Before The Boosh

Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding, who would one day declare "we're just interested in being ridiculous", were actually rather serious, studious types when they first met at art college.

Julian's first passion was music, and he actually toured Europe playing in a jazz band. Noel, meanwhile, was immersed in the visual arts (and would one day be responsible for the distinctive sets of The Boosh).

Comedy was the last thing on their minds, even as they started performing it on stage. Instead of doing anything so simple as telling jokes, they recited poems, sang songs and baffled the audience by getting a woman to cry on stage and attempting to collect her tears...

Comedy steps

Julian's first step towards fame was made in 1995, when he won the first Daily Telegraph Open Mike Award for his stand-up comedy. One of the prizes was an automatic commission for Radio 4 - which he never got round to actually using.

Instead, he and Noel continued to experiment with their surreal stage shows, alongside other projects with established comedy stars. In fact, it was while working with Stewart Lee on the stage show King Dong vs Moby Dick (in which Julian and Noel played a giant penis and a whale) that they first conceived The Mighty Boosh.

(By the way, that curiously catchy title comes from a haircut that Noel's brother Michael had as a kid - dubbed the "mighty bush" by playground wags.)

The first Boosh

Noel and Julian first unleashed The Boosh at the Edinburgh Festival in 1998. Even at this point they didn't take their comedy careers particularly seriously, though. Whilst the berserk zoo-themed antics immediately got them compared to the Pythons and Vic and Bob, the pair maintained they weren't influenced by previous comedians - and didn't care that much about comedy in general. In fact, Noel later said that if the first Boosh had flopped, they'd have happily quit comedy to get back into music and art respectively.

But, rather than flopping, The Mighty Boosh won a Perrier Award. They had arrived.

Booshing to the big time

The first Boosh was such a success that Julian and Noel did the natural thing - and completely changed it. The year after their Edinburgh breakthrough, they returned with a new version of the show, called Arctic Boosh, which replaced the zoo-keepers with postmen. It was a smash-hit, and was followed the year after that by the even more successful Autoboosh.

The BBC had taken notice by this time, and the pair were signed up to bring The Boosh to Radio 4. But even after the success of the six-part radio series (it won the Douglas Adams Award for innovative comedy writing, a one-off award specifically created to honour The Boosh) there was some doubt in TV-land that the show would successfully transfer to telly...

Small screen surrealism

The pair had actually written a non-Boosh script for a potential TV show. Submitted to Channel 4, it was an idea for a series called Boyz N The Wood, which would feature "fusion guitarists" and "tree-dwelling monkey nanas" (that is, granny apes in cardigans). For some reason, Channel 4 didn't commission it.

But it didn't matter. The Mighty Boosh was a radio hit, and one fan was none other than Steve Coogan, who approached the lads and offered to produce a TV version. And the rest is crazed, gorilla-infested history...