Armando Iannucci

The former 41st Best Stand-Up Comedian ever (and current 12th) is back in Stoke Newington's Mildmay Club for the second outing of his Comedy Vehicle. If the first series was a test drive for Stewart Lee's suitability for television, this is him taking the wheel, ditching the rather unnecessary revving at the lights (we're talking about the sketches - this is a metaphor...) and taking us for a more assured drive through, er, Comedytown.

Even StewLee fanboys like tvBite will admit that the cut-aways in the first run didn't always hit the mark. Instead, in their place we have clips from an interview with Armando Iannucci, as found last year on the Red Button. So this second run is more stripped-down and, presumably, less expensive for the Beeb.

At the beginning, Lee explains that he intends to add more jokes to make himself more appealing to a wider public and to the BBC themselves ("They wanted me to put more jokes in as a condition of this being recommissioned."). The only joke is - there are no real jokes ("Not in this show"). They've actually allowed him to be more Stewart Lee-y; he's contrived to make himself less appealing to a wider public. So the pauses are longer, the repetitions more pronounced, the deconstruction more constant. He implores the audience to keep up and then scolds them for anticipating jokes or even laughing at them ("They're sycophants, basically. I despise them"). With the new 11.20pm time slot, it's as if the BBC are saying, "Go mad - no one'll mind."

Will you like it? Would you find a 29-minute routine about a man's grandfather eating crisps where the punchline is "the reconstruction process was time-consuming but not expensive" funny? If not, you may be best waiting for a ride in Russell Howard's Good News Party Limo, which is bigger and more comfortable, but ultimately leaves you feeling a bit cheap. This is still a metaphor.

Peter Capaldi talks Malcolm Tucker's future

When the third series of Armando Iannucci's political satire The Thick Of It ended in 2009, we feared it might be the end of the road for foul-mouthed government spin doctor Malcolm Tucker. Out of favour with a party which was subsequently chucked out of office, it was difficult to see how the rudest man in Scotland would fit back into series four.

US version of The Thick of It commissioned

The Thick of It creator Armando Iannucci has had a US version of the political satire commissioned by cable network HBO.

New series of The Thick of It commissioned

The Thick of It, Armando Iannucci's brilliantly vituperative political satire, has been recommissioned for a fourth series.

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, as the repeats of series three of Armando Iannucci's satire continue on Gold. Yet again, watching 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" - packed with macho posturing from egomaniacal men behaving like competitive baboons. And it's brilliant. Look out for the memorable scene where Malcolm Tucker gets physical with a misguidedly assertive Glenn.

No joke as BBC college of comedy is binned

A BBC training scheme that was set up to nurture emerging comedy writers and endorsed by leading creative talents such as Armando Iannucci and David Mitchell has been scrapped after it failed to secure funding for a fourth year.

Spin doctor Malcolm Tucker is back in a blizzard of vituperation as Gold repeats series three of Armando Iannucci's peerless political satire. Tucker is doling out his "verbal colonics" to a new Secretary of State (splendid Rebecca Front, in a role that won her a Bafta). The inventive expletives bounce off the walls in firework displays of pure filth and bad taste. The dexterousness of the insults remains a marvel, as does the sublime supporting cast - Chris Addison and James Smith - of useless apparatchiks.

Video: Iannucci on Alan Partridge in the digital age

As Alan Partridge returns for more of his web-only series, Catherine Gee talks to the men behind it, Armando Iannucci and Henry Normal.

Armando Iannucci interview

Armando Iannucci talks about the new Alan Partridge projects and the new series of The Thick Of It.

The wobbly camerawork, as if shot by a team of four-year-olds who have run off with the digicam; the mournfully drab municipal setting; the absence, God forbid, of a laugh track; the studiedly natural dialogue. The Office begat The Thick Of It which begat this, a downbeat comedy set on an anonymous NHS ward. It came as no surprise that this, the first episode of the second series (I've come to it late), was directed by Peter Capaldi and starred Joanna Scanlan - each a first-class honours graduate of the Armando Iannucci school of comedy.

And this, being the series opener, it was appropriate that this most self-effacing of entertainments kept the action to the bare minimum. An unconscious old homeless person was admitted whom neither Nurse Den Flixter (Joanna Scanlan) nor her underling Kim Wilde (Jo Brand) really wanted to deal with. A little later, a woman visited her ailing mother and challenges Dr Pippa Moore (Vicki Pepperdine) about the level of pain relief available. That was it. The comedy, such as it was, peeped out from the fraught exchanges between Den, Dr Moore and the male Matron Hilary (Ricky Grover) as they tussled for the upper hand among the dank beds and grey windows. Kim meanwhile rolled her eyes and tried to keep out of trouble.

Yet, days later, it's not the comedy that stays with you, but the show's portrait of the NHS in miniature. Brand, Pepperdine and Scanlan are co-writers, and one assumes Brand's early career as a psychiatric nurse keeps the tone right, if not the up-to-the-minute detail. The passage of the homeless woman from Kim and Den, to the reluctant care of a junior house officer, to the corridor as they try to offload her on another ward was as understandable as it was distressing. Similarly, a well-informed woman's request that her mother's meds be amped up wasn't so much wryly amusing as it was useful - so that, you thought, is how you get someone to pay you proper attention: bone up on the internet, be endlessly polite and don't let them off the hook.