Dan Freedman is a comedy writer and performer, star of many BBC Radio 4 comedies. He has now turned his attention to producing the BBC's first ever audio Internet drama – and it's no less than a completely new Dr Who story – Death Comes To Time.

So Dr Who online. How did that materialise? (geddit?)
I first took the idea of doing a brand new radio version of Doctor Who to BBC Radio 4 a couple of years ago. We did a pilot but then they turned it down! So I had this fantastic programme, and no one to broadcast it. However I went to BBC Online and they were interested.

When the pilot episode was streamed, it got 2.6 million hits in the first three days! And it generated thousands of messages on many sites about the plotlines. So we knew people were interested and we were able to write a full series.

How does Doctor Who as a cyber-man (geddit?) differ to a purely radio story?
For the online streaming, we had the audio with some pictures, or enhanced audio. Initially I was against having images as I thought it would be like a film but not as good, but the artist, Lee Sullivan, did a fantastic job. It's not animation, but impressionistic images that pop up and change as the story progresses.

It's also mixed differently on the Internet than it is for radio. On the net you only have a limited bandwidth but we are re-mixing a CD version where you'll be able to hear it in much better quality.

Apart from Master-ing (geddit?) the different mixes, what else did you have to take into account?
The main problems with streaming is that it's expensive. The more people who want to hear it, the more the BBC has to pay, and given that the BBC is funded by UK licence fee but anyone around the world can listen for free, it was an issue.

So WWWho's in it? (geddit?)
It's a great cast. We have the last TV doctor Sylvester McCoy, Stephen Fry, John Sessions, Anthony Stewart Head from Buffy, Sophie Aldred who was a Dr Who assistant in the 1980s, David Soul from Starsky and Hutch and even John Humphries from Radio 4's Today Programme!

The idea is that we'll stream a 10 minute episode each week for 12 weeks, starting on 14 February.

It goes online at midday and immediately people will be able to give instant feedback and review it on the site. We could, if we wanted, ask users to suggest plots for the next episode, which would make it even more interactive. That's the advantage of doing it this way, unlike with radio where you have very little contact with the audience.

What tips on comedy can you re-generate. (geddit ?- eh?)
Well, John Cleese once said that there are three rules of comedy. No puns. no puns and no puns.

Uh-ha...
Freedman's law of comedy says that the length of a joke is proportional to its worth. So if you've got a crap pun get it out of the way very, very quickly.

In which case thanks, bye.