Peter Capaldi

Funniest film of 2009? This hilariously biting political satire has already got my vote. Think Yes, Minister with more swearing. A lot more swearing. OK, ballistic levels of swearing. Swearing so sublime and breathtakingly vicious, it makes you wince with pleasure.

As discerning comedy fans will already know, this is the movie adaptation of The Thick Of It, Armando Iannucci's massively acclaimed TV sitcom, which means that by the rules of such transitions, it should be pants.

Yet there are no compromises to be found here, certainly not in the teeth department. With original star Chris Langham unavailable due to his conviction for downloading child porn - a chain of events beyond even the show's scurrilous imagination - it's up to the ever-marvellous Tom Hollander to play hapless secretary of state Simon Foster, who bleats out lines such as: 'To walk the road of peace, sometimes we need to be prepared to climb the mountain of conflict.' Only to be savaged by the PM's rabid Alastair Campbell-alike communications officer, Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi). 'Climb the mountain of conflict?' he scoffs. 'You sound like some Nazi Julie Andrews.'

Bounced along at every turn by brilliant aphorisms and comic turns, including The Sopranos's James Gandolfini bulking out the transatlantic audience appeal as a warmongering general, there's admittedly not much in the way of actual narrative. But, frankly, who cares when you're laughing this hard?

Watch an exclusive deleted scene from In the Loop

Armando Iannucci's blistering satire is out on DVD on 24 August. Remind yourself why Peter Bradshaw awarded it five stars with this exclusive deleted scene, in which Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi) mouths off over the phone. Warning: there will be swearing.

Peter Capaldi on directing Getting On

Peter Capaldi (amongst other things, Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It and In The Loop) is director of BBC Four's new series Getting On, whose naturalistic presentation has drawn favourable comparison to the political comedy in which Peter stars.

Getting On gets better. Somehow Jo Brand, Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine have created a comedy about a modern NHS ward that is piercingly weird, coldly plausible, heartbreaking and hilarious. This week, a foul-mouthed racist OAP went on the rampage, delivering a bloody nose to the new male matron, who desperately tried to remember his stay-calm management training module as his nose bled.

The humour in Getting On is stealthy: the harassed doctor searched for her stool samples, hustled pathetically for a car-parking space and saw not that many patients - then looked at her lined face in the toilet and wondered where the years had gone. This moving reverie was interrupted by the head nurse rapping on the door, insisting that it should never be locked. The doctor she fancied, played by The Thick of It's Peter Capaldi (who also directs Getting On), looked past her at a much younger model. The comedy in Getting On is as wincing as The Thick of It, with the added pathos of near-death patients wheezing their last. Or not, as happened this week, with the sudden, vexing recovery of one.

It's a struggle for the Getting On nurses - to decide if they can take a dead patient's cake

Curiously, it reminded me of Dinnerladies, which Victoria Wood wanted shot as this is: naturalistically. It is very female and unfazed by death.

Once upon a time, before she became a comedian, Jo Brand was a psychiatric nurse. Now she stars as a nurse in an old people's ward in Getting On, a comedy with a resolutely dark heart. It was directed by Peter Capaldi and the hand-held camera, jitteringly close to the action and people's responses, reinforced the same uneasy, quease-making intimacy the technique also gave to The Thick of It, in which Capaldi played the foul-mouthed spin chief Malcolm Tucker.

Just as The Thick of It exposed political corruption, Getting On revealed the daily reality of cutbacks and petty bureaucracy now blighting the NHS. A turd sat on a chair for almost the entire duration of the show, first because a specialist turd-removing medi-testing outsourced company needed to clear it, and only then because the turd was being used as part of a vital research exercise to secure funding for the hospital. The staff struggled and failed to understand a woman speaking in a foreign accent. There were piercing notes to the character portraits: the ward sister was neurotic and ineffectual but also heartbroken. For all her dead-eyed scorn of her seniors, Brand seemed nice about the patients, until she ate the cake belonging to one dead old woman. She also lifted her family pack of Starburst.

One of the clues to successfully turning an in-joke into an out-joke is to trust people to get it without too much signalling. Getting On, a comedy set in an under-resourced geriatric ward, clearly understands this, beginning in a way so indifferent to the arrival of newcomers (us, watching) that you almost feel you should cough to let them know you're there.

Sister Flixter is sitting by an old lady's bedside, one hand checking her texts, the other clasping the patient's limp hand. The camera pans slowly to show a cake - "Happy Birthday Lily 87" - and then, without any fuss, it becomes apparent that Lily isn't going to be eating any of it. It's the kind of detail that might be played for cheap pathos in a different kind of series, but here - without a line of script - it very effectively delivers a key signature. This is a comedy about a place where the bleakly mortal and the banal are continually rubbing up against each other.

Sister Flixter didn't have much time to worry about Lily because a something distracted her, a coil of excrement discovered on a ward chair by Nurse Wilde (Jo Brand). To Nurse Brand, this is "shit". To Sister Flixter, it's a "critical incident", which will require the requisite NHS paperwork and to Dr Moore (Vicki Pepperdine), it is a "faecal deposit" and valuable raw material for her current research. For want of a stool pot the stained chair was pushed into an alcove behind hazard tape, where it is still odorously contributing to the ward's atmosphere of mismanagement when the new matron turned up later to add yet another chief to a tribe already short on Indians. That's the central joke of Getting On - of priorities and interests competing so effectively that virtually nothing gets done - though "joke" is too crude a word for the stealthy way in which the humour bubbles up through the cracks.

Written by its three leads and directed by Peter Capaldi, Getting On is in the tradition of The Office and The Thick of It, rather than Only When I Laugh or Green Wing. You can feel the grit of real events inside the comedy, such as the ludicrous attempt to translate the genial babblings of a patient speaking some unidentified Indian language (they discover she's been saying "I want to die. Please kill me") or the closing moment when Sister Flixter and Nurse Wilde found themselves having to mumble their condolences to Lily's sister, through mouths still filled with the dead woman's cake. And the most surreal gags turn out to be true. Dr Moore's strange obsession with the patient's bowel movements turns out to be the result of an ambition to "expand the Bristol Stool Chart from the current seven to an exhaustive 37 types of patient faeces". Wonderfully, the Bristol Stool Chart really does exist, a turd-spotter's identification chart that runs the fecal gamut from "hard lumps, like nuts" to "entirely liquid". Getting On doesn't feature on it anywhere.

The opening line of a comedy is crucial in setting the tone - it lets you know where the writers are coming from. So when Getting On dumped "there's a s*** on the chair" on us as an introductory gambit, it was clear this wasn't going to be an easy ride. That the words were squeezed from the lugubrious gob of Jo Brand, resplendent in nurse's uniform, only piled on the agony.

Yet I can't remember the last time I howled so loudly. Cut from the same downbeat naturalistic cloth as The Royle Family and The Office, Getting On mines the misery of a hospital geriatric ward for bleak laughs. Yet for all its pot-shotting at NHS bureaucracy and patronising consultants, there's a heartening thread of humanity that stitches this mordant little gem together.

You don't need to have spent any time in geriatric wards to get Getting On but possibly it helps. Director Peter Capaldi (taking time out from political jiggery pokery in Torchwood and The Thick Of It) gets the feel of washed-out light and weary resignation spot on; even the corridors feel like they're shrugging their shoulders and doing all they can to keep from falling over.

But where Getting On really scores is with the performances of its central trio of writer/actors. Brand is matched every cynical sigh of the way by Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine as the lap dancer-booted sister and the stool-obsessed consultant ('what type is it?' 'I'd say type four: snake') around whom Getting On revolves in increasingly desperate circles. One heartbreaking, hilarious scene summed up. An Asian woman had been muttering away in her bed for an age and finally the nurses got a translation over the phone. 'What's she saying?' 'I want to die, please kill me.' 'Put it in her notes.'

Peter Capaldi has made virtually no mistakes since Local Hero. His is a CV that screams 'class' louder than someone at a pub quiz tiebreak asked to name Andrew McCarthy's debut film. So it's no surprise that when he turned his hand to directing a sitcom, it's extremely well made. Jo Brand and two less well known actresses play nurses on a medical ward that's overloaded with OAPs. They have to deal with NHS bureacracy which requires them to fill in forms and file faecal matter. It's a cynical, dry and washed through with realism. It is a lot like The Thick Of It, but understandably, and that's not a bad thing.

You really shouldn't laugh. That's what you'll keep telling yourself during the first episode of this dazzlingly low-key new comedy set in a geriatric ward.

But it's no good putting on your politically correct face and sitting there tutting, because this is a relentlessly funny, workplace comedy that is right up there with The Thick Of It or The Office.

Part of the BBC's coyly titled Grey Expectations strand about the joys of ageing, the morbid humour is as black as death itself. Produced on a budget that would barely cover hair and make-up on Ugly Betty, it's written by Jo Brand, Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine who also star as the self-interested, bored and incompetent medical staff. To add to its credentials, it's directed by Peter Capaldi, most famous of course as The Thick Of It's explosive spin doctor Malcolm Tucker.

Brand, as everyone knows, used to be a nurse in a psychiatric hospital which must surely account for the way that every horrible detail is so ruthlessly observed. You feel you could be watching a documentary filmed by an undercover C4 researcher with a camera hidden in a bed pan.

As the patronising, brisk, and utterly ineffectual Dr Pippa Moore (obsessed tonight with a poo that has been left on a chair), Pepperdine is absolutely spot-on and instantly recognisable, while the team's joint dealings with a patient who speaks no English are toe-curlingly sublime.

But just remember, you really shouldn't laugh.