This is Electric Eel. Well, two thirds of Electric Eel, the still relatively obscure sketch group that are about to - quite literally - explode on to our television screens in their new Channel Four sitcom. Roy Dance Is Dead is their new telly show set to change all the rules of the modern sit-com. all the usual then. In the mean time, they're just going to have to get used to talking about themselves. "I did a degree in me," points out Dan. That's better. "In self love. I got a One."

Electric Eel are made up of three chaps called Dan Clark, Cliff Kelly and Adam Goodwin. Today, Dan and Cliff meet us in Clapham for some fizzy pop and a bite to eat, fresh from the editing studios where they are putting the final touches on to their television spectacular. The three boys already have an incredibly mucky back catalogue of television appearances: between them they've appeared on comedy classics such as Only Fools And Horses, Comedy Nation, The Stand Up Show and Hale and Pace. But alongside these jewels in the comedy crown, they've also been on Casualty, The Bill, and Auntie's Sporting Bloomers. To top it all off, Cliff's biggest claim to fame has to be the fact that he was one of the dancing children on Rod Hull's Pink Windmill. Pretty boy Dan has even appeared as a model in certain teenage magazines for girls, helping them to work through their problems in a photo story style.

These days, they've put their three lovely heads together to produce some incredibly fresh sketch comedy. They first met at the Edinburgh Festival in 1995. Adam and Cliff were in "quite a dodgy show" with two other actors, and Dan was appearing in a play he had written with a friend. Appearing in Marcos together - a Fringe venue that has since closed down - formed a bond between the four of them, and they decided to work together. The following year they brought 'The Purple Hendrix Extravaganza' to an unsuspecting Fringe audience. Soon after, Oliver Maltman decided to leave the group to commit himself to his college course. "We were truly gutted," says Dan, "and we considered it not happening any more. But then, we said f*ck it, we've got to do it. About a week after he left, we started doing it as a threesome and," he laughs, "we started getting rave reviews in the press!"

Indeed, over the years the reviews have been fairly generous - "they take a pinch of Fry and Laurie, a dab of Python and a smear of vulgarity, before belching out their comic skits to a happy audience", according to Danny Wallace PLC, and he'd know. They have also had their fair share of horrible gigs, something from which Cliff does get a perverse pleasure. "There's something about the adrenaline of saying your punchline and people just looking at you. It just makes me laugh. I like it when an audience plays hard to get." And the good gigs are even better - during their 1999 Edinburgh run, some audiences refused to leave the venue at the end of the show. "Yeah, that was fab, Dan and Adam actually telling them to f*ck off. And they laughed. You know you're having a good show when you swear at the audience and they laugh. Superb."

Superb is one word that recurs again and again through any conversation with Electric Eel. The Boosh are 'superb'. As is Dan Antapolski. And Simon Munnery. And Dave Gorman and Lee Mack and the Royle Family. Electric Eel are very serious about their comedy. "I'm a bit of a comedy whore," admits Cliff. "I can sit and really enjoy a sit com." Indeed, when they were first commissioned to write a six part series, they sat down and studied tapes of old sitcoms, from Yes, Prime Minister to Spaced, "just trying to work out what makes a good sitcom. The most we'd ever written was a sketch, and then suddenly we're trying to write six half hours, so it was quite a jump really." "We'll soon find out if we got away with it!" sniggers Dan.

If the Comedy Lab is anything to go by, the new series should definitely be something special. Roy Dance Is Dead was broadcast in September 1999 as part of the Comedy Lab series that included Adam Bloom's 'Beyond A Joke', Rob Rouse and Phil Nicol's 'Pornorama' and 'Los Dos Bros' which has just been made into a sketch series. At the time, it did not get too much recognition, but many people remember it as one of the strongest episodes from the three Comedy Lab seasons. A week in the life of Embassy Properties, the show examined what happens to Estate Agents Mark England (Cliff), Mark Devlin (Adam) and Jerry (Dan) as they compete to save their jobs.

The programme produced some very strong performances from them, and gave them the opportunity to explore many different styles of comedy, particularly their unique affinity for combining humour with some fairly extreme slapstick and physical comedy, bordering on violence. There was also a liberal amount of bad language, prompting Channel 4's continuity announcer to describe the show as a 'hard hitting and foul mouthed look at the world of Estate Agents.' "There were twenty three 'fucks'" Dan tells us proudly. "In a twenty four minute programme. So we're talking about one a minute." The series will be along the same tone of the original pilot, with a lot less swearing. "But just as much lethal violence, drugs, lunacy really," assures Cliff.

At the same time, the pilot also uncovered some fairly subtle comedy, including the continual persecution of Nigel Havers, and hinting at some of the more disturbing aspects of the character's home lives. One of our favourite sequences, outside of Mark Devlin's rapid decline to an out and out nervous breakdown, is the moment when Jerry asks him about his children.

"Mark Jnr has got a cold," he replies. "And Lucy's got this idea that he's a girl."

The new series promises to deliver a new twist on the old sit com format, with explosions featuring high on the menu. "There's lots of explosions," says Cliff. "We actually have houses exploding and car crashes. We have guns and violence. We've decided that maybe we might reinvent ourselves as Action Comedians! Where you tell a gag, and then you jump out of the flames. Out of the explosion as you say a punch line!" "When we've got enough money," says Dan, "we're going to try and do it live."

So now that the world of telly is beckoning, will they be abandoning the stage forever? "It's weird, because when we first started working together, we originally just wanted to do TV" says Dan. "We kind of only did live stuff in a way to get people to see us, but then we started honing in on our live show." They have already returned to the live stage, with appearances in the Hen and Chickens and Jermyn Street Theatres lined up.

On stage, their seemingly boundless energy and enthusiasm can pull them through what can be well-trodden comedy ground. Reworking old ideas and introducing the strangest twists and turns within the body of fairly conventional sketch ideas, they present tightly structured scenes that often degenerate into extreme conclusions - more often than not, with one of them getting viciously beaten by another. Off stage, they are just as in tune with one another, constantly maintaining eye contact, asking each other for affirmation ("Didn't we?", "Isn't that right?") and often even finishing each other's sentences. There is quite a close bond between the three, with more than just a hint of deprecation thrown in. They are not ones to miss an opportunity to tease each other, and such an opportunity is presented when Adam rings to say hello.

While I'm on the phone to Adam, he tells me that he writes all the material for the boys, that he's really the star, brains and talent behind the outfit. I pass the message on to the other two, and they roll their eyes - "He always says that," says Cliff. It's true - they all always say that. Each of them individually told us the same thing one long night at Late N Live during the 2000 Edinburgh Festival. Repeatedly. Until seven in the morning. Cliff attempts to put the record straight. "Adam writes the words in between the gags. The main punctuation. We come up with the gags. He's great with the semi-colons, that sort of shit." Fair enough.

"We're very lucky because we're such good mates, working together," says Cliff. Dan starts to sob. "It's beautiful. no, we are very lucky. People always ask us do we argue, and we don't, do we. It is mad, actually, every now and again, I'd look over and I'd see Cliff and Adam and I'd think, 'I'm getting paid to come to work, be with my mates, have a laugh, feel really popular.' not everyone gets to do that. We've just got to hope that people like the show, otherwise." Cliff picks up the end of the sentence - "That'll be the one and only time we've done it!" They both start giggling again.

Writing together has never been a problem for the three of them. In the early days, they began writing together by improvising material, or, as Cliff puts it, "we used to 'work shop' everything." "Oh! You sound like a wanker!" yells Dan. "Well, I never wanted to do it," argues Cliff, "it was always you two freaks who put your leg warmers on and say, okay, let's workshop! They used to love it! Leg warmers, jazz shoes, those long t-shirts with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders." These days, they have put their Fame outfits aside and congregate together in Dan's kitchen - Adam smoking, Cliff with his feet up and Dan sitting at the computer. This is an approach that suits Cliff much better than the luminous leg warmers approach. "I prefer to sit down and think about gags and stuff, rather than just bearing all. Even just with these two I'd get embarrassed improvising."

Back to the TV show then. The title for the new series isn't confirmed, as Channel 4 have yet to come up with a suitable title that explains fully what the series is about. The boys are determined to stick with their original title, as Dan explains. "We just quite like Roy Dance Is Dead. Although we totally agree that doesn't say anything about houses. After the first episode, Roy Dance dies, and the title becomes irrelevant."

The three main characters of the show aren't your usual sit com buddies - three loveable likely lads trying to get along in a ker-azy world. The world they inhabit is the back stabbing, cut throat world of Estate Agents, and the situations they find themselves in are more cartoon in effect than any docu-comedy. As such, the three characters are not loveable rogues, but despicable gits. "We were hoping to create something like Blackadder or Alan Partridge where he's really horrible, but you still enjoy watching it," explains Dan, "so hopefully they love to loathe us. And don't loathe to loathe us."

Deciding who got to play which character was something more organic, rather than having summit talks around the kitchen table. Adam plays Mark Devlin, a down trodden, luckless and accident prone man who is continually desperate for a sale. "If you felt sorry for Adam in the Comedy Lab" says Dan, "you'll feel really sorry for him in this. Adam became more and more a loser and more slapstick to a ridiculous extent, really. I mean, he's in a wheelchair for a whole episode. Whereas I was just being me, only really out of order. And everyone kept saying 'where's the line between Dan and Gerry?'" Dan plays Gerry, an egotistical, misogynistic man with quite a healthy drug habit, who is concerned only for himself and his own well being. So it's worrying to think that people might be getting him confused with his character. "So, whereas Cliff won't get recognised at all, I'll be getting slapped by women up and down the country. Because I'm going on a woman slapping tour." Cliff plays Mark England, a hard working conscientious worker with an obsession with the late Roy Dance that stretches well past platonic boundaries.

There is one certain part - excusing the pun - of the series that we are particularly looking forward to, as Dan explains. "I had to do my first ever naked scene, which scared the hell out of me." Say that again? "Full frontal as well." Cliff giggles. "Yeah. Letting the whole lot out." The full Richard Herring then. "That was. it was both surreal and quite liberating." And who wrote that bit? Dan has the grace to blush, "Well, yeah, but. it's very quick. But there were lots of things that we wrote that whilst filming we wondered why the hell we wrote them. Cliff wakes up in bed with a man. Say no more."

"It was alright actually," says Cliff. "By the time we got to film it, the actor who was playing the part, I was sort of cool with him. We'd gone out to the cinema, we'd parked up in the car park there." "You'd given each other your friendship bracelets." "Yeah, I'd met some of his friends and his parents."

Dan grins wildly at the idea. "So Cliff's going to be a gay icon."

Fingers crossed.

Roy Dance Is Dead begins on Channel 4 soon. Check the weekly Comedy Lounge TV and Radio previews for more information.