You also filmed the show in front of a live studio audience?
Again that was a political decision. People like Armando Iannucci talk about the 'Comedy Taliban' who have decided audience shows are dead, but doesn't that mean no more shows like Fawlty Towers? No more shows like 'Porridge'? And more importantly from my point of view, no more shows like Father Ted? That bigger, fun type of sitcom is dead? I refuse to believe that. Anyway, the biggest show of recent years has been Little Britain which had an audience on it and that didn't seem to bother anybody.

Some shows slavishly follow the fashion of 'no-laughter-track' and whilst some of them are good and some of them are bad, there are some that need the laughter. You think, "Well, this is funny but it feels very empty," because there is no one joining in the fun. The good jokes and the bad jokes are met with the same response - silence. Or people decide to replace the audience with sound effects like a scratched record, but isn't that just like a really bad laughter track?

Our audiences are great and I always say part of our job on the show is to take laughs off because there are only two times when you notice a laugh; one when something's not funny and it gets a laugh, and the other is when something IS funny but doesn't get a laugh.

We've had moments like on one episode Moss' first line which was "Well done", got a huge laugh every time we played it to the audience. We just had to keep going with it until they didn't laugh otherwise the audience at home would just say, "What the hell was funny about that?"

Our audiences are all very sweet and they want to do a good job, so sometimes they laugh at things like that. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful they respond the way they do!

Strangely there aren't many techie jokes in the show
Funny enough there aren't that many jokes about computing. It feels like there are because that's what the show's about, but it's in the same way Ted and Dougal never really mentioned religion, our guys never really talk about computers. It's a backdrop.