FANS on both sides of the Atlantic have been mourning the news that Veep, the sharp, awards-laden US political satire, is to come to an end after its seventh season.

But Veep’s creator, Glasgow-born Armando Iannucci, who handed over the reins a couple of years ago, has long since moved on, and his latest film, The Death of Stalin, is out on October 20.

The film depicts Stalin’s ministers simultaneously jostling for power and trying to stay alive after the dictator’s death in 1953.

The trailer opens with a glimpse of Stalin in the office of his dacha outside Moscow, about to breathe his last. Outside the closed doors two soldiers are standing guard. One, hearing Stalin’s body hitting the floor, whispers anxiously, “Should we investigate?” The other gives a terse reply: “Should you shut the f--- up before you get us both killed?”

Stalin, Iannucci explains in an online video, had instructed his guards that he never wanted to be disturbed, “so when the guards hear him fall over, they don’t know what to do. They don’t want to be shot, so they don’t go in … He’s left lying on the floor in his office for hours.”

He told Variety: “I went into [the film] pushing everyone, including myself, out of their comfort zone. I was making a funny film, but I also knew that some scenes weren’t supposed to be funny, and that other scenes would be dramatic or emotional.”

The film, which was directed and co-written by Iannucci, has a great cast: Steve Buscemi, Jason Isaacs, Michael Palin, Rupert Friend, Jeffrey Tambor, Andrea Riseborough, Paddy Considine, Olga Kurylenko and Simon Russell Beale. And it has the caustic, cynical, profanity-laden style we associate with Iannucci’s other political works, Veep, In the Loop, and The Thick of It.

Veep, whose fate was announced last week, followed the serial misadventures of Selina Meyer, a ferociously ambitious US politician undone by her egotism and lack of discernible talent, and forever condemned to one petty humiliation after another. “A venal, nasal, [Sarah] Palinesque horror in soft tailoring,” runs one critic’s description.

The series has had many killer lines, all eminently quotable. One soon-to-be dead senator, lying in hospital, is casually described as being “mostly intravenous – he has so many tubes, he looks like a set of bagpipes.”

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who plays Meyer, has won the Primetime Emmy award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series every year since 2012 for the show. The series itself has won numerous awards and has been described as the finest US political satire show in recent times.

Before then, of course, Iannucci had created The Thick of It, the undisputed star of which was Peter Capaldi, who played the Prime Minister’s policy enforcer, Malcolm Tucker – a master of the dark arts, a man given to volcanic displays of temper in which hapless colleagues are showered with f-words. Tucker, one critic noted, was destined for a place in “TV’s arrogant bastard hall of fame.”

The run-up to the war in Iraq was satirised in the Iannucci-directed In the Loop (2009), which starred Capaldi, James Gandolfini and Tom Hollander (the film's tagline: "Things are about to spin out of control." Iannucci and his co-writers were nominated for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar.

Iannucci, now 53, is astute on the subject of politics. Asked earlier this year about what was most to blame for the problem with modern politics, he said “Spin”. Politicians had allowed themselves to be influenced more by fear of the press and negative ratings than by their own ideals, he added.

“They surround themselves with these advisers who are telling them what not to say, what not to do – ‘If you do this, they won’t like it.’ In an ideal world, they would do as little and say as little as possible.”

On the issue of satire in the age of Trump he has said: “Normally, satire is where you take something that is true and then you bend it and twist it and you exaggerate it until it becomes absurd, but that’s what Donald Trump does in every sentence that he speaks. He’s a self-basting satirist, really: he is his own joke.”

When he was 12 Iannucci was sent to a private Jesuit school. He told the Herald magazine in 2013 that he was “hideously self-conscious” when he was younger “… In larger groups I was very, very shy and quiet and bookish.”

He studied at Oxford, where he met his wife-to-be, Rachael. After graduating, he worked for BBC Radio Scotland and then as a producer on Radio 4. His early CV includes On the Hour, The Day Today, the Alan Partridge sitcom, and the Armando Iannucci Show.

In 2012, after Iannucci was awarded an OBE, Alastair Campbell, one of the inspirations for Tucker, issued a mocking tweet that Iannucci had thus “join[ed] the Establishment he claims to deride. Malcolm Ticker and I do not approve of honours system.”

Campbell later tweeted at Iannucci: “Three little letters can have more impact than you realise. Tut tut.” The Scot’s crisp reply? “WMD.”

Iannucci said the award would not have an adverse impact on his comedy. "Does Chris Hoy cycle less well after being honoured? Is there a suggestion that he has sold out? My comedy is not about judging where people come from, or what they are called or what school they went to. I don't care. It is about what they do."