HOW DID 'MEET THE RICHARDSONS' COME ABOUT?
L: We did Married To A Celebrity on Channel 4, which we really enjoyed, as we were basically arguing on TV and found it quite cathartic. Then Lee Hupfield [the producer] thought it could work as a sitcom and he was so enthusiastic, we trusted him that we could make it work.
J: I think he could see the back-story; the same as in Seinfeld, you see their lives and how it informs their stage act. This is that, but our couch scenes are a nugget of an argument and all the rest of it is how real life plays out from that.
HOW DID YOU FEEL ABOUT CAMERAS INVADING YOUR HOME?
L: I loved it. I definitely played up to being a bit more of an aggressor. Normally I take a lot and have to back down for a lot of things. I really enjoyed going hammer and tongs and putting Jon in to awkward situations. Like setting him on fire – I really enjoyed that.
J: It helps you win an argument when it's in a script and it can't be changed. If you arrive on set and there's a pyrotechnics team there, you sort of know you're going to get set on fire.
HOW DID THE WRITING PROCESS PAN OUT?
L: I co-wrote it with Tim Reid, who co-wrote the first series of Car Share with Peter Kay. A lot of it was taking story lines from things that have happened, almost verbatim from an argument. It sometimes got really meta, because the lines between the fictional Jon and the real Jon blurred. For example, I agreed for us to do a Dock Pudding competition and I said that Jon was going to be a judge, but I forgot to tell the real Jon!
HOW TRUE IS IT TO YOUR OWN LIVES?
L: All of it. Some of the story lines have been heightened for entertainment, but it's always real. It's a bit like The Only Way Is Essex. Jon's saying Seinfeld and I'm thinking, "It's not, it's The Only Way Is Essex."
J: It's not The Only Way Is Essex!
L: It's exactly the same thing that they do, and there's nothing wrong with saying that. People love it. And they all own beauty salons now, so we're going to be all right. You're going to be selling false eyelashes.
IS THERE REALLY A LOT OF ARGUING AT HOME, OR IS THERE A LOT MORE LAUGHING?
L: It's very rare that I make Jon laugh. He laughs at me more than with me. It's more like, 'That was the most bizarre thing I've ever seen'.
J: I think we're quite relaxed around each other when we're on our own, but when we have guests, we both click into gig mode and work as a double act. I become a heightened version of me and you become a heightened version of you, and we could both do with being heightened, let's be honest.
HOW DID ELSIE FIND THE WHOLE EXPERIENCE?
Both: She absolutely loved it.
J: She's just at an age where she can't really remember what went before, so she doesn't understand why people have stopped filming every minute of our lives. She keeps asking when the crew are coming back. She kept asking to be in scenes.
L: We didn't want her in it a lot though. She was too good! We don't want her to be the next Shirley Temple. We do need to be careful about how much we expose her.
:: Meet The Richardsons starts on Dave on Thursday February 27
