Eureka!: Lab rats (BBC Comedy for BBC2)

Where did the idea come from?
We came up with the idea of Professor Herring, a character in my Radio 4 show The Ape That Got Lucky, presenting spoof lectures on BBC4. In 2005, my producer, Simon Nicholls, took this to Armando Iannucci, who had the idea of putting some of the characters into a sitcom.

Who inspired the character?
It's the idea of peaking early in your career. The professor has sat on his arse since he won a Nobel prize. My father was a paediatrician but had his biggest success as a student when he came across a test for a molecule. He's not been as lazy as Herring, I hasten to add.

How did you adapt the idea for TV?
On radio, he's a guest on my show. I wanted to continue having a high status character who was junior to someone younger and to see the tension that arose. Once we decided to put him in a lab, it fleshed out from there.

How did you pitch it?
We wrote some sample pages and Armando appealed for funding for an episode of a BBC3 comedy pilot series called Behind Closed Doors.

What was the reaction?
BBC3 said it didn't fit its demographic. But Armando had already taken it to BBC2, which jumped at it and commissioned a full series. He kept this from me while we filmed The Thick of It as he knew it would go to my head.

How did the show evolve for BBC2?
With a bigger budget we could redesign and relight it and make it look less like a set. We also needed to sustain a longer narrative, so we added more regular characters.

What's been the biggest challenge?
We'd write surreal visual gags without thinking about how we'd do them. We thought “that's someone else's department”, only to be told it was impossible or too expensive. But sometimes this helped and we could give it a homespun look. Thankfully we got to reshoot the giant green-screen snail from the pilot, which was a bit rubbish.

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