It's a pretty damn impressive CV. Seamus Cassidy, the producer of RTE's new family game show, It's A Family Affair, is responsible for bringing Jack Dee, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, Father Ted, Clive Anderson, Whose Line Is It Any- way, Drop The Dead Donkey and After Dark to our television screens. Cassidy (41), from Derry, was commissioning editor of comedy at Channel 4 for 10 years.
Others working on the new show also have a fine pedigree - the director, Phil Chilvers, has worked on Live Aid and Top Of The Pops and the executive producer, Stephen Stewart, was responsible for Don't Forget Your Toothbrush and The Last Chance Lottery - both for Channel 4. The three of them have come together to boldly go into the world of mainstream, peak-time, demographic embracing television with It's A Family Affair. Given Cassidy's background, you have to wonder aloud what he's doing sitting in the RTE canteen, drinking horrible coffee and talking to the likes of me.
"After spending all that time with Channel 4, I wanted a new challenge," he says. "I got a phone call a while back from Green Inc, an independent production company based in Belfast which is run by Stephen Stewart and Patrick Kielty, and they told me about doing this new game show for RTE. I couldn't resist it. This is a lot more mainstream than most things I've done in television and it's good to be able to develop something new."
Cassidy, like many a well-known Derry boy, was educated in the city's St Columb's school and got to be the head of comedy at Channel 4 through working for BBC community programmes in Belfast. "The BBC used to bring me on as the `yoof' voice on their programmes and from then I stayed in television. I was lucky in that when I arrived at Channel 4, the whole `alternative' comedy thing was breaking through so a few of the first programmes I put on were by Sean Hughes, Jack Dee and Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer."
All of which may seem a televisual world apart from his current RTE project, but Cassidy says that the culture is changing. "If you look at performers like Jonathan Ross and Frank Skinner, they've successfully crossed over to the mainstream and I think that whole ghetto has been demolished - I mean, just look at the amount of what we used to call alternative comics turning up on the Des O'Connor show.
"I think it's far easier to come from the left-of-centre in to the mainstream than start off in the mainstream and move to the left-of-centre. And it's the former that we've done with this programme. It's a family quiz show that will play to a very large audience." The show's presenter, comic Dara O Briain, was spotted by the production team while performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and Cassidy says he's perfect for the role. "I think before this, Dara just played to the 18 to 35, Network 2 people, but now he's going out on RTE 1 - it's that sort of development of talent I'm interested in."
O Briain, who will be legging it off to tour in Australia immediately after the 10-week run is finished, says that he doesn't have any problem adjusting his persona for prime-time audiences. "I know I swear like a sailor on stage, but I have a little switch at the back of my head that I activate when I need to do television work. Besides, I've always had that two-strand approach - when I started out doing stand-up, I was also working on Echo Island."
So what's the show all about? "Each week three families will be competing against each other. They'll have to play various games and, most importantly, answer questions about how well they know each other to earn a number of prizes," says O Briain. "Along the way they'll be able to sacrifice some of their prizes - which get shredded by a big computer - in order to be able to win a car. There's also filmed acts of talented people around the country performing in their local supermarket; the families will have to judge which is the best act, and their answers will be compared to that of the judges. There's a lot of running around and it's very different to other game shows in the past which seemed to have intractable rules and a grand prize at the end, of £27 or a vacuum cleaner. This show looks very slick."
Both Cassidy and O Briain are quick to stress the production values of the show and how they've both banned the use of cliched game show one-liners. "I think people will be pleasantly surprised by it," says Cassidy.
It's A Family Affair begins on RTE 1 tonight at 7.10 p.m.