‘They offered me a prosthetic testicle for the fashion show scene but I thought, what’s the point? I was hardly going to claw back any dignity’
I worked with Damon Beesley (co-creator) at Channel 4. We also lived together. We’d entertain each other playing PlayStation and telling stories of our youth, so we decided to scratch an itch and write a sitcom about being teenagers trapped in suburbia. Channel 4 commissioned a pilot – which ended up as Bunk Off, the second episode of the first series of The Inbetweeners. A lot of the things in that episode had happened to Damon. He did draw on a girl’s driveway. He did tell a child their parents would be obliterated in a nuclear disaster. Then Channel 4 said: “Why would anyone watch a bunch of teenagers on a Friday night?”