Aesthetically it’s much more satisfying to have natural daylight – to light areas more like a drama or a film than

“Aesthetically it’s much more satisfying to have natural daylight – to light areas more like a drama or a film than comedy. It’s why we filmed it in real hospitals.”Green Wing was filmed at three hospitals – Basingstoke General Hospital (the most accommodating) and two in and around London. “There were people being wheeled past on trolleys on their way to serious operations,” says Mangan, who plays anaesthetist Dr Guillaume Secretan. “And there were people coming out of serious operations, and we’d have to do our scenes really quietly so that we didn’t wake up them up after their triple bypass operations. The NHS must be in a pretty shoddy state to allow us lot to wander round with bare arses up and down the corridors.”He adds: “I got bothered quite a lot when I had the doctor’s gear on, with people asking questions.

We’ve ended up with something much broader than we first envisaged.”Not as broad as the posters for the show, now plastered across the country, might suggest. Somehow incorporating a stuffed camel, the posters also show the doctors playing roulette in the operating theatre – although the actors all have stories from their research (probably too libellous to repeat here) about what really goes on during operations. But the posters manage to make Green Wing seem much more juvenile than it really is. In fact, although never shy of the rude and lewd – witness Haywood on the vibrating bed in tomorrow night’s episode (“Oh, it gets far worse than that,” promises Pile) – the humour is far more sophisticated than the modern-day Carry on Nurse promised by the adverts.”It’s just delving into the familiarity of behaviour that rings bells with us,” says Pile. Heap’s pompous consultant is perhaps another stock “hoscom” character, although there is nothing “stock” about Heap’s gleeful, almost Pythonesque performance, which sent Green Wing off in unanticipated directions.”We originally intended something much more subtle and observational – more like The Office,” says Pile. “But once we had our cast in place we got rather carried away with their various skills. Mark Heap is such a comic genius – the idea of his having illicit sex in the office with Pippa Haywood’s head of human resources just played into Mark’s clowning hands, and he ran with it.

The writers then rewrote the scripts incorporating what they liked of what they had witnessed.”Some of the performers felt more at home with this process than others,” admits Pile “Stephen Mangan, for example, is brilliant at improvisation. “We filmed in three different hospitals, so that’s the only difference I really feel when I’m watching it – what hospital we’re in,” says Mangan, who plays the hospital lothario – a sort of 21st-century Leslie Phillips from the Doctor films of the 1960s, if the comparison isn’t misleading. In fact, it’s impossible to shut him up…”Mangan himself says he found the choppy, sketch-like nature of Green Wing slightly disorientating. The performers workshopped their characters for 12 weeks before being handed their scripts, which they then acted out while being free to ad-lib material themselves. The cameras were then left running at the end of each scene, to capture any “business” that the actors spontaneously came up with. It’s very rare that you go on to a comedy programme and you’ve got that three months beforehand to muck about and workshop, and I think that trust shows.”Greig is referring to the most unusual process involved in bringing Green Wing to fruition. “At the risk of sounding like a wanker, comedy is about how you trust somebody – how they’re going to play with you.

It’s an impressive ensemble – a sort of pick’n'mix assortment from the best of recent British TV comedy.”If you look at this show there are people from very different comedies,” says Greig, who is best known for playing Fran in the dearly departed Dylan Moran sitcom Black Books, and who here plays the pivotal character of Dr Caroline Todd, the new girl on the wards. Parts of the 2002 pilot were even blended into tomorrow night’s first episode (Pile says you can tell which they are by the differing length of actor Julian Rhind-Tutt’s hair).Rhind-Tutt, who plays a junior doctor, joins the likes of Tamsin Greig from Black Books, Mark Heap (Spaced), Stephen Mangan (I’m Alan Partridge), Michelle Gomez (The Book Group), Pippa Haywood (The Brittas Empire) and Sarah Alexander from Coupling, the largely uncredited “fourth member” of the Smack the Pony team. “I was looking for a home for a bunch of assorted characters and I happened to mention to Peter Fincham (then managing director at Talkback Productions; now chief executive of Talkback Thames) that something like a hospital would be ideal. “If we get another series – and it depends on the ratings – we might even set it on a cruise ship,” says Pile, and you sense she’s only half-joking.It’s been two years since the original (unbroadcast) pilot was completed, and it says a lot about the project that Pile managed to hang on to the entire cast except Doon Mackichan, one of her triumvirate from Smack the Pony, who had since become pregnant.