Chris Addison: Swapping satire for sitcom

Every comedian, it seems, has a sitcom inside of them. Chris Addison is in the enviable position that he has now acted in one, the docu-comedy, The Thick of It and has co-created and stars in another, the conventional studio-sitcom Lab Rats.

"Whenever I see myself described in papers now, they always say 'actor' first. Not true. I've done that now and I've thoroughly enjoyed it but I was a stand-up for 13 years and everything comes from that."

In conversation, Addison is every inch the confident, charismatic host, with faint undertones of vulnerability and steel, who impressed Edinburgh Fringe audiences with his series of excellent stand-up shows-cum-lectures between 2000 and 2005. He tours much less now, partly due to family commitments, but also because of ongoing work with The Thick Of It both on the small screen and in the show's forthcoming film spin-off In the Loop.

Comfortable within his own skin, unperturbed that his interview is clearly audible to anyone sat nearby, this youthful 36-year-old can make fairly pseudy observations sound fascinating: "Have you noticed that all the Monday-night sitcoms on CBS are studio-audience sitcoms and all of NBC's Thursday-night sitcoms are single-camera sitcoms? The NBC ones get all the good reviews and the CBS ones get all the ratings!" The single camera naturalistic approach versus the fourth-wall studio-audience approach to sitcom and comedy has been a debate that has, thankfully, waned in the UK after the initial pioneering of People Like Us and then The Office but Addison, now a practitioner of both styles, recognises that it still gets some hot under the collar. "An awful lot of single-camera sitcoms get made now, and we made a decision with Lab Rats that not many would make and would see as unfashionable."

Lab Rats has origins were in Addison's live theme-shows like The Ape That Got Lucky and the Perrier-nominated shows Civilisation and Atomicity, all of which took as loose themes society, science and evolution. The Edinburgh shows were then adapted for Radio 4, from which Lab Rats' core team came together, including co-writer and co-creator Carl Cooper and fellow comics Dan Tetsell and Jo Enright, as well as comedy actor Geoffrey McGivern, the original Ford Prefect in the radio production of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It was the relationship between Addison as the host and lecturer and McGivern's hands-off professor that formed one of the plans that Lab Rats is built on and which caught the eye of Armando Ianucci, creator of The Thick of It, among his numerous comedy credits.

"We went to Armando and said we wanted to do The Ape That Got Lucky on the telly and he said: 'Well you could, but why don't you not? What I really like about those radio shows is the stupid characters, so why don't you write about them?'"

Lab Rats has morphed into some amiable "cartoon" nonsense about a group of inept and inert scientists. Science was a field Addison felt was ripe to exploit because "it can do anything yet it's very scary and can get out of control."

Appropriately enough, many of the characters are out of control too, like the dizzy Cara, played by Jo Enright. She brings a quirky innocence to the proceedings and can deliver, and posture, a great end-line. For example, in one scene Addison's character is yet again exasperated by the Enright's character's lunacy, and the scene ends: Dr Alex Beenyman (Addison): "How have you got through life without a piano falling on you?" Cara McIlvenny (Enright in a broad Brummie accent): "I haven't."

Watch Chris Addison in a clip from 'Lab Rats'

McGivern as a Nobel prize-winning scientist in de-facto retirement has some catalytic moments too. When he challenges the other characters to name better Nobel winners than him, the Dean of the university where the research lab is set suggests Marie Curie, to which the McGivern's professor retorts: "Marie Curie! Anyone can organise a fun run!"

Meanwhile, there are some solid cameos including one from Kim Wall as a hilariously anal "surprise inspector" to the lab whose snooping can be thrown off by a skewed picture frame.

"People will say Lab Rats is not edgy or dark but we wrote the kind of jokes we like, in the way we like them to be delivered by people who we think are funny," says Addison, getting his retaliation in first.

"I don't understand why people don't see that jokes aren't the cornerstone of comedy. They don't have to be, 'I say I say I say', or a Friends-style zinger, they can be brilliant characterisation like in The Office."

For Addison there are a number of people who don't understand the art, though he's careful not to name names. His resentment runs deep, it seems. In his 2004 Edinburgh show Civilisation he joked: "unlike my fellow comedians I couldn't afford a laptop", and chided those who do use one: "very impressive, now write some jokes".

When we meet it's the purveyors of "the dark arts" he has a beef with: "I've seen stand-ups ask the audience: 'Do you want the dark stuff?' You'd better be offering me Guinness. Write jokes. Don't write darkness and expect that to be funny in itself." This gentle, polite but firm tirade against joke charlatans opens a window on Addison's own writing process: "It's within all of us to say, 'that'll do'; but 'that'll do' is the enemy. You have to get beyond that and ask, 'can we put some more jokes in and are they jokes that should be in here?' Are you prepared to kill some kittens – so-called because they are the jokes you least want to dump."

Addison's own natural comedic process was initially fired by Billy Connolly and The Goons, a discovery after which he says 'Allo 'Allo was never the same again. On leaving Birmingham University, where he studied English literature, and returning to his native Manchester, he felt a need to do something creative. "I'd wanted to be a theatre director and had directed plays at school and university but I realised that you needed other people, that you have to hire a hall, do the posters and I was very lazy and didn't want to do any of that. Stand-up is, logistically speaking, the simplest thing that you can do; just turn up and somebody else organises it all."

Watch a clip from 'Lab Rats'

Addison also found himself helped by a buzzing mid-Nineties Manchester comedy scene, helped by the rise of Caroline Aherne and Steve Coogan. His first open-mic gig at the city's well-known Frog and Bucket comedy club may not have raised even a croak from the audience, but Dave Gorman was present and told him: "this is a really terrible audience and you shouldn't be downhearted because there was some good stuff in there".

The advice spurred Addison on through a much better follow-up gig, and subsequent exposure on the student circuit meant that within a year of starting stand-up Addison had turned professional. It's a clean rise for a neat comedian who professes A love of comedy as his main motivation to go into it. There's no dysfunctional family or schooling story, and no obvious comedy heritage passed down by his mother, a teacher and social worker, or his father, a doctor.

I suggest his father's occupation and the resonances beyond might account for his "bedside manner" and attraction to white coats. Addison agrees.

"I love the smell of hospitals because they smell of my dad. When I was young I remember him coming back from work and lying in front of the TV watching The Six O'Clock News. I would lie with my head on him, and his shirts would smell of hospitals because he'd been in them all day. Even now they have a homely smell to me, although these days they tend to smell of a mix of bleach and coffee."

'Lab Rats' is on BBC2 tonight at 9.30; www.chrisaddison.co.uk