"There's nothing Irish in it at all, you'll be glad to know," says Navan comic Dylan Moran of his new sitcom, Black Books, to be broadcast by Channel 4 later this month. Although Moran both stars in the show and co-wrote it with Father Ted writer Graham Linehan, he didn't succumb to the temptation to pad his work out with priests, churches and mad people cursing all the time. In more ways than one, perhaps, Black Books can be seen as the anti-Fitz.
The sit here is a bookshop and the com comes from the interaction between the people who work there: Moran plays the shop's owner, Bernard Black, a miserable misanthropist who hates anybody who dares to cross the shop's threshold; the brilliant English stand-up, Bill Bailey, plays Manny Bianco, the mirror image of Moran's character in that he is kind, considerate and actually likes selling books. Extra comic possibilities are presented by the woman who runs the awful gift shop, called Nifty Gifty, next door, Fran, a paranoid headwreck played by Tamsin Greig.
"I had the idea for a sitcom set in a bookshop for a long time," says Moran, a former Perrier award winning stand-up, and one of the stars of the BBC2 comedy series written by Simon Nye, How Do You Want Me? "I wrote the original pilot a while back. Something, though, just wasn't happening with it. All the ideas seemed to be in place but there was no structure there. One of my early scripts had a coach-load of tourists who mistook my character for a guru and they all killed themselves in the shop. It was that sort of thing."
The production company (Assembly Film) behind the show encouraged Moran to bring in a co-writer to help bring some more coherence to his scripts. "I was initially against the idea," he says. "I really didn't want to relinquish control over my project, but in the end I relented."
Dubliner Graham Linehan, co-writer with Arthur Mathews of Father Ted (C4) and Big Train (BBC2), was brought on board: "I'd always really admired Dylan's stand-up persona, that sort of drunken, shambolic creation, so it was just a case of playing to his strengths," says Linehan. "My job was just to bring some structure to the scripts - the ideas were certainly there - they just needed to be bashed into shape. He had some really crazy characters and it was all very surreal - it just needed to be pulled back a bit. It was very intensive working with Dylan for the first few weeks, but we just talked about what he wanted and took it from there."
It's not just playing the Moran character off the Bailey character that gives Black Books its impetus - there's plenty more going on - but their relationship is crucial: "I think Manny is there to try and humanise Bernard and it's never really clear if Bernard really hates or really likes Manny and what he is trying to do to the shop," says Linehan. The filming of the series was not without incident. "It was shot around the Kings Cross area of London and we were plagued by this mad Polish woman who would turn up every day," says Linehan. "Sometimes I'd be talking to Bill or Dylan about something and then she'd come over to me and say things like `He wasn't listening to a word you said, you know', other times when we eventually managed to get her off the set, she would return with these yelping dogs who would bizarrely do their barking thing whenever we were shooting a scene."
The interior shots, though, were a lot more relaxed. "It was just so great having Bill Bailey, because in a studio setting there's a lot of delays so, being the performer that he is and such a good comic, he kept the audience entertained."
On the evidence of the first two episodes of the show, Black Books is very good indeed, and, apart from having great lines, shows that both Moran and Bailey can act. All concerned are already looking forward to a second series: "It was surprisingly good fun to do," says Linehan.
Black Books begins on Channel 4 on Friday, September 29th at 9 p.m.
