Armand Iannucci on Veep, interview But there's a more general joke in play about the impotence of the office, which politics junkie Iannucci encountered when devouring the 4000-page biography of Lyndon B Johnson. He found himself sitting in his office just drumming his fingers thinking, I'm doing nothing. But three years later he is president. That's what I thought was the funny side: somebody who has a certain amount of influence finding himself diminished but going, "No no no, I'm important here."" Iannucci first dipped his toe in Capitol Hill not in fact with the feature film In the Loop, but when a pilot for a US version of The Thick of It was made. "I was a tiny cog," he recalls. I was flown out and made to feel like this was going to be wonderful and discovered I was number 30 on the call sheet. I remember after about three days spent by the pool thinking, this is terrible, what am I doing here? It was useful in one respect. My experience of making that pilot was what became the basis of In the Loop - that and the war. And I said to the British cast when we were filming the Washington scenes, "Remember what it was like the first time you went out to LA and all the big meetings you had and then how soiled you felt and how you came home feeling empty? Because that's precisely what happened to Tony Blair when he went to Washington."" But Iannucci's days of fretting by the pool are now over, with HBO's money funding his vision. You have a bigger cake to play with. If you want to shoot a scene where the vice-president steps out in the street you've got to have 10 people playing her security staff and a motorcade of cars because that's what happens. If you go into a room there's 300 people there because you're at a fund-raiser. The fully realised world is underpinned by meticulous research. What you see in Veep is what you get in Washington. "The ambition is overt," Iannucci found. "Someone was telling me that a typical conversational gambit between two people meeting in Washington for the first time without any hint of embarrassment is, "So, who do you know?"" Meanwhile, back in Westminster, Iannucci returns to The Thick of It after a three-year sabbatical this autumn. "If we'd made The Thick of It as soon as the Coalition got in it would be about how well they got on," he says. It needed a couple of years before you got the true nature of what is going on. The satire now is inspired by "people who fundamentally disagree, being held together out of fear, and being led by two people who realise that the minute anything goes wrong they are dead meat." Nicola Murray and Malcolm Tucker are now in opposition. But Peter Mannion, who thought he had the place to himself, has got a junior minister from this third party. You get a smaller party who need to separate themselves in order to satisfy some element of their supporters - "You see that thing about changing the pasty tax? That was us" - I think that is funnier than the love-in you get for the first six months." Tucker, meanwhile, he advises, is "apparently diminished but biding his time." The same cannot be said of Alan Partridge, another of Iannucci's comic gargoyles. Iannucci is associate producer on a new offering, which also begins on Sky Atlantic on Monday night. He just keeps regrowing. We were surprised by how he felt a bit more three-dimensional, partly because Steve is now nearly the same age as Alan. Meanwhile, a second series of Veep is to be filmed in October. The trick is staying ahead of the game, he says. Stories that I might have rejected as being too mad, happen anyway. It's about how far you can push it and still make it believable. Veep starts on Sky Atlantic on Monday at 10pm.