The guff life

Moz (played by Johnny Vegas) is a small-time drug dealer in Manchester. And by small-time we mean very, very small-time: microscopic time. He deals only in weed, and only to those he knows. Which means he never makes any money, and his flat is forever being invaded by wasters from all corners of Manchester. People like Colin the scally, Brian the easily seduced homosexual, and Psycho Paul – a rather more proactive (and unhinged) drug dealer. And then of course there's Cartoon Head, a dangerous hitman in a Mickey Mouse mask. Is it any wonder that Moz's girlfriend Nicki is on the verge of losing it completely?

Duff man!

Ideal is the squalid brainchild of one Graham Duff, whom you very likely haven't heard of (and if you have, stop being smug). Duff is an unsung hero of British alternative comedy, tirelessly striving away behind the scenes to create funny things (or 'jokes') that make us laugh. He also plays Brian the man-eater on the show.

Duff got started in the industry back in the 1980s when he was a performing arts student. He and a group of wannabe-comedians joined dubious forces and created Obelisk – a "surreal sketch show" that toured arts centres and stand-up clubs. Their work was hit and miss (with a high proportion of miss, to be honest), but Duff was by then addicted to comedy. He carried on doing stand-up and eventually cracked the hallowed Edinburgh Festival, which with satisfying predictability led to doors being opened on BBC radio. Since then he's worked on various radio comedy shows, created the Steve Coogan series Dr Terrible's House of Horrible, and become a not-inconsiderably-sized cheese in the comedy world.

An ideal sitcom

When Graham Duff sat down to write a sitcom, he knew he wanted it to be set in Manchester. For one thing, he'd done a lot of gigs there in his formative years, and knew the place well. For another, it meant he could get his mate Tony Burgess, a Manc stand-up, to share the burden of gag-writing with him.

As far as the actual plot went, Duff followed in the tradition of the great Modernist playwright Samuel Beckett, and his quintessential Theatre of the Absurd play Waiting for Godot. By which we mean, he wanted to write something set in one place with random people talking rubbish at each other in between bouts of misery and angst. The perfect set-up, he realised, would be a drug dealer's den: somewhere claustrophobic in which many secondary characters could come and go.

"I love the fact that a character can make an impact with 10 lines of dialogue and then not appear again for several episodes," Duff explained. "The drugs are just a dramatic device. Ideal isn't about drugs, it's about the people who have one thing in common and how their lives interact due to the shared need." Remember this line if you want to look clever the next time you're vegging out in front of Ideal with your mates.

A not-very-ideal schedule

There is an old and boring question that critics have long mused over: what's more difficult, comedy or drama?

We have no idea actually – but Johnny Vegas certainly found Ideal a lot tougher to work on than the "straight" projects he's been involved in. But this has less to do with the immortal "comedy versus drama" question than his actual screen time. For, while he's said he felt a bit of an imposter when doing serious dramas like Tipping the Velvet and Bleak House, he at least didn't have much to actually do on those shows. "I only had six minute scenes in 10 hour shoots," Vegas said of the dramas, "so I'd spend the other nine hours hanging around texting people who have real jobs."

Not so with Ideal. Being in just about every scene means 5.30am wake-up calls and 14-hour shifts in front of the camera. And, what with a fourth series being in production, we can take sadistic glee in the fact that Johnny won't be getting a lie-in for some time to come.

Improvise, damn it

For the actors on the show, one of the benefits of working on Ideal is the fact that writer Graham Duff is very open to additional lines, gags and plot ideas. Basically because he's only too happy to delegate creative duties to everyone else (well, wouldn't you?).

Which means that, if you want to put it pretentiously, making every episode is an "organic process". If you don't, "chaotic mess" will also do.

Being a talented lot, the stars will throw ideas into the air and Duff judges which ones should be incorporated and which should be tactfully declared rubbish. It's all great fun, although Duff did have a lot of trouble in the first series with Moz's cat, Mrs Slocombe. He got so peeved with the misbehaving mog that he wrote her out of the second series. And by "wrote her out", we mean he just made her vanish without any explanation. Well the writer is god after all. In Duff's case, the vengeful Old Testament one.