Exclusive: Adam McKay On Anchorman 2

Pass the news conch, for we bring exciting tidings from the Channel Four News Team. As any fule - and Conan O'Brien viewer - kno, Anchorman 2 is coming soon, so** Empire **spoke to writer/director Adam McKay to extract some pungently-musked tidings on the sequel's progress.

To begin at the beginning, McKay updated us on the status of the script: "We've done about two per cent! Half a per cent? We've got five pages of story notes and chunks of story. We're holing up writing for the next three months."

So what will the sequel have in store for Ron and the team? Nothing good - at least, not if you're a luxuriously-maned, change-averse '70s sex dinosaur. "We know these guys never deal well with change," says McKay, "and the good thing is that there's a big blast of change coming, according to the regular timeline. We're going to be throwing a lot of innovation at them, and they're not going to handle it well."

So what does that sinister-sounding "regular timeline" mean for KVWN-TV? "It's right when all the news started changing with the 24-hours news cycle in '78 or '79," McKay explains. "All of a sudden, local news stations diversified and had Latino anchors and African-American anchors, and any time you're talking about diversity and the Action News team, that's always fun to deal with."

For "diversity" read "an old, old wooden ship". And for "fun" we reckon you can safely read "total bloody chaos", with McKay promising another epic gang fight ("We already have a couple of ideas for it"). Somewhere amid all that ethic diversity, it'd be nice to think, lies Arturo Mendez and a big set of nunchucks.

For the full Adam McKay interview and lots more on Anchorman 2, pick up Empire's June issue in newsagents from April 26.