Paul Rose is the creative mischief behind bubblegun.com, a cult, cartoony, cheeky and damn right funny website which has spawned a Channel 4 'Comedy Lab' TV spin-off.

Take us back to the very start of this story, if you please
About 10 years ago I was writing 'Digitizer' for the pre-cursor of the Internet – well, OK, for Channel 4 Teletext. It was full of humour and got something of a cult following. When the Internet took of in the mid–1990s I got together with web designer Steve Horsely to do a humourous entertainment magazine on the web – with the idea to make huge amounts of money!! So bubblegun.com was born. We plugged it to death on Teletext, so it immediately had an interested audience.

So you got the website, now buy the tee shirt?
Yeah, the name looked good as a logo and so we sold loads of tee shirts through the site, which I admit was a cynical capitalist exercise and not that cool! But at its height, it was getting tens of thousands of page impressions a day.

How much did you make?
Errm... we had a business plan ready to go and then... along came all the dot com crashes and our investors backed out. Still we covered our cost in the sales of the tee shirts.

How did it literally 'cross platforms' and get a presence on Channel 4?
One of the most popular cartoons in Bubblegun is 'Knife And Wife' which is about a chicken married to a human...

Errrr yes, do go on...
And Channel 4 offered us the chance of doing it as a full animation in its 'Comedy Lab' TV show.

Was it different writing for TV than for the web?
Yes, jokes that work in text, don't always work when spoken. In a static cartoon drawing, the timing is in your head – on TV you rely on animators to get it right.

Tell us your thoughts on what makes a good comedy website
Simplicity works – as proved by TV Go Home. And on our site, the top 10s are a simple idea but very popular. We're thinking about re-launching the site as a top 10 site with a few cartoons. Other good comedy sites are The Onion, Disappointment and Spacemoose which has some very tasteless cartoons and Cat Scan which never ceases to raise a laugh. By and large there is some good comedy out there – a lot of it British – but there's also a lot of dross. Too many sites are rip-offs of the news or copies of TV Go Home. The joy of the web is you never have to compromise your writing to suit others. Use your own voice.

Any final words of advice.
Don't go into it expecting to make money. You may be lucky if you recover your costs and sell a few tee shirts!

[picture from www.fartoons.co.uk/cartoonman/18.htm]