Review: In The Loop

Is your office currently being trashed by a raving Scottish lunatic, foaming spittle bubbling on the lapels of his finely-cut suit?

Is your new office boy weaseling his way into your boss' good books with all the sophistication of a slug pretending to be a cotton earbud?

Is your chest thudding with the strain of a tell-tale heart struggling to dislodge itself from a tomb of paperwork?

It's not funny, is it?

Strangely enough, sometimes it is. But it takes a very good writer to make it happen.

Armando Iannucci is a very, very good writer. His work with Chris Morris on spoof news show The Day Today was once talked about in hushed tones by journalists and broadcasters, who were careful to avoid any of the outrageously crass ticks and graphics of the self-important news world.

His 2001 Channel 4 series The Armando Iannucci Shows were hugely under-rated musings on the loneliness and idiocy of modern culture, and his political TV series The Thick Of It updated the image of Westminster from the smirking labyrinth of frustration seen in Yes Minister to the PR-swaddled den of unreality we're wading through today.

Iannucci is a master at slicing through to the ridiculous heart of a victim without slashing around vindictively like Jason Voorhees. He displays this trait with surgical precision again during In The Loop, a feature-length tribute to The Thick Of It's world of Labour-era politics.

The strangely-familiar plot revolves around the machinations of British and American attempts to engineer a war. In time-honoured fashion, this is achieved not by raising a sabre and hollering high on a mountain, but in manipulating a tiny little political bug who spends evenings in hotels watching shark documentaries because porn would turn up on his parliamentary expenses bill.

Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) is in trouble. The hapless government minister has blurted out something stupid on radio, and all of a sudden he's locked in a loveless death spiral with American hawks and doves, including assistant secretary Karen Clarke (Mimi Kennedy), the ethically-torn General Miller (James Gandolfini) and the sinister Senator Linton Barwick (David Rasche).

He's also being chased around the world by Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), the crazed Jack the Ripper of spin doctors with the scent of Alastair Campbell. And all the while, his constituency office wall is collapsing into the garden of the mother of a very ticked-off man (Steve Coogan).

His only allies in this are his tired fixer, played by Gina McKee, and his slimy new boy Toby (Chris Addison). So, of course, he's absolutely, irrevocably and possibly apocalyptically doomed.

British satire has been waiting for a champion as good as this one for a little while. While Iannucci's satire is slick, keenly-observed and above all perfectly-timed, it's not just light-fingered wit that's on show here.

In The Loop removes the mythical sheen from the political world, revealing the haplessness, tedium, confusion and slime huddled underneath. There's also a knuckle-whitening level of visceral banter to enjoy, mostly in the spectacular insults of Tucker and his fax-smashing assistant Jamie.

You'll find yourself repeating many of them on the way home. But try not to use too many of them in your own office, unless you've got a very understanding HR department.