`A sketch-show with catch-phrases" was how the BBC rather unwisely described the first series of The Fast Show - reviewers who tuned in to the kick-off just couldn't see the point of a character coming out onto the set, uttering an inane sentence and then departing again. But as the weeks ticked by and viewers came to know and love the characters behind the catchphrases, The Fast Show took on a momentum all its own and studentunion bars and school playgrounds resound to cries of "suits you sir", "brilliant!" and "which was nice".
The creators of the show, Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson, were somewhat heartened when one of the early negative reviewers wrote to them to apologise for not understanding the characters on their first appearance. Repetition, the reviewer said, had far more comedic value than he thought.
There should be no such misunderstanding with the new characters introduced for this, the third and last series of the award-winning show: "Roger Nouveau" is a football fan from Hampstead, part of the post-Hornby generation who talks about football all the time despite knowing nothing about the game, while Caroline Aherne (Mrs Merton) plays a supermarket check-out woman who specialises in personal insults. There's also a deaf stuntman, a squeamish zookeeper and a new twist on the pub bore alongside the triumphant return of the clothes men, the excitable teenager and Ted and Ralph.
"It's a very, very old-fashioned structure we use but the way that it is edited makes it different," says Charlie Higson. "Benny Hill and Harry Enfield had recurrent characters, but they would run four bits of a sketch through one show. We have one sketch in six parts throughout a series. This means the audience has to pay attention and watch every week."
Higson and Whitehouse met at university 20 years ago: years later, both working as plasterers/decorators and sharing a flat with Harry Enfield, they turned to writing comedy. They wrote the Stavros (kebab shop owner) and Loadsamoney characters for Enfield's television programme but it was the characters that Enfield turned down that formed the basis of The Fast Show.
"We tried to get him to do the "Suits You" characters but he didn't like them and he found a lot of our characters just too quick for his show," says Whitehouse, who is also one half of Enfield's Smashey and Nicey DJs. "The characters are based on a turn of phrase, an attitude or voice and don't stay around in the scene very long.
"We didn't want to do anything revolutionary when we started up The Fast Show, we were just fed up with sketches taking too long.
"The whole idea came about when we went to the press launch of one of Harry Enfield's programmes. The BBC had put together a compilation of highlights from the series with a 10second burst of each character. They came on, did a catchphrase and went off. We were surprised at how well it worked."
They make an exception, in terms of length, for the Ted and Ralph characters, who are written by the Father Ted team of Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan - Ralph is an English landowner who is unable to articulate his love for his monosyllabic Irish gardener. "Ralph and Ted don't sit that comfortably now in the show, their sketches get longer," says Whitehouse - there are plans to send Ted and Ralph off to their own one-off TV special in the near future.
Although Whitehouse and Higson write most of the show, in this series they have given free rein to the actors to come up with and write new characters. "Arabella Weir, who plays the `does my bum look big in this?' lady, was messing about one day on set with a South African accent and she said mockcattily to the wardrobe assistant who, was wearing a very thin Tshirt: `what a very nice white bra you're wearing.' We told her to keep the voice and she turned the character into a very offensive shop-assistant who rounds off her insults with the words `no offence'," Higson says.
Despite the shortness of its sketches, The Fast Show is credited with bringing a "theatrical" dimension to its humour. "What is nice," says Higson, almost falling over one of the show's catchphrases, "is to take a sketch to somewhere sad and upsetting and then back again. In the new series, Paul Whitehouse plays a stereotypical pub bore whose tragic existence peeps through his relentless jolliness."
IT is this sort of writing that, strangely enough, has brought about the end of the show. They had a new character for this series, a man going through a mid-life crisis - and although it was one of the best things they had written, they had to decide to drop the character because his scenes were developing into playlets. Once this series ends, Whitehouse says, he wants to write a serious war film exploring the consequences of a civilian murder and Higson says he has three ideas for novels. It's not the end of The Fast Show as we know it, though. Next year, the pair bring the show on the road where they will be sharing the stage with Shooting Stars (an Irish date is a possibility) and there are also plans for a feature length film starring their acclaimed characters - which will be nice.
The Fast Show is on BBC 2 on Friday nights at 9.30 p.m.