Words: Chris Baraniuk
Photography: John Stewardson

For Andy Ward, 23, messing around on student radio was the perfect breeding-ground for his slap-dash brand of absurdist comedy.

“I’m over in the middle bit, by Burger King,” I shout down my mobile to Andy, mere metres away in Paddington station. We spot each other and, since neither of us is city savvy, slip in to a nearby Korean restaurant to avoid the bustle.

“I’ve just left Keele Uni,” he begins. “During my whole time there I was involved with student radio in some form or another. We were nonsensical. We did idiotic features every week, like a whole series based on rhymes and puns. Play your Picards Right was a gameshow that we made up as we went along – nothing to do with Star Trek,” he adds helpfully.

“We were nominated for a Student Radio Award for Best Interview after a show we did with The Hoosiers,” Andy goes on. “We didn’t want to do a conventional interview, so we brought ‘wacky’ gifts along – Vimto, champagne flutes, Space Invaders, that sort of thing. We thought they’d like it, but we ended up spilling Vimto all over them. They’ve stopped doing student radio interviews now. Who knows if that was our fault?”

It’s the irreverent style of his shows that helped garner popularity amongst fellow students, particularly his Garth Marenghi and Mighty Boosh influenced Ghost Stories series, which began as a one-off airtime filler.

“We got loads of texts and feedback from people saying we should do more,” he explains. “So we did. My Dad used to play us this tape of monologue ghost stories at Christmas, and I think the inspiration came from that – I really liked working with a single narrating voice. Not even any sound effects. With the monologue, you can really get a sense of how to drive the comedy forward.”

His sample reels don’t hide the fact that producing them was side-splittingly good fun. He hasn’t wasted time on editing out background laughter or wobbly lines. In fact, he says, that’s all part of the plan: “It was all deliberately amateurish. It helps the fun come across. We knew we couldn’t act or do voices properly, so felt it was better not to try too hard.”

But could that style be accommodated by professional radio? “Definitely. I think people really appreciate things that don’t try too hard to iron out the imperfections, like when actors in sitcoms can’t help laughing at each other’s jokes. But you do have to be careful with absurd comedy: it’s a bad idea to string random words together and hope that people will find it funny.”

As we’re finishing up I ask Andy how he would describe himself. He looks exasperated. “I have no idea. I always cringe at questions like that on job forms. I just can’t take anything that seriously. I need someone to give me a comedy job, or I won’t survive in the real world. Put that in capital letters. Save me from starvation.”

andyward16@googlemail.com

Words: Simon Harper
Photography: Jannica Honey

A former finalist in Channel 4’s stand-up contest So You Think You’re Funny, Rose Heiney, 24, has since decided that the pen is mightier than the mic.

Published earlier in 2008, her darkly comic debut novel The Days of Judy B saw Rose – daughter of broadcasters Libby Purves and Paul Heiney – become firmly ensconced in the literary world that she was first exposed to at an early age.

“I was very lucky to grow up in a house full of books, to be taken to films, to plays, and introduced to good TV programmes,” she begins. “They’re the places that you go when the rest of the world isn’t looking so brilliant. I learned to have a lot of respect for television. A brilliant half-hour sitcom can inform your outlook as much as six miserable weeks spent trying to slog through The Brothers Karamazov.”

Fittingly, much of Rose’s humour comes from exposure to a raft of British sit-coms, name-checking the likes of Hancock’s Half Hour, Drop The Dead Donkey and People Like Us among her favourite touchstones, alongside more recent triumphs such as Peep Show.

“I’m evangelical about the programmes I find funny – if I were braver I would be running down the street thrusting box-sets of Ever Decreasing Circles into the hands of strangers, shouting, ‘Episode three is life-changing!’ and then sprinting off to spread my message.”

Describing her own working habits as “haphazard”, Rose wishes she’d prepared another draft of her novel before it went to print – but she needn’t have worried. Her first offering won over readers and critics, with Victoria Hislop [The Island] lauding it as “one of the funniest, most profound book’s I’ve ever read.”

“It actually got turned down by an awful lot of publishers,” says Oxford graduate Rose. “Looking back, I can see why. It’s obviously a very ‘young’ book, and the draft on submission was by no means ready. I dealt with the rejection through a well-moderated regime of incandescent rage, hysterical sobbing and alcohol abuse. I was very, very lucky that a publisher saw fit to take a punt on it in the end, and that relief was incredible.”

Rose is keen to dabble in other media too, and is in the early stages of developing an online comedy. “It’s a bit of a departure for me,” she confesses. “I’m the kind of person who thinks that computers have eyes and that you can scoop up broadband in a bucket. Trying to explain widgets and platforms to me is like teaching a dog to play poker, but I’m doing my best.”

“There’s so much I’d love to try,” she goes on. “I’d love to write radio comedy, contribute to other people’s shows, and ultimately help create good television. It’s very early days, but if someone opens a door, writing-wise, I will happily peep through it.”

rose.heiney@googlemail.com

Words: Martin Anderson
Graham Linehan photography: Adam Mattison-Ward
Buy Issue 10 here

If the British studio sit-com is as dead as Victoria Wood suggested in 2005, no-one’s told Graham Linehan or the legions of fans awaiting the third series of award-winning geek comedy The IT Crowd. Declared in 2007 to be amongst the top 100 living geniuses, this Irish writer loves to ignore good advice in his relentless pursuit of the perfect mainstream comedy show.

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“I’ve always been a contrary person. Roy’s based on me to that extent, with that whole ‘music snob’ thing – the idea that if more than ten people like something, it isn’t any good anymore,” says IT Crowd creator Graham Linehan.

Graham enjoys resistance: the ‘Ted and Ralph’ sketches that he wrote with long-time collaborator Arthur Matthews were the slowest entries in The Fast Show - and the most popular; Father Ted turned the deadest concept in British sit-com - the ‘clerical’ - into the most revered comedy show since Fawlty Towers; and Victoria Wood’s 2005 declaration that the studio-based sitcom had been killed by The Royle Family and The Office only served to fire Linehan’s efforts on the first series of The IT Crowd, which went on to garner praise, ratings and awards.

“It’s good business practice that if everyone is going in one direction, you should go in the other,” he declares. “I believe that audiences get bored with things before they know they’re bored with them.”

No-one’s bored with The IT Crowd yet. As we talk, only a couple of days remain before the beginning of exterior shoots for the third series, and many fans fear that in his creative thrift Linehan will afterwards abandon the neglected and neurotic denizens of Reynholm Industries for pastures new; predecessors Father Ted and Black Books both bowed out at series three, though it’s not a decision Graham has yet made for The IT Crowd.

“If you look at something like Friends, series nine or ten, I think people are saying to themselves, ‘I’ve had too much of this delicious food, and I’m really getting sick of it,’” is his diplomatic way of putting it. Even the increasing number of exterior shoots for the series hallmark Graham’s determination to follow his own path. “I kind of know when something does or doesn’t work myself, and I tend to go my own way.”

“For instance, a lot of people were saying really early on that I shouldn’t take the characters out of the office; then I did The Work Outing – and that’s been the most popular episode. So you can’t really pay attention to what people say, because they might be wrong. Really I’ve just got to follow my own instincts, and in the end I just go with what’s funny.”

Graham gets to hear more of other people’s opinions than most writers who reach his level of success, as he maintains a very popular blog where fans of his work can interact with him when he opens a comments thread every Friday. It was at this venue that the self-professed computer nerd appealed for authentically ‘geek’ items to adorn the basement set of the third series.

“I’m hoping it will look just a little bit more super-charged this year,” he reveals. “I always wanted the kind of people the show was written about to look at the set and go, ‘Oh my God, they’ve got a Sinclair Spectrum!’ or, ‘There’s an old Amiga in the background.’ I wanted them to constantly find things.”

Though praising the production design team on The IT Crowd, Linehan admits that only authentic nerds could possibly have the right knowledge to dress the set. “Up until this point, I had to be the one suggesting items. This year I thought that even I don’t know everything about nerd culture, so it’d be better to turn it over to the public, and that’s worked out great.”

Like the reclusive techies in The IT Crowd, geeks are very protective of their territory, and the show has had to walk a careful tightrope between accessibility and geek credibility. “I don’t want my comedy to be enjoyed by just the people that it’s about,” laughs Graham. “I want to reach as wide an audience as possible, but without losing any intelligence.”

“Some people complained that there weren’t enough ‘geek’ jokes in the show, but that’s never what I wanted the show to be. I didn’t want it to have loads of jokes about Linux. I wanted the show to feature these characters but not be aimed at them, but rather at everybody. I don’t like TV shows that polarise audiences and atomise society even further. I want to try and create TV that a large group of people can sit and watch in a room and laugh at.”

The IT department at Reynholm Industries are the typically idle or insane residents of a Linehan show. Graham often posits that grumpy central figure Roy [Chris O’Dowd] is his alter-ego, whereas social-reject savant Moss [Richard Ayoade] is him at age twelve, and their frustrated and computer-illiterate boss Jen [Katherine Parkinson] was inspired by the effect that meeting his wife had on his own life.

“No, Jen’s not based on my wife’s character,” Graham chuckles as I suggest it. “She’s just based on the effect of a woman in a male environment. Jen is much more into the idea of being a businesswoman than my wife is. Also, my wife knows a lot more about computers than Jen does.”

Part of the hope fans retain for a fourth series is that Linehan won’t feel he has quite perfected the show in series three. He retains that the first series was overly confrontational, and despite my suggestion that Jen is one of the few genuinely funny female sitcom characters output by a male writer in recent years, that there’s work to be done there as well.

“I think that it’s only now that I’ve even started doing an OK job with Katherine’s character,” Graham confesses. “I’m very embarrassed about the first series, and that episode to do with shoes - what a bloody tier-one idea that was for writing about women! I think the reason a lot of male writers aren’t very good at writing women is that they’re nervous: a funny character often has negative characteristics, and men are worried about being accused of sexism.”

A total absence of respect - though not of affection - for his entire cast of characters in The IT Crowd helps Linehan sideswipe the comedy-killing influence of political correctness without becoming overly mean.

“Often you’ll find that if there’s a so-called ‘minority’ character in a TV show, they’re not allowed to be funny, because you can’t say anything negative about them,” he proposes. “That’s why men write so many male characters - they can just slag them off ’til the cows come home. But if it came to a woman, or a guy in a wheelchair - not to say that the two are remotely similar - they pull back a little bit, scared of being attacked.”

Graham decided some time ago to disregard these considerations. “I said to myself that if I had a disabled character, or any kind of a minority character, I’m going to make them as negative as any of the other characters. I don’t really have any admirable people in my show - they’re all foolish, and they’ve all got their problems in one way or another. You just have to bite the bullet, and not worry about people being insulted.”

On the surface, it seems that Graham now has to make such judgement calls by himself. Since he and Arthur Matthews went their own ways after the first series of the surreal sketch show Big Train in 2001, the writer has experimented with new collaborations, but writes all of The IT Crowd solo. Does he now prowl parties looking for the funniest person to forge a new writing partnership?

“That makes me sound like some kind of comedy rapist,” Graham grins. “It’s a very precious, magical thing, and it doesn’t really happen if you deliberately try to make it happen. Comedy partnerships are born, not made. What happens more is that you’re sitting in a pub, someone starts speaking, and everything they say is funny. Well, that’s someone you should possibly think about getting to collaborate with you. But if you have a funny writer and you say, ‘Hey, do you want to do something?’ – I think that’s probably a recipe for disaster.”

These days Graham gets creative feedback from Robert Popper, once Commissioning Editor for Entertainment and Comedy at Channel 4, but perhaps best-known for co-creating the Tomorrow’s World take-off Look Around You.

In his new capacity in his own sub-company within Talkback Productions, Graham is himself looking forward to the chance to nurture and encourage new talent. “At the moment I’m trying to do some work with Steve Delaney, who does Count Arthur Strong,” he can reveal. “I would be so proud and happy if I helped him make a sit-com out of that.”

Since there seem to be more funny people in pubs than there are first-rate comedy shows on TV, I ask Graham to explain the difference between being funny and writing funny. “This is something I’ve only found out through doing it,” he explains. “But writing is something that’s often misunderstood. You can be as funny as you like, but sitting down and creating characters from scratch is difficult, and putting them into storylines is difficult. It’s much harder than it seems to be. I worked with someone who thought like that. While we were collaborating, I asked him how he structured his shows. He went whaa–?”

“Like a lot of people, he thought to write a show you sit down and write, ‘INTERIOR… blah blah blah’, and then start writing dialogue. He didn’t realise that you actually need to have a plan. You have to think about it, make sure that you’re on the right track, and that all the characters will bounce off each other. You write scenes to test that out, you experiment a bit, and then finally you come up with what might be the best plot to show the characters off. Then you structure it.”

“Then at the end, there’s this long process of looking at tiny scraps of paper and notes you’ve written on your computer… all sorts of different things. And at the end of that process, you start to write ‘INT. PAROCHIAL HOUSE. DAY.’ Or whatever.”

According to Graham – dismissive of his well-publicised 2007 ranking among the world’s top 100 living geniuses – the most common mistake the tyro comedy writer makes is to go straight from concept to script. “A funny person will sit down with a couple of vague ideas, and they’ll start writing dialogue,” he suggests. “You can only get to about two pages with that type of planning before you start thinking, ‘Oh, I don’t really know how to get this character into the room.’”

Despite his strong association with the ‘Golden age’ of Brit comedy in the Nineties, Graham remains enthusiastic for the quality of current and recent comedy output, such as Peep Show and The Thick Of It, although less enamoured of another staple comedy format: “I hate the way the definition of ‘sketch-show’ seems to have changed recently, so that a sketch-show is now about four characters who are repeated every week until you want to smash their heads against a wall. It used to be that a sketch-show was about variety: different sketches and different ideas.”

If Graham were to return to the format he last dabbled with in Big Train, he’d choose a more classical approach. “It certainly wouldn’t be a character sketch-show – it would be one where every single sketch is different. More along the lines of The Two Ronnies or even Smith And Jones.”

Coming from him, you believe it would work. With only the relative failure of 1994’s Alexei Sayle comedy Paris to de-emphasise in an otherwise glittering CV, one wonders if Graham Linehan could have an idea too risky or off-beat to get commissioned these days.

“No,” he refutes. “The opposite happens; people commission me to do things, and I find that it’s actually beyond my talents. I tried to write a film based on Radio 1 disc-jockeys in the Seventies, and everyone was very enthusiastic about it. We did a good pitch. Then I sat down and found that I didn’t really know how to write it.”

Graham believes that despite appearing to be a creative powerhouse, he often comes up against the brick wall of his own inexperience. “Writing’s a very mysterious thing. Now, when I pitch, I tend to say to people, ‘This might not work, but we can give it a shot,’ rather than, ‘This is going to be the best thing you’ve ever seen in your life.’”

“But I guess the only advantage of being in my position is that I can say that, and people will still employ me,” he admits. For the outsider, the route into television writing remains as mysterious as it ever was. Despite new initiatives and schemes from Channel 4, the BBC and other broadcasters, the de-centralisation of production leaves potential talent not necessarily knowing where to begin. Whilst waiting for the annual contests to roll round and scrounging contact details and meeting-time with the ‘right’ producers, many end up hoping that a ‘high-concept’ comedy pitch might be more fruitful than a conventional one.

“Here’s the thing,” Graham contends. “The ‘high-concept’ script has a better chance in treatment form, but the low-concept one will have a better chance in script-form. I would always suggest to people that they don’t do treatments. Treatments are just cheating. Anyone can say, ‘The Heroic Five is a brilliant new comedy show’ – well, it’s not – it’s nothing yet, just a title. But if you actually sit down and write the script, and it’s flowing out, and there’s jokes and situations and the characters are alive…”

“Look at Seinfeld, the lowest concept you can imagine. Even Friends called itself Friends, whereas Seinfeld was basically the same concept - a bunch of friends hanging out, but they didn’t even go for that angle. Write the funny script; let someone else worry about how saleable it is.”

“Being funny is a surprise in itself, so innovation really isn’t that important. I think Metrosexuality - if you remember that show - would prove that. You shouldn’t write the script until you’re absolutely sure of what you’re doing. That should come at the end of the process, not at the beginning, which is a time for collecting all your ideas and notes and writing things on little pieces of card. If you hold off on writing till you can’t bear it anymore, you’ll write much faster.”

As someone who confesses to nudging a deadline in order to reach maximum creativity, Graham has particular disdain for the power that a poor first draft has to discourage writers. “Your worth as a writer is not measured by your first draft, which is just some notes that will help you write your final masterpiece. A first draft is something that should be changed unless, as sometimes happens, you accidentally write something perfect, which does happen every so often.”

This is the third time this year that I have spoken to Graham about series three of The IT Crowd, and I feel I know by now the painful desk-banging involved for him in getting each script ready, and working out problems during the rehearsal process. Might it not be less stressful to go the Ben Elton route and turn his comedy talent to novels?

“I used to write a lot of prose,” he recalls. “I used to be a journalist. But my prose muscles are a bit weak at the moment, because I haven’t been writing enough of it. Maybe that’s something for the future. It’s also a good thing to be older when you write novels – I don’t know why, but I just think there’s less chance that you’ll make an absolute arse of yourself.”

As we pause our chat for a production person to ask Graham about the casting of a walk-on part in The IT Crowd, I realise that I should let him get back to Reynholm Industries. The rehearsal week is over and it’s time for Roy, Moss and Jen to take their neuroses on the road again before studio recording in the early Autumn.

This year Noel Fielding has too many commitments to reprise his role as gentle goth vampire Richmond, but Matt Berry will be taking up the slack as the morally-challenged company head Douglas Reynholm, following a hugely popular insertion into series two.

The rewrites will continue until the last moment, even potentially impinging upon the studio recording with the audience. “Suddenly you notice that even if a scene has always read well, there’s too much dialogue before the first plot-point gets introduced, or there are three scenes where there should be two. Things like that, for some reason, don’t really present themselves until you’re actually rehearsing. Then there’s a lot of jiggery-pokery involved.”

“The actors help: sometimes they’ll say to me, ‘We don’t need to actually do this in dialogue – I can just look over at him and it’ll convey that information.’ In the final week, it’s like working with a writing partner made up of the four other actors, and it’s just a pleasure, really.”

Though tight-lipped about storylines in The IT Crowd 3.0, Graham admits that even if the characters and situations at Reynholm Industries play themselves out a little, the show might have further renewability as a comedic reflection of the rapidly changing pace of technology – which was his original vision for the series. “It became its own thing for a while, but I think it’s finally becoming what I always wanted it to be.”

Words: Nick Carson
Photography: Anastasia Taylor-Lind
Buy Issue 10 here

Cult British comedy hails from a cloistered isle where subtlety, eccentricity and surrealism can thrive. US shows may surge across the Atlantic but only a select few wriggle back against the tide; established big-hitters like The Office and Little Britain that are checked in fully-formed before being re-packaged. A Brit writer pitching a fresh idea exclusive to the US market is virtually unheard of, so what happened when Green Wing creator Victoria Pile landed Stateside?

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“It never happened,” muses Victoria with a wry smile, when asked when she realised she was funny. Given that the four-times-Bafta-nominated creator of Green Wing and Smack the Pony started penning broadcast-worthy sketches for the Beeb while still at Uni, surely that switch must have flicked earlier than most? “I’m constantly surprised when my work is appreciated by other people,” she continues. “That sounds fake, doesn’t it? But comedy writers need a lot of stroking, and positive feedback - me more than most.”

It doesn’t sound fake. We’re sipping water in her spacious North London front room: it’s comfortable, but clearly a well-lived-in family home where this writer can squeeze in some precious keyboard time before the kids get back. She’s rented some space above a shop to use as an office, she tells me, but the decorators are still in so it’s a working-from-home job ‘til they’re done.

“I get fearful of expectation,” Victoria’s prepared to admit. “I prefer to do a low-profile project and see if it makes a ripple than go out all-guns-blazing. I’ve always abhorred publicity: I don’t like people seeing stuff until it has to be seen.”

So it was an intriguing career curveball, following Emmy and Bafta-winning hits and mounting public anticipation for the next, to plunge into a notoriously competitive overseas market and produce a pilot, set in a US police precinct, rather than risk dropping the bat in Britain.

“America lured me, partly because I didn’t have to recreate something else immediately here: I went to avoid the second-album syndrome,” she goes on. But far from burying her head in the sand, she’d buried her head in a goldfish bowl. “Over there you’re exposed so completely; you can’t just say, ‘Let me do it, and then you can have a look.’ Every step of the way, you’re naked.”

Dismantling the tight-knit Green Wing team in 2006 - cast and crew largely handpicked by Victoria herself - felt “like breaking up a family unit,” she admits: “A lot of the cast spent more time with us than with their own families, and that was the hard act to follow, not whether we’d do something funny again.”

Of course, ‘funny’ - more than perhaps any other creative goal - couldn’t be more subjective. “I struggle, because people say I have a slightly perverse view; an unusual take on things. I never understood that. I always assume I represent a large number of similarly minded people; it’s just how I see the world. You can’t choose how to approach something comedically; well I can’t, anyway,” she goes on. “Vogues change, and when I started out I was very much into the style of comedy that I’ve since developed, and other people weren’t. Now we’ve gone about-face and there’s more trend for big studio-based comedies. But I’ll always go for what I instinctively find funny.”

But protestation aside, it was for idiosyncrasy rather than conformity that Victoria’s agent and manager, who had existing positive relationships with US networks, “hoiked” her across the Atlantic. “Now, I’m not a ‘networks’ person,” she begins, settling back into her chair: “I prefer HBO and cable; they tend to be more off-centre.” It’s already clear that this will be no pleasant fiction where a saucer-eyed Brit skips through bountiful fields of cotton candy.

“I don’t want to slag America off,” she’s keen to stress. For while it’s tempting to snuggle you down with a dustbin-sized vat of popcorn and sensationalise this cautionary tale like a gravelly-voiced Hollywood trailer, the simple truth is that the studio-driven US market is an acquired taste for a British writer. Especially one whose devoted creative control at the helm of her own complex shows have attracted monikers like “visionary” and “genius” from cast-member Tamsin Grieg and fellow Green Wing writer Fay Rusling respectively.

“You have to be prepared to have a lot of top-down input,” is her delicately democratic way of putting it. The fact that American networks can pay extremely well is no secret, and Victoria draws attention to various fellow writers who have sustained a healthy trade contributing scripts to other shows. Suffice to say that getting a fresh one off the ground is somewhat different.

“There’s a certain hypocrisy in saying, ‘We want you because you do something different; we love your work; we understand your process and we want you to do it over here,’ when that’s the very thing that they cannot let happen,” she declares, frowning slightly as a shadow of that past frustration crosses her face. “They crush it, and crush it, and crush it, and crush it, and you end up with something that’s neither my choice nor their choice.”

“I was treated fantastically well, with a lot of respect, and actually given a lot of freedom according to other sources,” she reflects; perhaps proof positive that incompatible personalities and working practices were at least partly responsible. “It was a strangely enlightening experience. We did do a pilot; I’m going out there to pitch something else, and I’m trying to do co-productions at the moment. But the things you hear are absolutely jaw-dropping: until you’re immersed in it, you don’t quite believe it’s possible.”

“I spent most of the time either in hysterics with laughter, or in tears with disbelief at how they conduct themselves. Considering that it’s the epicentre of the entertainment industry, I was horrified at the outmoded, archaic, hierarchical, creative-crushing things that went on.”

By way of example, Victoria recollects a memo that was passed her way encouraging producers to perpetuate the influx of British talent, but not to sign any deals: “It recommended reinventing the format with your homegrown crew,” she explains. “Rip the idea off, in other words. It was an article in an American publication. They’re not embarrassed about it: ‘We don’t need to buy the formats; we’ll just do it ourselves.’ It makes you slightly fearful of sending things ad-hoc as a writer. As an actor there are some brilliant people there; lovely casting directors; in fact everyone’s brilliant apart from the system.”

And what a vast system it is. The same year that she was in the midst of it all, the network commissioned eighty scripts - a quarter of which were produced as pilots. Three went to series, and all three of them were pulled. “There was not one success out of the whole season’s production,” laments Victoria. “What I didn’t realise was that there’s a rush of British actors coming out every year to do the pilot season: if you get picked up, you’re made forever.”

“I fought tooth-and-nail to get Stephen Mangan out there, but we were also forced to have two ‘named’ stars from their stable - Jason Alexander [Seinfeld], who’s fantastic but wasn’t right for the part, and Orlando Jones [one of the original cast members of Mad magazine's late-night sketch series MADtv], who again is a tremendously talented comedian, playing completely the wrong part.”

Half-an-hour in, and Victoria has already demonstrated pretty transparently how involved she expects to be when getting a comedy show off the ground, and it’s similarly clear that this approach won’t transplant well to US soil. But there isn’t a flicker of a toy-throwing tantrum in her voice: frustration, yes, but she’s not precious for the sake of it. Her talent’s rooted in a more temperate climate, where tight creative control happens to be what she’s very, very good at - and taking that away can mean letting a project sway off course.

My timely reminder that, for her seminal creation Green Wing, she’s credited as creator, producer, casting director, script editor, film editor and writer - albeit one of several in many cases - is met with a mixture of a smile and a wince. “I didn’t choose those titles,” she points out, “but as a description of the job description then yes, it’s accurate. You need somebody trying to achieve what they want, or don’t know they want. Quite often all I know is what I don’t want.”

It may take a couple of seconds to unpick the sentence, but it does make sense. And for commissioners, collaborators and cast alike, it boils down to putting your trust implicitly in someone else’s creative vision.

“You have to have quite a loyal and tolerant group of people to contribute to something blindly,” she agrees. “But as a ‘tame’ writer you’re exempt from some of the difficult decisions that rack us all. You’re in a childlike state: write as freely as you like, and we’ll take the best bits. All the writers on Green Wing had careers in their own right, but as a unit we were like a different writer.”

Her confession that she once associated each member of the team with a body part - the kidney, the little finger and so-on - prompts the obvious question: which was she? “It depends who you ask,” she smiles darkly. “Probably the stick up the arse. Although the real answer, of course, is the c-word.” Whether this refers to gestating and giving birth to her precious creative baby, or something infinitely more self-deprecating, we both decide to leave hanging.

A likely byproduct of building a tried-and-trusted team of bodily organs is that you’ll want to work with them again, and shipping Green Wing stalwart Stephen Mangan across for the pilot season is a case in point. Mark Heap, too, was penciled in from the outset, but replaced at the studio’s behest by Jason Alexander. Does she often put pen to paper to shape a character with a favoured actor already in mind?

“Since Green Wing I’ve done that… three times,” she reports after a moment’s thought. “I put Steve and Mark in all of them, in my head. But Mark didn’t get the part, and Jason wanted to do slapstick, drop his trousers and show his bum. There was a line in the script where he opens a drawer and there’s a portable vagina inside, and he wanted the prop to be made. You don’t need to see it,” she emphasises, sounding slightly exasperated as the voice of understated British comedy: verbal humour that conjures vivid mental images, rather than literally and figuratively shoving a vagina in someone’s face.

Setting aside comic preferences however, Victoria is quick to praise the talents of the lead actor that was dropped into her production from above: “Jason has incredible comic planning, hilarious timing, and knows a lot of martial arts so there were some incredible visuals,” she points out. But as she’s already made clear, it was the system, not the individuals, which crushed the project.

“They cut all those bits out, including some gorgeous nonsense with putty,” she reveals, with palpable regret that said putty-play won’t be lighting up our screens anytime soon. “He could equal Mark in many ways; in terms of physicality he was great. There’s a scene where he’s almost grooming the new boy: he comes round behind him, puts his hands round his neck and gobs on his cheek. The executives cut it out; they said it was leery and unattractive.”

Another “cracking scene” where Steve attends a lesbian meeting, shot with a gay female stand-up, survived right up until the wire: “They ripped it out the night before,” reveals Victoria, as if they’d torn the still-beating heart from her already maimed project: “They were too ashamed to take it out earlier.”

It’s revealing that when asked how the show was compromised, she recalls very specific episodes; vignettes that made her chuckle, but failed to crack a smile on the execs further up the command chain. Of course, even the pioneering hour-long format of Green Wing - with its series-long plot arcs that seemed so far removed at first glance from the self-contained skits of Smack The Pony - was built around sketches, expertly woven together as part of a wider narrative. Individual episodes are the blocks that make Victoria Pile’s comedy work, and sliding them out one by one is like a high-stakes bout of Jenga.

“You can cover more material with sketches,” she affirms. “Your territory’s wider. If you’re out to make a really comedic experience, you want the freedom to go hither and thither, to cover as much material as we do in our real lives.” She landed on a police precinct as a setting for the untitled pilot we’re discussing for much the same reasons that a hospital became the setting for her last hit show: you can find all sorts of people under one roof. Green Wing was originally intended to weave the lives of car park attendants, canteen staff and everyone else alongside the medical and admin staff, but it never quite happened that way.

“This pilot followed four detectives and their lives and loves: it wasn’t really to do with policing, but there was some procedural stuff in there because that’s what they wanted,” Victoria explains. “This body within the department is there to check up on procedures, and they’re so litigious. We developed a potentially fantastic relationship between the slightly anal character trying to catch everyone out, and normal detectives with their everyday lives. But it was the lack of interest in those peripheral things that screwed it for me: I wanted to indulge in the little idiosyncrasies of the characters; they wanted the story.”

From the off there was a lot of “slipping and sliding” and top-down adjustments, which as Victoria readily admits, was “exactly what I do, but done by someone else.” With very different sensibilities pulling in opposite directions, the chances of the comedy kernel surviving intact were slim to minimal. Pressing on, her team wrote two new blind scripts that impressed another network, and they commissioned a fresh hour-long script. Then the writers strike happened, and it all ground to a halt once more.

“Ultimately, in America all your experiences often come down to one person, and everyone’s curtailing to them,” she explains. “Over here, you cast someone and say to the broadcaster, ‘I’ve found some great talent, here’s the tape, have a look.’ Over there, you have to make a deal for two series before you can pass them. You need at least two other options, then you go to the studio - not the network - and they all perform in front of 40-odd people on stage, up against each other like gladiators. It’s The X-Factor, basically. Then if the studio executive agrees with you, you go forward to the network and do it all again.”

An observation that’s hardly worth making to a British audience - that a talented small-screen comic actor won’t necessarily take well to a live stage - is the final, forceful reminder that things are untouchably different over there. Victoria shrugs. “I’ve learnt a lot, and have less belief that they want what works here,” she concludes philosophically. “If I make a decision to do something that works there, that’s another matter.”