Interviews - Barunka O'Shuaghnessy - Part Two

It's a sketch show, a character sketch show all very much based on partly familiar celebrity couples.

The trigger for the show was based on Dodi and Di, the characters we played before for Funny Cut. They're a bit like Richard and Judy really; it's got the same dynamic, because Richard Madeley's a little bit of a bully and Judy a little bit of a nervous wreck, so it fits really well with the Dodi and Di characters as we've created them. They don't really bear much similarity to the real Dodi and Di because, well, they're obviously dead.

Also, I've wanted to do this Diana character for a long time and I was thinking about doing the character in Edinburgh because I was bored and sickened by how sycophantic people were when she died. And also, somebody said I looked a bit like her!

The kind of people who would find it offensive probably wouldn’t be watching a Comedy Lab. If it ever filters through to someone in the Daily Mail or the Daily Telegraph they'll probably show their disgust at it, but I doubt whether it'll make any stir. If it does, so what? It'll pass, people will get bored. We’re not doing it to shock.

The thing about using famous or celebrity couples is that they're so familiar it's a good shorthand for people watching to immediately know who these characters are and then we can do what we like with them really. They don't bear any relationship to the real people. I mean we do Coleen and Wayne, but I don't really know what they’re like apart from them being scouse. It's just about playing with silly ideas and celebrity names to hook people in.

This is very much the remit with most TV channels is that they're really worried by the fact that young people don't watch TV so much, and they don't because they're on the internet or playing computer games… listen to me, I sound like an old woman!

So yeah, we were aware of making it a bit more populist, because otherwise we'd have characters in it like Siegfied and Roy, which probably wouldn't really appeal to the masses. You can't be too current or topical though because stuff changes so quickly. At least with dead people they can't come back to life.

When I say we're inspired by couples it's not like we're in anyway realistically observing any kind of relationship, behaviour or anything like that. It's so far removed from that Man Stroke Woman, Spoons sort of world.

When I say we're inspired by couples we just mean we base our characters on men and women - that's the thing we start from. With me, my style isn't particularly sophisticated; it's mostly accents, wigs and teeth. It's quite absurd as well, it's more a Vic and Bob world really, I suppose, which is Tom's big influence.

We use couples as a starting point and then they go off into other worlds. A lot of them aren't based on romantic relationships at all, like Wills and Harry. We just play two people who are in some way related to each other. There's not much grounding in everyday reality or anything like that, whereas, I suppose, Man Stroke Woman and Spoons was.

What we do is silly nonsense really. It's kind of clowning and that's why it's good to have some hook with real actual people with recognisable names, so then you can go off on flights of silliness really without alienating people too much.

We did Ealing Live, which was a regular character sketch night over at Ealing studios. It finished about three years ago, but up until then a lot of people have since gone onto better things.

People like Simon Farnaby were involved, Tony Laws, Lucy Montgomery, James Bachman, Shelley Longworth did it as well, Katie Brand, Alice Lowe – it was like a big gang show, basically. It was created by a guy called Rob Moore who wanted to make the ideal gang show, like Saturday Night Live for British viewers, so he ran this regular Thursday night comedy characters sketch show night over at Ealing Studios.

I started doing that and Tom started doing it as well. We started together by doing this character called Mrs Hands, which was very much a live performance piece which we had yet to figure out how to do on telly, but it involved us making noises and wearing all in one white overalls. It went down a treat! So we started performing together and, you know, we ended up going out as well.

He has some vague ideas and I end up doing all the work, basically. Behind a rude woman is a man with a vague idea. I’m a bit of a square, so I do most of the writing, I have to say. Tom's great with coming up with the initial ideas and he's also brilliant at work-shopping and devising stuff as we go. We'd write the script then workshop with a guy called Gareth Tunley, who also did Ealing Live. We'd flesh out the scripts by improvising them and stuff.

August/September we're filming Beehive for e4, which is with Alice Lowe, Sarah Kendall and Clare Thomson. So that's all happening this summer. We're also going to sit and wait and pray that the Comedy Lab will get a commission too! We'll be bankrupting ourselves with bribes to the Channel 4 commissioners.

I don't even know what the fandango is! I imagine it's something to do with Latin American dancing.

Well, I'm more than happy to prostitute myself in any way possible to get a commission.

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