How do you follow the enormous critical and popular success of Father Ted? For Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, writers of the BAFTA and British Comedy Award-winning Channel 4/Hat trick sitcom, the answer is, something completely different - a sketch show.
The writing team's next big junction is Big Train. A six-part sketch series starting on BBC 2 on Monday at 10 p.m., it is an attempt to push the comedy boundaries further and widen the concept of the sketch show, in the daftest way possible.
Last week, in the dubbing studio in Camden, things were fairly hectic as Linehan (who is also directing the series) and producer Sioned Wiliam edited the sketches. Here, take a look at one, says Graham. The sketch is a very simple idea, in cinema verite/fly-on-the-wall documentary style, with hand-held camera and people interrupting each other. Set in an office, the manager tells his staff that the boss is coming tomorrow and they'll just have to stop masturbating in the office. There follows a po-faced discussion about this unreasonable request. It's shocking (in a surprising rather than a scandalous sense), silly, childish, puerile. And very funny. "Not for your granny," comments producer Wiliam.
In terms of contemporary sketch shows, Chris Morris's spoof, real-life documentary style in The Day Today and elaborate hoaxes in Brass Eye, and Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson's The Fast Show (all of which Mathews and Linehan have written for), with its regular characters and catch-phrases making the comedy self-referential, each developed the well-worn genre in different directions.
What Big Train seems to do is fuse the meaningless silliness of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer with the documentary approach of Morris (who, incidentally, directed the pilot of Big Train) and, to a lesser extent, Steve Coogan. In other words - no catch-phrases, no regular characters or settings, and precious few jokes, though this does not in the least mean it's not funny. The humour comes not from gags or familiarity, but from ridiculous things played as naturalistically as possible.
So you have another office scene (there are lots of office scenes among the 200-plus sketches in Big Train), for example, where the Devil and Jesus work together but don't get on. To explain, Mathews says, "We're aiming for situations that play naturalistically, basically. The Devil and Jesus in the office act completely like they would do if it was a boss and a worker." Linehan: "There's no reference to them being Jesus and the Devil apart from the fact that they're dressed as Jesus and the Devil. It's like a pantomime devil - horns and everything. If they weren't dressed as Jesus and the Devil it would be a really boring piece of television. But because they are, the fact that the ridiculousness of the situation, coupled with the realism of the way it's played, and shot, keeps hitting you. And you keep realising `this is Jesus and the Devil'."
So what else is in the series? A plastic horse dressing up to go out to the soundtrack of You Look Wonderful Tonight, some monk sketches, battle scenes (some with roundheads, and some with hens in armed combat - don't ask), lots of uniforms, and pop stars chasing jockeys.
Some of the sketches were written with a conventional script, but more were just mad ideas that they came up with (sometimes thinking of additional sketches on set), then gave instructions to the five-strong core of actors, who basically improvised around the given situation. So a lot of how the scenes worked out is down to the actors, many of them veterans of Morris and Coogan shows.
The core actors are Amelia Bullmore, Julia Davis, Kevin Eldon, Mark Heap and Simon Pegg; Pegg has commented about how Big Train worked: "Graham and Arthur are great and they'll say, you're this mouse and you're in a pub with a cat - what happens? And we'll go off and do it." So what you get, especially as the actors are improvising, is comedy with no jokes as such, and lots of the humour (which is basically absurdist) comes from introducing the outlandish or the completely inappropriate into prosaic settings. They do it as well by introducing one parodied movie genre into another parodied movie genre, and everything is based on the protagonists in the sketches accepting as normal a different and more bizarre set of rules in life. This is about the only link - and it is tenuous - with Father Ted.
Linehan and Mathews are purposefully not doing anything similar to Ted. Mathews comments: "It's very strange and I don't know how it will be received - it's not really Ted-friendly, you know? I think it'll get the top end of the Ted audience, but you won't get the family audience that Ted had. Kids love Father Ted, they loved Father Jack. But this (Big Train) is very naturalistic and in a very different style. It's very English and all the people in it are English. But it's not a family programme."
They analyse what they're at. And then the conversation becomes a big joke.
Linehan: We did think we had something to offer in terms of the sketch show, because The Day Today and Brass Eye were using naturalism to parody the news, or programmes like Panorama, but we thought we could use naturalism in sketches. Nothing to do with parodying the news or whatever - just silly ideas that are presented in a very realistic way, so we used a lot of the techniques that The Day Today used and tried to get the actors to improvise, which they did, and shot it in a very loose, hand-held style, so we probably have added something new to the comedy genre, but only because of people who passed through the area before.
Mathews: The pioneers, we call them.
L: Yes, we're the sidekicks. When the wagons thunder through, we're the guys behind on the donkey, rattling all over the place.
M: And when everyone else is killed we're the only ones left alive.
L: No, we just thought there were a couple of things that hadn't been done. And there's a certain kind of humour that Vic and Bob have explored, which is things that are funny not for any satiric or parodic reason but just because they're funny.
Linehan directed to keep control: "Chris Morris did the pilot, and if he'd done the whole series then I could just as easily have gone home. But if Chris Morris isn't doing it then we have to be there, we have to be overseeing it because sketches can go wrong in so many millions of different ways."
Linehan comments that they didn't want to do another sitcom straight away and they've always done sketches and wanted them done in a particular way. Says Mathews, I'm glad we've done this after Ted, it's a buffer."
Later, the conversation turns to what's on in the local cinema, and even Saving Private Ryan isn't safe. "Wouldn't it be great," says Linehan, "if instead of saving Private Ryan, they accidentally captured Hitler." "Yeah," says Mathews ironically, "and then there could be a hilarious car chase."
Big Train starts on BBC 2, Monday, 10 p.m.