future in broadcasting".

Unlike many comics, Iannucci doesn't crave the limelight, and despite appearing on Radio 4 panel shows such as The News Quiz and The Unbelievable Truth, and on television in Have I Got News For You – seen by others as essential exposure – he is still far from being a household name. In fact, the few failures in Iannucci's resum have been his forays in front of the camera. His self-presented shows for Channel 4 "went down like a bowl of dead fish… I thought, am I going mad, have I lost it?" Time Trumpet in 2006, a spoof documentary which looked back from 30 years in the future to today, received poor reviews.

Where Iannucci excels is as a producer, working with a trusted team of actors. His method combines painstaking preparation and improvisation. He asks each writer to create ten lines for each character and gives his actors the freedom to throw in the lines at any time. Capaldi says: "He creates an environment where everyone's a little tense. The actors have to be on top of the written material but at the same time have to be vulnerable enough to just run with it. That leaves you feeling very exposed and nervous."

Iannucci describes his own politics as "sort of woolly leftish of centre" and he once campaigned for Roy Jenkins and the SDP in Glasgow Hillhead. Eclectically, he lists Ken Clarke, Robin Cook and John Prescott as the few politicians he admires. It is one of the strengths of his work that it doesn't follow a party line.

And now the reticent genius is about to go global. The American media have taken him to their heart, with New York magazine announcing "Armando Iannucci is everyone's favourite Oscar nominee." In The Loop was such a hit in the US, where it premiered at Sundance, that HBO have signed him to create a new series about a group of twentysomethings who start up successful websites similar to Facebook and Twitter. For the man who made his name satirising the pretensions of the media, then the government's attempts at media control, it's an irresistible next step.