So tell us Graham, what inspired you to create Big Train?
"My writing buddy Arthur Matthews and I noticed there were lots of shows that were filmed in a deliberately naturalistic way – shows like The Day Today and Brass Eye. We noticed these were all done in a mock-documentary format, and we wanted to see what happened if you kept the naturalistic, stripped-down tone but changed the format to that of a sketch show."

"So, to put it another way, we wanted to take very silly ideas and play them as straight we could, with no conventional jokes and no laugh track. Big Train was a kind of an experiment to see if that theory held water."

Where did the inspiration for the Big Train characters come from? Come on, a man with a phobia about spoons – surely alcohol was involved?
"Basically it came from Arthur and I sitting around trying to make each other laugh with our ridiculous suggestions. The spoons idea was a good example of something that just popped into our heads while we were trying to write the show one day. It cracked us up."

"Writing comedy can be a very mysterious thing, as it’s all about gut feelings and instinctive responses. You just go digging around in your own imagination and take it from there. But yes, I confess, sometimes alcohol was also involved. What can I say, I love red wine!"

Why all the jockeys, Graham? Why?
"I admit we became a little bit obsessed with jockeys while writing the script. When you don't have much of a budget (and we didn't), it makes good sense to use the same costumes, so it was quite useful to fill the show with jockeys."

"There's also something funny, in a very basic and shallow way, about small men in uniforms. Most small men don’t get to wear uniforms because of height barriers with things like the police force and the army but jockeys all wear this funny uniform, and we felt they deserved our attention. I sincerely hope no jockeys were offended by our strange fixation."

You probably get asked this a lot, but we demand to know why the show is called Big Train.
"We just heard this song one day, and the chorus was just a bloke singing 'Big Train, Big Train'. Being entirely meaningless, we immediately fell in love with it and decided to use it on the show. There is a very popular sketch in the show with a train in it, so many people assumed it was named after that. But it wasn’t."

How did you go about making the series a reality?
"I directed the first series, as our ideas were so offbeat that another director wouldn’t have quite got what we were up to."

"We had a lot of ideas written down but soon realised that we didn’t have the money to shoot them all, so the scripts had to be revised a fair bit before the cameras started rolling. It worked out well as it forces you to think of different lines very quickly, and we ended up spontaneously coming up with some great ideas we wouldn’t have originally had."

"Filming a sketch is a compromise between the material, time and money. That’s the sad reality of making funny things happen."

Do you have any funny anecdotes about the making of Big Train?
"None whatsoever. Being consummate professionals, we were grimly efficient at all times."

And finally: why did you depart after the first series?
"My only worry about Big Train was that I didn't want us to repeat ourselves. So after the first series was done and became a success, I felt I’d satisfied my curiosity as to whether our idea of naturalistic sketches would work. They did, and that was enough for me."


Graham tells us about Father Ted, his writing buddy Arthur Matthews and some other stuff...