Having achieved a dizzying level of success with the 15 million viewer rating of Men Behaving Badly, writer Simon Nye opted for a different approach on his new comedy series, How Do You Want Me. Going out on BBC 2, the series was not recorded in front of a live audience and neither does it use a laugh track. He's also gambling by giving one of the lead roles to a first-time actor, Irish comedian Dylan Moran.
Shot on film (very rare for a comedy) the series is a tad more considered and involved than the nouveau-blokeishness of Men Behaving Badly.
Based on the differences between rural and urban life, the show also examines family relationships, particularly when a person marries against the wishes of the family - an in-law outlaw sort of comedy.
Dylan Moran plays Ian Lyons, a city type, who marries a country girl, Lisa, (played by Charlotte Coleman from Four Weddings And A Funeral). She loves the country; he doesn't. After a year of living in London (having been burgled and mugged a few times) the relationship strains under Lisa's hankering for all things bucolic so they move to the country, where Lisa is on home territory and the whole dynamic of the relationship changes.
In a quaint, rural village, Ian becomes "the other" and despite being a fairly amiable sort of character, he is disliked by Lisa's family, especially her father Astley (played by Frank Finlay, still best known for Bouquet Of Barbed Wire). He is ignorant of Lisa's family heritage (they practically own the whole village), confused by their values and unmoved by their odd sense of humour: so the scene is set for all manner of classic British sitcom misunderstandings.
"Although I'm Irish, it's not a big deal in the show," says Dylan Moran. "It's just that they weren't bothered changing my accent. It's not relevant and it's not used in the script in anyway."
As a first-time actor he says the rest of the cast put him at his ease. "I just went in on the first day and we were sitting around, reading from the script. I was amazed at how good they were, how quickly they got the characters, but I soon became conversant in all the things you need to know to do television," he says. Not hired as a comic but as an actor, Moran says he was hired on the basis of a showreel tape his manager had sent to the producers and that it was more his character than his material they were interested in casting. Was he surprised to be cast ahead of experienced actors? "The process took so long that in the end I wasn't. You keep getting called back and then called back again, so every time you go back in for an audition, the surprise of being picked diminishes. I suppose I did find it an alien world at first but that soon wore off," he says.
He says his comic background only came in useful when he came to do bits of improvisation. "Simon Nye, the writer, was very generous and he let me add in my own dialogue and make suggestions, that sort of thing," he says.
The first episode looks promising enough: Dylan falls out with his wife's family after telling an ill-judged, risque joke at his parents-in-law's anniversary dinner. He then gets beaten up by Lisa's brother and when he tries to make peace with the family, he finds that they have cut him out of his own wedding photos. His only chance of salvation is to behave himself properly at the opening of his father-in-law's new turkey shed . . .
"It's not like I have all the laughs or anything," says Dylan. "In fact, I play a very straight role. It's not a comedian-does-a-comedy-show sort of programme."
Is it strange that a Navan man should play a city slicker? "Maybe. But once you've seen one city, you've seen them all."
How Do You Want Me begins on BBC 2 on Tuesday at 10 p.m.