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‘The reason we ended up not being involved in the TV series,’ Lee explains, ‘is that we didn’t think we were being offered a fair deal. We wrote about 20 per cent of the first series. I don’t think that would be an exaggeration – probably someone on the internet would know what the exact proportion was. And when it went to telly we were offered thirteen minutes a week, but as we felt we’d set the tone for some of the characters, we asked for less money and less minutes, but a share in the future of the show.’

With Iannucci reluctant to give up this degree of control, a stalemate rapidly develops. Lee and Herring go off to make their own Radio 4 and Radio 1 shows, Lionel Nimrod’s Inexplicable World and Fist of Fun, and when On The Hour is released as a BBC audio-cassette (and later on CD), their contributions have been surgically removed by Iannucci.

‘There might have been an argument about us wanting to get paid three hundred pounds instead of two hundred for it going to CD,’ Lee says phlegmatically, ‘but basically Armando edited us out to prove a point. I don’t hold it against him, really.’

Like a pair of latter-day Trotskys, snipped out of the photo of triumphant Bolshevik revolutionaries on the balcony with Iannucci’s Stalinist Stanley knife, there is little Lee and Herring can do but put a brave face on life in comedic exile (and keep an eye out for shifty-looking individuals carrying ice-picks).

‘I was about twenty-three at the time,’ Lee remembers, affecting an indulgent air. ‘Most of the other people involved in On The Hour were in their late twenties and I remember feeling quite sympathetic and thinking, They’ve got to take what they’re offered because otherwise they’ve missed the boat.’

So why do his and Herring’s live shows at the Edinburgh Festival a year or so later feature the latter delivering repeated savage blows to the head of a balloon likeness of ‘the playwright Patrick Marber’?

Lee laughs: ‘We were only annoyed with Marber because he came to the whole thing quite late, and he seemed to be the most delighted of anyone at the idea of us being forced out of the picture.’