Do you look back fondly on Big Night Out?

Yeah it was great, it was some of the best days ever. It was brilliant. Very good days.

It looked like you were having a lot of fun.

Well there was nothing else like it at the time, and when I did it I'd just left art school and it was like a performance piece on stage. I'd spend all week making the things in my kitchen and then taking them down there in a wheelbarrow. It was all just so homemade, it was never done with the intention of being on TV so when it did it was a surprise. It was a different show every week on stage, and then we took the best bits, added some extra bits and put it on TV.

Quite often on the show there's a glimmer in both of your eyes and it looks like you're having the time of your life.

We were, we were having a great time, it was just brilliant.

And there's a real sense of anarchy about it.

Well, controlled anarchy. There's always a sense of anarchy sort of lurking in the background, always a sense of it all going wrong any second now, but it had to be controlled. When we used to film those things we pretty much used to go in there, hardly do any rehearsal, and film the whole lot in 32 minutes. We'd be back in the pub half an hour later. It was amazing, hardly any rehearsal at all.

I was trying to think what I could compare it to and I can only think of The Muppet Show.

Really, I deplore The Muppets. I think they're all wankers. I didn't like Sesame Street either. It's certainly not an influence.

Why are The Muppets wankers?

They just are, aren't they. All you have to do is look at them. They just are, they irritate me. Not as much of a wanker as Barney. That big purple monster thing.

Alright, forget The Muppets. So did comedy come out of the music you used to do?

Well it came out of art school really, in the early 80s. There was always a musical thing, we would do things which were very musical on stage, but it was more about messing about with tapes in bedrooms. We used to do a thing called The Tiny Little Beatles. The third member of our team really was John Irvine, who operated all the tapes. I used to share a flat with him and we used to come up with these ideas every week. So we'd have a little plate with four figures on it, which weren't really The Beatles, and a tea towel over the top. And we'd play (sings) She Loves You... and we'd change the tone control and it would be (does impression of the singing changing tone to sound muffled). He'd operate the tone control and get them to lift the tea towel up and no one could work out how it was working. It was just him watching with the tone control. So it sprang from music a bit in that respect, but not really from being in bands. Probably a combination of that and art school.

Is it true that there was never a plan for it to be on TV?

No, we were just enjoying ourselves.

It seems strange to me that there was no ambition about it. Getting up there and doing the work and getting an audience, surely there was a bit of ambition going on.

Yeah there was mild ambition. When we moved from the Goldsmith's Tavern to the Albany Empire, I thought it was great, to be on stage doing it. I didn't really think about putting it on TV, but at the same time I was doing The Tube, and going on Jonathan Ross' shows. But I really didn't think anyone would want Big Night Out on TV. And then it sort of started dawning on me that maybe they would, but it wasn't an intentional thing. It sort of gradually moved in that direction, and then Michael Grade and Alan Yentob came down on the same night to see it, and both of them wanted it, for Channel 4 and BBC.

So you never had to pitch anything.

No, I think we were probably cocky, in an anarchic, didn't really care way. You know, let 'em come to us, if they want to put it on TV it's up to them.

I imagine if they didn't know who you were and you approached them with this stuff it would have been more difficult.

I don't think you could take that idea unless somebody came and saw it in the flesh, if you went in and tried to describe it... At that time you had Friday Night Live, things like that on TV, and I would imagine if you'd had tried to describe this to some TV exec they would have thrown it out the window.

Bob says one of the first things he saw you do on stage was something called Tappy Lappy.

Yeah, we had two Bryan Ferry masks, both identical with the same smile, and the fact that they were identical made it hilarious, me and John Irvine made these masks - we've never beaten them - and we had two big pieces of wood sellotaped onto our feet and tap-danced. But we'd recorded the tapdance using pans and things in the house, so it started off as a tapdance and ended up as a cacophony, pans and things dropping down the stairs. But we were just two tap dancers.

What was the first stuff you did on stage with Bob?

After I'd met him, he was a friend of a friend, I said "Do you want to do something next week?", and he was a lawyer, so we wrote something about lawyers, which was Judge Nutmeg. It was as simple as that. Most of it was so shit. We'd have half an hour talking about joint cuts of beef, or do a crisp consumer test. And lot of it just wasn't funny, we thought we'd impart some information about crisps to people, as a sort of break from the comedy.

Some of the criticism you got early on, from people who didn't get what you were doing, was that your stuff just wasn't funny. Melody Maker called you Prick Reeves.

Hahahaha! That's clever isn't it. If only I'd have thought of calling myself Prick Reeves.

You've actually said in the past that your stuff's not always supposed to be funny, just interesting.

Yeah. It's a fair point. What's wrong with that?

Did you care about how it would be received?

Well we only expected to do one series and leave it at that, we didn't think people would accept it. But we knew that there was only going to be a small amount of people that would get it and like it, and that was good enough. It was just never on the cards that it was gonna be anything more than a cult thing. We were perfectly aware of that. When you've got something like that you get absolutely brilliant reviews, and complete pellings. A lot of people thought it was a spoof, of something they couldn't work out. It did get gradually more positive.

I think the funniest thing in Big Night Out was Talc and Turnips, which was completely nonsensical.

It was one of our favourite things, we LOVED Talc and Turnips. We used to do it on stage and we loved doing it, because it was so preposterous, and so monstrously ridiculous... The director and producer said "You can't do that, not on television." I thought it was great. The noises we'd make used to crack us up. If you listen to it very carefully you can hear Bob and me giving instructions to each other. Which we thought was hilarious. Like (quietly), "Throw the squirrel over there now."

A lot of the show is made up of pointless physical comedy nonsense, but that was the extreme.

Well that's all it is. You never should have to describe or explain, but that's all it was. It's probably nervous laughter, it's the most ridiculous thing you've ever seen. "How dare they!" What made us laugh was doing something for no reason but giving instructions. You're qualifying anarchy. I'd love to do it again. I think we might do a show at the Albany Empire to launch the DVD, so we might do it again. It was a peak. Another peak of our careers was managing to get on BBC1 at 6pm with Families At War, and we had a kid who was destroying a garden shed to below the height of an Alsatian with his bare hands. To get that on national TV, BBC1, Saturday night - you can't get much higher than that.

I remember coming to see the Big Night Out live show in 1991, and there were fans on the train with pieces of carpet stuck to their heads.

I know. You'd look out in the front row and there'd be people there as their favourite characters, and throwing things on the stage. Potatoes, with messages rolled up in a tube and thrown on. It's a bizarre thing. I'd have never have done that myself.

You had an eclectic audience at the live shows if I remember.

We'd have them all. It was wide-ranging. Every time was different, you'd get a different reaction wherever you'd go. When we were on that tour we went to Dundee University, and there were bearded men sitting taking notes. Maybe they were on a field trip, I don't know. One woman I saw fingering herself. I was singing a song at the end and I looked at the front row and she had her hands down her pants, looking at me with a glazed expression. It stopped me in my tracks. You kind of imagine it like a young boy going to see a pop singer like Clodagh Rogers or someone.

Who?

Clodagh Rogers. I don't think she's about anymore. You know, maybe a Nolan. But a girl, it's quite a different thing. Disturbing. And we used to get people out the audience and bring them on stage to talk to Judge Nutmeg. And one of his lines, which was the same every night, was "You're BLIND to judgment", and a bloke came out of the audience and he (i)was(i) blind. I was trying to say something, but I couldn't say "By the way Bob, he's BLIND." And he's going "You're BLIND, you see NOTHING!" And I'm just going 'Shit, he is...'

Didn't you sometimes have some aggressive fans?

Yeah, you get the standard hecklers, a lot of them get really excited and bark our catchphrases, a kind of Tourette's thing, they just shout it out, can't help themselves. Some of them, I don't know why, would shout "FUCK OFF!" And you'd go, Why have you paid money to come and see us? You know what you're getting. I remember one of them - this was on a later tour - we used to come out and there was dry ice everywhere, and I walked out and all of a sudden a full pint hit me right in the face, I just got drenched. Before anyone had seen me, because I was coming through the dry ice, and I just walked through completely soaked, and shocked. They used to do that quite a lot, you'd come on and they'd throw half drunk drinks at you. Which I've never understood. But on the whole they were great. Just a lot of screaming. It was like being in a pop group, outside there'd be barriers, with children reaching out to touch, and chasing the bus down the road.

Did you feel that whole Beatles thing then?

Completely. It really was, quite often you couldn't go out the hotel room, in the daytime or now. Always being pursued. And at the end of the gig they'd all run on stage, go mad. But it was quite nice for the ego.

Did it feel like you were getting a second wind, after the music career hadn't worked out?

Well yeah, it was an unexpected second wind. I wasn't expecting to be a pop star either, that came out of nowhere. Big Night Out had been on and I got a call from Island asking if I'd like to do a single. So I did Born Free and it just went straight in at number three, and I wasn't expecting it at all. Then Dizzy went to number one. So you're on stage at the end finishing off with Dizzy and they're all going bonkers. It's nice to have had it.

Was that amount of adulation something that was particular to Big Night Out, or did it continue?

It was mainly for Big Night Out, then it moved on to The Smell Of, then it drifted away. I don't know how long you can be in that furious fanlike position, but I think it lasted for about three or four years.

What sort of letters did you used to get?

There were a lot of them, but they were all very different. A lot of them were nonsense, they would try to write like we would write, so it would be indecipherable, mostly. They'd send us a lot of stuff, lots of crap we'd get constantly.

What, food?

A lot of food, yeah. Bits of onions, some lemons. Whatever they could dig out the fridge and didn't want any more.

Is it right that you've got a new Friday night comedy variety show in the works?

Well we'd like to, but we haven't been given any green lights by anyone yet. So we're still waiting. You get the feeling that people don't want us anymore, you know. They've got Little Britain now, they'll have that. We wanted to do another maverick Friday night show, but we haven't got a lot of response.

There's nothing like that on at the moment.

I know, there's not a lot of comedy on really is there. Yeah, I'd like to go out and do a song and dance, do nonsense, then go home.