In the three years since the last series of Armando Iannucci's The Thick of It, the fine line dividing art and real life has become more gossamer-like than ever.
The government's pasty tax U-turn, Jeremy Hunt's unfortunate Olympic bell-ringing incident and treasury minister Chloe Smith's Newsnight mauling by Jeremy Paxman all suggested a master satirist at work.
"I always look at the news, unless it's something absolutely horrific, as entertainment," said one of The Thick of It's six principal scriptwriters, Roger Drew. "Stuff in politics, the backbiting, the in-fighting, it's just hugely entertaining. Chloe Smith on Newsnight – that was terrific."
The show's writing team keeps its distance from real-life politics – script consultant Kate Conway is their conduit with Westminster – although Iannucci was said to have been contacted by an insider from the office of deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg.
"Someone approached Armando and said, I am in Nick Clegg's office ... I will give you all the dirt. I don't know what happened with them," said Drew. "People said the coalition was always going to break down, it's whether they managed to make it to the end of the five-year term. The jury's out on that."
Times have changed, both in reality and in the fictional world of the Bafta-winning BBC2 satire. The hapless Nicola Murray MP, played by Rebecca Front, is now leader of the opposition, with Peter Capaldi's Alastair Campbell-alike, Malcolm Tucker, temporarily neutered.
A coalition government is in power, supported by a junior partner dubbed "The Inbetweeners" – as is the show's tradition, no party is ever identified by name – and Peter Mannion MP (any resemblance to Kenneth Clarke is entirely coincidental) in charge of the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship.
"There is even more conflict and less possibility of anyone being happy at all," said Roger Allam, who plays Mannion.
Producer Adam Tandy said the show, which returns to BBC2 in September, had sought to reflect the changing political times.
"It was a perfect opportunity to reboot and allows us to keep the show relevant and do different things with the characters. No one is in power, no one has won the election, and that is an inner truth which we have embraced wholeheartedly," he said.
"We aim to achieve certain parallels with real political life, but it's not slavish satire. We get lucky from time to time. Who was it had the bell come off the end of his stick? We couldn't have made that up and put it in a script and expect people to believe it."
The new seven-part series is played out against the background of an inquiry inspired by Lord Justice Leveson's long-running probe into press ethics set up in the wake of the News of the World phone hacking scandal.
Cast members and production team are coy about precise details of the "inquiry" and its fallout, but it is not specifically related to the media.
"The inquiry affects everybody in a particular way," said Front. "You gradually see it unfolding, it is all quite unexpected. It starts to become apparent that everybody is embroiled. Armando is quite intrigued by the whole culture of inquiries."
Iannucci returned to The Thick of It while finishing the first series of his White House satire, Veep, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
"When we were initially thinking about the series, before we knew we would spend a year on Veep, the [coalition] tensions were within each party, the problems were internal," said Will Smith, who writes and stars in The Thick of It. "Luckily for us, comedically by the time we came to do it, it all seemed to be coming apart a bit more, there was more friction."
But some real-life incidents – such as the Leveson inquiry revelations that David Cameron signed his texts to Rebekah Brooks LOL, until she pointed out that the phrase meant "laugh out loud", not "lots of love" – were too outlandish even for The Thick of It.
"It doesn't make us feel we have to match that," said Smith. "Armando is always very keen to make it believable, to feel real. It feels more like they copy us."
As indeed they did, when Labour leader Ed Miliband lifted the Malcolm Tucker invention "omnishambles" to describe the state of the government at prime minister's questions in June.
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