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The original impetus for On The Hour came from producer Armando Iannucci, a slicked-back BBC insider who, having already worked on The Mary Whitehouse Experience and Weekending, presumably knew a thing or two about what he didn’t want. Chris Morris – hell-bent on destroying the radio establishment from within like some fearful computer virus – supplied the maverick element.

Having started out as a news trainee in the not so illustrious surroundings of BBC Radio Cambridge, Morris worked his way up the ladder by unorthodox means. These included a series of legend-building stunts (such as filling a studio with helium in the midst of a live broadcast) and increasingly high-profile sackings and walk-outs from local stations in Bristol, Cambridge and London.⁵¹

With the exception of the mercurial Morris, who – then as now – operated more or less as an autonomous city state (‘He sent in completed packages,’ a still-impressed Stewart Lee remembers. ‘We barely ever saw him’), there appeared to be a clear divide between the writers and the performers. Ianucci acted as go-between, fulcrum and pivot, while simultaneously exercising some degree of control over both groupings, and the resulting creative tension seemed to give everyone involved the incentive to stay on top of their respective games.

On The Hour’s, calling card is the bracing precision of its language. The way this holds good throughout all the writing – from Chris Morris’s one-man Jesuit comedy suicide mission to the milder-mannered interjections of Lee and Herring (‘our favourite comedy at the time was Spinal Tap,’ Lee remembers, ‘and we just copied that by imparting lots of really dense information’), to the occasional trenchant contributions of grizzled NME veterans Steven Wells and David Quantick – allied with innovative use of editing and sound, creates an almost overwhelming effect.

A further vital factor in the overall impact of the show, and one all too easily overlooked by insiders as well as outsiders, is the consistency of the performances. ‘I was very conscious that Armando knew exactly what he wanted from us,’ remembers Patrick Marber, one of a six-strong cast alongside Morris, Jewish drama expert David Schneider, Steve Coogan, Doon MacKichan and Rebecca Front (the last two ‘fresh’ from the somewhat debilitating experience of playing the female parts in The Mary Whitehouse Experience). ‘We did have to learn a different way of performing sketches.’

And what was different about it exactly? ‘Armando told us “You’re not allowed to be too funny”.’ For Marber in particular – a somewhat obtrusive presence as co-presenter of Radio 1’s little-lamented first venture into comedy, Hey Rrradio – this simple instruction opened the ivy-covered door to a secret garden of comedic understatement.

Having largely given up on his rather declamatory (nay Eltonian) stand-up persona, Marber was ‘arsing around in Paris, trying to write a novel and failing’ when he got the call from Iannucci (with whom he’d worked previously on Weekending) in the summer of 1991. Recognizing a good thing when he heard about it, he wasted no time in coming back to London on the coach.

‘I just think he [Iannucci] cast it brilliantly,’ Marber asserts. ‘We all knew each other a little bit, but not too much. We were people who had been around a bit, but not long enough to be bitter, who were young enough to be hungry, but all at a point in our careers where we really needed it to work.’

Beneath the imposingly monolithic surface which results from this cunning manipulation of human resources, On The Hour is riven with intriguing fault-lines. As with its clearest historical parallel – the emergence of the Beyond The Fringe quartet of Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller, and their televisual satellites from That Was The Week That Was, way back in the early sixties – the rapid advent of this new comedic generation entails not only a maelstrom of competing egos, but also a grisly wake of hurt feelings, inter-personal complexity and apparently lifelong antipathies.

When Alan Bennett said at Peter Cook’s funeral that ‘His [Cook’s] one real regret was that he had saved David Frost from drowning’, it was a mistake to think he was speaking entirely in jest. And while the On The Hour story involves nothing quite as inherently dramatic as the moment in 1963 where the talented man who could swim (Cook) prevented the not so talented but very ambitious man (Frost, who had persuaded the BBC to let him star in just the sort of epoch-making TV series which the former individual might have made, had he not been away opening on Broadway) from meeting his end in an American swimming-pool, there is no shortage of human conflict there, either.

Remembering the formative experience of On The Hour ten years afterwards, Steve Coogan says: ‘I’ll never forget the first day I walked in to work on that show…I really felt like I’d found my home.’⁵² The impression Coogan means to give by saying that he felt at ease with On The Hour in a way that he never had before is that this was the point at which the yearning to produce high-quality work (which had so far remained implicit rather than explicit in his career) finally found the chance to express itself. ‘I didn’t remember him ever having done anything much good before’ is how Stewart Lee puts it, somewhat more bluntly. And if Coogan had some cause to feel intimidated on finding himself in such acerbic company, he also had his own ways of establishing his status with the group.

‘We were all children at that stage really,’ says Patrick Marber. ‘We certainly didn’t have much experience of success. But Steve was really rich and knew a lot about money – he was just so flash and cool. He had a Mazda MX-5! I realize now that’s a hairdresser’s car, but it didn’t seem that way at the time.’

‘Steve Coogan was earning tens of thousands of pounds from adverts,’ recalls a slightly less bowled-over Stewart Lee, ‘and I remember him saying things like “It’s really nice to be able to do this, as I get loads of money from my voice-over work and this will bring me a new level of respect”.’ A phlegmatic pause ensues. ‘For me and Rich [Herring], it was what we’d always wanted to do and it was also the bulk of our living. For him with his bad Ronnie Corbett impressions, it was the peanuts on top of his Ferrari advertising life!’

Before we can proceed any deeper along the Coogan trail into the On The Hour jungle of behavioural complexity, we need to find out why those particular peanuts meant so much to him.