Armando Iannucci: I'm not Alan Partridge

Though he helped Steve Coogan to create his best-known character, and propelled Chris Morris to the front rank of satirists, Armando Iannucci – comedy writer, performer and producer – still isn't a star. But he may have only himself to blame...

Armando Iannucci. There is something I've always longed to ask Armando Iannucci, the man behind The Day Today and Chris Morris and Knowing Me, Knowing You (aha!) and so much else. Was Alan Partridge – who recently bounced back with "the third-best spot on Radio Norwich" – based on Alan Titchmarsh, as popularly supposed? "I think that is something Alan [Titchmarsh] is quite keen to propagate," replies Mr Iannucci, "but I hadn't even heard of Alan Titchmarsh 10 years ago." What, you never watched Pebble Mill at One, were never inspired by Mr Titchmarsh's wickedly incisive interviewing technique? ("Ohh, Kylie, knock-out dress...") No. Apparently not. "I never sat at home watching Pebble Mill at One," he says. Neither did I, I lie. I must have just heard someone talking about it once. I'd been minded, at some point in our conversation, to get Armando's vast comedy brain going on Robin's Nest – was the one-armed Irish dishwasher essential to the hilarity in the Aristotelian sense? – but am thinking better of it now.

Anyway, Armando Iannucci, commonly thought of as the best comedy producer of his generation. He is small and dark, late thirties, and dressed in something. A grey jumper? "Ohh, Armando, knock-out grey jumper..." (I learnt at the feet of the master, obviously.) I'm not sure he has a distinctive style, actually, and neither is he. "I'm not fashion conscious at all. I'm not even sure what you are meant to ask for in a barbershop apart from, 'Cut my hair.'"

We meet in London, although he now lives in Buckinghamshire, where he is working on his first novel, which is coming along at such a rate that it's already two-and-a-half years late. "I remember getting very excited, about two years ago, when I saw on Amazon that you could advance-order it, even though I hadn't written a word of it yet." He did have a book published three years ago; a collection of his newspaper columns, which, alas, rather brought out the worst in him. "I did that classic thing of going into bookshops and looking around to see where it was, and if it was at the back nudging it forward. I've read so many tales of authors in bookshops... apparently, there is one about Lord Longford going into a bookshop and complaining that his book on humility wasn't in the window. You do that sort of thing, though. You become a pathetic figure." As pathetic – and hilarious, always hilarious – as a one-armed Irishman trying to wash dishes at a restaurant? I think not. Sorry to keep going on about Robin's Nest, but if it's your yardstick vis-à-vis comedy genius, it is quite hard for anything else to measure up.

Alan Partridge? OK, I accept he has something, even though, frankly, those 182 days at the Linton Travel Lodge might have been rather a mistake. Why not a Fulham bistro? Does Armando remember the moment Alan, the sports reporter – "And that was the sports news. Happy now?" – was born, so to speak? Did he come complete with those blissfully horrible Titchmarsh-style sweaters?

"Oh, yes, he came out fully formed. We were doing On the Hour [the spoof news show for Radio 4, which Armando wrote and produced] and I asked Steve [Coogan] to be a sports reporter. He came up with this voice and someone said, 'He's a Partridge.' Then someone else said, 'He's an Alan.' And once we knew he was 'Alan Partridge' we knew what his background was, how he felt about being a sports reporter, how he wanted to move on and be taken more seriously. Then we started improvising and getting him to do interviews, always bringing the conversation back to himself." That, I say, is so irritating in an interviewer. Do you like my new lipstick? From Mac. Not too red? Good.

I tell him I enjoyed the most recent I'm Alan Partridge series, which I did. Armando, it turns out, is not so sure. "I just don't think it gelled," he says. Really? "There were some funny bits in it. I'm glad we got there in the end. Maybe it's because I was so bound up in it. When I was watching it, I found myself thinking, 'Why are we devoting so much time to this man? Why is he of interest?' I didn't see a reason for it. I saw the reason for the last series, but not this one." Perhaps, I suggest, it was because The Office had moved the whole genre on so much. "It did make our show seem more traditional. I think this Partridge was more BBC1 than BBC2 in the end."

Was it difficult to make? Very, it turns out. "By the time we finished filming, when I still had all the editing to do, my brain was just gunged up. But I was aware of not being able to cope, so I went to the doctor and got signed off for three months." A mini-breakdown? Burnout? "It was stress. I should have done it earlier." What happened to the production? "Everything shut down." Was it scary? "It was great. I was at home. Carmello [his third child, a daughter to add to two sons with his wife, Rachel] was about to be born. It's funny, when you do something like that you realise how everyone gets so sucked in by their daily routines. You forget you can call a halt. The world does not cave in. I think this is why I feel slightly dubious about the last series. It was very difficult to make, and I don't feel as if I was in it. I feel very detached from it. In fact, we've recorded the rough elements of a new series, but I'm not producing it. Someone else is doing it."

What's this done to your relationship with Steve Coogan? "I don't think I'll work with Steve for quite a while. He was a major niggle on a day-to-day basis. We've talked about it and he knew. We didn't fall out or anything. It's like if you share a flat with someone. You can be best friends and then you share a flat and think, 'I can't bear it.' We sort of assumed we'd all be exactly as we were five years ago, but we're not, we're five years older. And it's strange trying to do exactly what we did five years ago, and I sort of thought we should have been doing a completely new thing, not revisiting the old. But the pressure was on. The BBC wanted Partridge, and people would say, 'When is Alan coming back?' You have an obligation. You're in a room with each other for a year. Every day. That's quite an intense activity. Quite personal." Gosh, this is getting gloomy. Maybe Armando just isn't an "up" kind of person generally. But then, who in comedy ever is?

Armando says he is now more interested in "finding my own voice". As a performer, I think he means, rather than a producer. He is currently appearing on The 99p Challenge, a very funny Radio 4 quiz show, and plans to do a further Armando Iannucci Show for Channel 4.

I'm not sure about Armando as a performer, though. I don't know what it is. Perhaps it's because his strength isn't so much being funny, but being intellectually able to identify what is funny. He is certainly brilliantly clever but, then again, he will say things such as: "I'm doing something very foolish at the moment because I'm trying to read Proust." Foolish? Why? I do get this feeling that he's actually a very serious man attempting, sometimes, to appear more lightweight than he actually is. On the other hand, Proust is bloody boring, so maybe he has a point.

Armando was born in Scotland, the son of an Italian immigrant – "I'm not the only Scots person of Italian descent. Miss Lena Zavaroni" – who ran a pizza factory. So, Armando, weren't you brought up in an atmosphere of: "One day, son, all this pizza will be yours"? No, he says, because his father believed in "education, education, education". Armando, always brainy – he read Dickens continually as a child – attended a private Jesuit school and then it was on to Oxford, where he got a first in English (which is proof, I suppose, that he never got hooked on Pebble Mill, unlikely though it seems) and then spent three years researching religious language in Milton's Paradise Lost.

Not many gags in Milton, I would guess, and anyway, what's the point? I say I've never really understood the detailed dissection of texts. Surely writers wish only for their works to be read and enjoyed? "Absolutely. When I was an undergraduate I spent ages reading other people's interpretations of works. It's funny when your own stuff is analysed and you think, 'I didn't think that.' A Japanese student once sent me his thesis on Knowing Me, Knowing You in which he argued that we adopted the Aristotelian unities of time, place and action. It did. It was run in real time, it was set in a TV studio, and it culminated in a catharsis, the bombshell. But I didn't set out to write in an Aristotelian way. I remember at one point getting lots of letters from sixth-formers because Partridge was a set text in media studies. I think the choice was either us, Madonna or EastEnders." But not Robin's Nest, alas.

He never finished his PhD. He left Oxford for a producer/presenter job at Radio Scotland. I wonder, where does being funny come into all this? "At secondary school, quite early on, I would steal stuff from radio shows and do impressions. We always had a Christmas concert, and I always used to compere that and write the scripts and do the links as Hughie Green or Harold Wilson. I've still got the pipe I used for Harold Wilson. My first prop. I wasn't sporty, and it was the classic thing of getting the other kids to like me by making them laugh." I've never understood why children bullied in the playground become comedians rather than martial arts experts, but there you go.

He ended up a producer at Radio 4, working on, mostly, Weekending and The News Quiz, although he had to do some rubbish as well. "When I knew I was leaving and I was going to go freelance [to produce On the Hour] but was still serving out my time, I had to make this pilot for a quiz about Europe called L'Euro Quiz and I thought, 'I'm in a kind of living hell here.' I thought, 'I'll try to make it to the best of my professional abilities, but not enough to get it commissioned. The recording was terrible but not, unfortunately, bad enough, so they asked me to make the pilot again. By this time it was my last week there and I put no effort in whatsoever. It was done in front of an audience, guests had been booked, and I remember sitting in the edit room at the back, watching it die a death, and I thought, 'I really don't care. I'm out of this now.'"

Do you think Radio 4 is in good health at the moment? "I do." Even Alistair Cooke's Letter from America? I've had more interesting letters from the Inland Revenue, frankly. "He does circle round the point and you think that when he does actually get to it, it will be interesting, but just before he does get to it he goes, 'Goodnight.' Still, I used to be a huge fan of his, particularly in the early Eighties. You very rarely hear a voice uninterrupted for 15 minutes."

And BBC television now? Healthy, too? He says it's better than it was three or four years ago "when there was an air of intelligent people thinking that most people were stupid and therefore they ought to make stupid programmes. Pets Win Prizes. All the docusoaps. I think you should never underestimate the intelligence of the audience. Your job as a broadcaster is to decide what is good, and make that. It's more and more common now, in broadcasting, to meet people fairly high up – the decision-makers – who don't venture an opinion about a programme, but just tell you how well it is doing, how well it is being received, how much coverage it is getting and how they are hoping to make more of that sort of thing. But you don't have any sense of what they watch and what they like and what they want to see."

What does he like? He says there is a comedy on BBC Choice, Fifteen Stories High, which is terrifically good. I say I don't get BBC Choice, or any of the other digital channels, for fear of sitting there all day watching Robin's Nest on UK Gold. Don't you have that fear? "I do not," he says. Shame, that. I guess I'm just going to have to send him my thesis on the role of hilarious one-armed dishwashers in British comedy (1950-84). He's probably looking forward to it already.

'The 99p Challenge' runs to 11 March on Radio 4, Tuesdays 6.30pm