Hello and one for the Red Box Politics Podcast in The Times.

I'm Matt Chorley.

It is an absolute joy to be joined by Armando Ianucci, the man behind on the hour,

the day-to-day, Saturday night armistice, the Armandhii In The Loopin'

shows, Alan Partridge, the thick of it in the loop, time trumpet, Stuart Lee's comedy vehicle,

Veep, Death of Stalin. Armando, is there anything that you've done which was rubbish? Well, I'll leave that for others to say. Does that sound like a politician's answer? It is a little bit of a politician's answer. That's a rubbish policy. Well, I mean... You have had an extraordinary... I mean, there were loads of people to be happy to have been involved in one of those shows.

Never mind.

What was it?

I have a...

I remember once talking to some six-formers and you get really great questions from when you go around schools, actually.

Questions that journalists don't ask.

And the first question I got was, when you start a new project, how do you overcome your fear of failure?

And I completely flawed me.

And I had to think.

And the answer is I go into each project assuming it's my first one or pretending it's my first one, because you've got to go into it with the passion and vigor

and concentration that you do when you're starting out so i tend to irrespective of what the last

project was forget it never happened uh pretend it never happened so that you're not

so that you're not in any danger of sort of coasting of doing the same thing twice.

The interesting thing about the way that you work, well come on to Avenue 5 at a moment,

but you're not someone who sort of a normal career path is someone who was really involved in the writing

and all of that at the beginning and then gradually they become increasingly detached and, you know,

executive producers attached to

...