ITV's new sitcom: Benidorm

There's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England - and it's called Benidorm. As you wander the streets of the Spanish holiday resort strewn with brawling, tattooed lager louts in Union Jack shorts, bars called Royal Britannia, The Queen Mary and Yorkshire Pride advertising "live Premiership football", EastEnders and "full English breakfast", cabaret venues such as the Wheeltappers and Shunters Club offering Roy "Chubby" Brown tribute acts and strippers who produce the flags of the nations from unmentionable parts of their bodies - you could be in Blackpool rather than Benidorm. I spent three days in the Costa Blanca without hearing a single word of Spanish spoken.

It's time-warp territory, like being transported back to 1970s England - but without the glamour. Benidorm appeals to Brits because it is at once foreign and resolutely un-foreign. Which is what makes it a good setting for an ITV1 sitcom - exotic enough to stand out from Heartbeat and Where the Heart Is (and any other series with "heart" in the title), and yet still cosily familiar.

Derren Litten's lively six-part comedy is set among an ill-assorted gaggle of British package tourists at the Solana, an all-inclusive hotel complex in Benidorm. Prominent among the Brits abroad are: Geoff (Johnny Vegas), a sad-sack quiz fanatic who has come on holiday with his mum (Elsie Kelly) and spends all day lounging by the pool while being tested by her on European capitals and American presidents; and Mick (Steve Pemberton of The League of Gentlemen), the paterfamilias of the Garveys, a rowdy Yorkshire clan making full use of the limitless free booze on their first holiday overseas.

Vegas certainly feels right at home here. Sitting under a parasol by the pool at the real-life, all-inclusive hotel where Benidorm is filmed, he is wearing a gargantuan T-shirt, an England cap and - the sign of a true Brit tourist - sandals teamed with white socks. Sipping fizzy orange and smoking Marlboro Lights, the actor looks as if he's been coming here all his life.

"I've had an absolute ball," beams the comic, who hails from St Helens. "I'm staying by a very quiet beach out of town, but every time I come into Benidorm, it's been total madness. One night, I watched as this totally drunk Spanish guy emptied the contents of a bin on to the pavement and started giving them a stern talking-to. There was no need for subtitles - 'and as for you, Mr Tin Can, you can get straight back in that bin now!' As I watched him, I thought, 'ah, a little bit of home!'"

Vegas asserts that Benidorm is brimming with such characters. "One manic guy came up to me the other day and begged me for a part in the sitcom. He told me, 'you'd be really helping me out, man. You see, I owe a lot of money back home.' But if you owe a lot of money back home and have moved to Benidorm to escape the heat, then isn't turning up in an ITV1 sitcom a bit of a clue as to your whereabouts? 'How did you find me?' 'Remember that touching scene you did in Benidorm? It moved me to tears. I almost feel guilty about coming here and breaking your legs!' That's the sort of person who makes Benidorm the most fantastic resort in the world."

These 24-hour party people have taken their toll on Vegas's spare time - to say nothing of his liver. "You don't want freebies, but it is very hard to pay for things here. It's also very hard to go for a drink and come back before three days have elapsed. I went out for a drink one night, and before I knew it, it was the next night! I don't advise it - I still want to know how I got that mysterious bump on my head!"

Geoffrey Perkins, the producer of Benidorm, chips in: "I heard a woman phoning home yesterday to tell her friends the Manchester United score. She thought that because we're an hour ahead here, they wouldn't yet know the score back home!" But this riotous assembly helps the programme-makers - you couldn't make up the characters who people the streets of Benidorm, and they create a gaudily entertaining backdrop to the series.

We cannot go on without mentioning the dreaded word that hangs like a rain cloud over any British series set among ex-pats inSpain: Eldorado. Perkins, a former BBC head of comedy and producer responsible for numerous classics such asFather Ted, The Fast Show andSpitting Image, says "the 'E' word" was at the forefront of his mind as he contemplated making this show.

"When Benidorm was first suggested, I thought of all the downsides, especially the comparisons with Eldorado. So is this Eldorado by another name? Definitely not! For a start, it's deliberately rather than unintentionally comic. Eldorado was also difficult for most of us to relate to, because not that many of us live in Spain." By contrast, Perkins believes, "we can all identify with Benidorm. It features a universal experience - the holiday where you are suddenly thrown together with people with whom you have nothing in common, but often end up bonding with and inviting to come and see you back home. Unfortunately, when they turn up at your house back in Britain, they stay up all night drinking everything drinkable plus a bottle of Toilet Duck and insist on playing a CD of Canadian thrash metal at Volume 11, while you cower upstairs trying to quietly phone the police. Or maybe that's just me."

Geoff boasts about being Lancashire's pub-quiz champion, but, Vegas reckons, "he's actually a very sad character. He has no people skills whatsoever. He is so arrogant, he gives himself the nickname of 'The Oracle'. But he fails to realise that nobody on this holiday will be remotely impressed by the fact that he's been unbeaten in pub quizzes for the last nine years. Like John Turturro's character in Quiz Show, he can only communicate through trivia. I see him as a lonely virgin."

The danger of middle-class people making a comedy about working-class people is that the whole enterprise could appear dreadfully patronising. That risk initially worried Pemberton. "At first, I was concerned that the series might be looking down on the sort of people who come here on holiday. But once I read it, I realised it is an affectionate picture of them. It's celebrating their lust for life. We all have preconceptions about Benidorm, but it's been brilliant to spend time here. The resort is not pretentious, and there isn't that sense of threat that there is in a place like Blackpool."

Litten, who also writes for The Catherine Tate Show and has a cameo in Benidorm as a cringe-inducing, blacked-up tribute act called Mal Jolson, mounts his own defence. "The tone of the show is exactly that of Benidorm the holiday resort - enormous fun if you go with the flow. It's easy to turn your nose up at somewhere as cheap and potentially tacky as Benidorm, but vulgarity is something which can be great fun if you don't fight against it. On nights out in the town, many of us would look at a bar from the outside and be horrified, but after a few drinks we were fighting to get on the karaoke."

"Yes," Perkins adds with a reflective grin, "I have a hazy recollection of launching into Pulp's 'Common People', before realising that it has a lengthy instrumental break and deciding to fill it with a particularly poor piece of break dancing." This job has clearly been more fun that most - and that exuberance is mirrored in the raucous characters on screen. Vegas beams that "when I heard about this job, I thought, 'what must I do to get this?' Mentally, I was already lying naked on the casting couch saying 'use me!' Now I've played the part, it's lived up to all expectations.

"It's been like a working holiday for me. Today I spent the first four hours of the day lying by the pool in the sun, smoking and texting my mates - and they call that work! What makes it even better is that the director said, 'very good, Johnny. That looks so natural. It looks like you're really using your phone.' I'm sure my agent will kill me for saying that at contract renegotiation time. I'll have to change my tune then and say, 'this whole thing has been so strenuous. I'll need to consult my physician before agreeing to a second series!'"

Benidorm starts at 10pm on ITV1 tomorrow