Avenue 5: Armando Iannucci engages his warp drive for this interstellar space-com

With a US president who recently tweeted “I JUST GOT IMPEACHED FOR MAKING A PERFECT PHONE CALL” and a Prime Minister giving airtime to “Bongs For Brexit”, real politics has out-satirised the satirists.

So where should all that comic energy be redeployed now Westminster and Washington have effectively gone in-house? If you’re Armando Iannucci, then it’s into space.

The Veep and The Thick of It creator’s hotly anticipated new show Avenue 5 takes place billions of miles from planet Earth, and decades into the future, on a spaceship resembling a luxe cruise liner crossed with a Middle Eastern five-star hotel.

The planet has been ransacked and the Moon turned into a giant prison, so 5,000 wealthy earthlings are getting away from it all with an eight-week “luxury space experience” sold to them by entrepreneur Herman Judd (Josh Gad): “I believe in space tourism” he says, tilting his blonde mop disingenuously, “not because I run a space tourism company, but because I genuinely believe in it… as a thing.”

The appearance might be different but the style is unmistakably Iannuccian, with naturalistic pinball dialogue between the ship’s management — “Mr Judd is fracking some merchandise ideas and he’s just hit gas” — and a handful of its guests.

Ryan Clark (Veep’s Hugh Laurie) is the glad-handing captain with a barely concealed disdain for his boss; Zach Woods is awful Head of Customer Relations Matt, who tells guests after an engineer dies: “If it’s any consolation he had very few loved ones,” while

Mission Control back on earth is run by Rav Mulcair, played with brilliant cynicism by Nikki Amuka-Bird.

When the crew attempts to fix a 26-second communication delay with Earth, the gravitational field is tipped, knocking the vessel off course — with both painful consequences for everyone on board and excellent potential for a second season. With Iannucci’s knack for finding comedy in incompetency, we begin to discover the people in charge have all the technical capabilities of a cat with an iPad. But can a veteran astronaut on board (played by Star Trek: Voyager’s Ethan Phillips), “one of the first 30 astronauts to orbit Mars — and the first Canadian to land on it”, help save the day?

Ianucci’s new “space-com” might not have the initial punch of his previous work — perhaps because an interstellar show has less immediate satirical potential than the corridors of Westminster or the West Wing — but there’s plenty of promise from this opening episode, which has so many jokes smuggled into the margins it’s even funnier with a second viewing. And as his characters blunder their way into deep space some time far in the future, at least you can forget about politics.

Avenue 5 is on Sky One, 10pm; stream on NOW TV

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