Interviews - Barunka O'Shaughnessy

I went to Cambridge University and I met lots of people who were very entertaining who then went on to do comedy. I sort of got a bit jealous because I quite wanted to do it, but I didn't really have the confidence to do it at university because I didn't go to a posh school where they're all taught to do debating and stuff like that, so I was a bit frightened.

Eventually, I got together with my friend Lucy Montgomery and I got together with James Bachman and we took a show up to the Edinburgh Festival. We had two very successful shows called the Wicker Woman and the Elephant Woman and it went from there really. At first I didn't have any speaking parts because I was too frightened, so I only wrote and didn't speak, but then I slowly got the hang of it and learnt to speak and got over my horrific stage fright!

Well, I also worked at Paramount Comedy Channel, which was my first job in London town. I wrote scripts for their promotions and then I was doing some stuff on the production side as well.

Then I worked for a lovely company called Channel X, which was Jonathan Ross' company originally, who were behind Vic and Bob in their early days. It was one of the first independent production companies, which sprung up in the late '80s early '90s.

So I was involved in the whole TV world anyway, then it was a matter of getting parts. I think I then put in about four Comedy Lab treatments before I got one. I've been in a couple before, performing in them, but Mr and Mrs Fandango is my first Comedy Lab commission, so I've been plugging away for a while.

When I was on Channel X I was a development producer on Fan-o-rama. I ended up being an associate producer on it that coincided with my first Edinburgh when I sort of thought, "I'm not very good at this TV production thing, I'll stick to the other side of it".

Tom Meeten, who's also my boyfriend, was in Blunder, which was on last year. Anyway, Shane Allen who commissioned that said to Tom, "Have you got any projects or ideas?" I basically hijacked this and made Tom work with me.

Then we made a Funny Cuts for E4 last year, which was called Dodi and Di, but it didn't get shown because it was due to be on around the time of the Diana inquest.

Well, I was very difficult! I threw a few hissy fits! Actually, nothing went that wrong because it was all filmed in a studio. A lot of it was against blue-screen.

It was a homage to the original Kenny Everett show and Tim and Eric. Tim and Eric are an American pair whose stuff you can see on YouTube. Their stuff is shot on green-screen, in studio and it's really funny, so we just wanted to do something like that. It's cheaper to shoot because everything's self-contained in the studio.

It's also quite good to have that challenge to write to a specific location and venue, which allows you to have more fun and be more creative and inventive about what you can do really. That's why so much of it is blue-screen - making something inventive out of budget limitations.

You don't really know the tone or the style of the thing until you actually do it really and I think what really helped bring it together was when we got Anil Mistry, the director, in because his background is graphic-based and very much visual.

He used to design the on-air look of Paramount, which is where I met him. He used to work with Leigh Francis back in the day when we were making tiny little two-minute World of Paramount segments to go out on the Paramount channel. He was great. He storyboarded everything and gave it a real sense of how it was all tied together. The show went into a high-spec editing process in smoke HD. I don't know how he managed it on the budget we had, but he did and that's what made it look nice! That was the point when I went, "Ah! This is good," - up until then I really didn't know.

It's also fun working with Tom. It's pretty easy because you can be pretty honest and open with each other. You can be as ratty, moody or whatever. It's not like working with a normal colleague when you have to hold back a bit.

I think you have to be a little bit established with the channel. Although, I know sometimes they commission stuff that is completely out of the blue. A lot of the time now I know people make taster tapes as well. Just a treatment on paper doesn't sell it anymore. You need to record something. Show and tell doesn't do.

The problem with sketch shows is that you never know what to call them because the sketches are so different and varied. It's just like, how do you sum-up what it is? There's very much a trend at the moment to name the sketch show after the people in them. That would be great if I didn't have a weird name! Say if I was called Barbara that would work fine, but because I have an odd, slightly unpronounceable name I don't think we could ever go down that route.

We don't have a good double-act name either because my surname's a bit weird as well, so we can't even do the O'Shaughnessy/Meeten thing. We wanted to emphasise the fact that we were a couple playing couples, a man and a woman doing stuff, so we thought Mr and Mrs something. Then quite late on in the process we were in a meeting and we said 'Mr and Mrs Fandango'. I'd like to point out it was my idea.

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