Gez Foster

"It is really amazing when you watch snails shagging. It's really quite fascinating."

Gez Foster's name may not immediately strike you as familiar, but if you are of a certain age, his face should certainly ring a Saturday Morning Kid's TV Bell. As one third of the sketch group who brought the legendary Men In Trousers to our weekend telly, while working alongside the immortal paring of Jamie Theakston and Zoe Ball, Foster was at the centre of comedy royalty. We joined him for a chat about stuffed dogs, S Club Seven and um snails.

Gez started his comedy life as one of the six members of the Cheese Shop. Their name of choice suggests a certain Monty Python influence, but Gez is quick to clarify. "I wasn't present at the meeting," he insists, "but the fact that we were six middle class blokes who went to university together and the fact that I look slightly like Michael Palin didn't help at all." They met at Warwick University and "in a typically tragic middle class way" started performing sketches together, which soon moved on to a show on the student radio station. Convinced of their imminent launch to stardom, they moved down to London "and struggled away on the dole for a couple of years", before their demo tapes were picked up by the BBC.

They made four radio series for Radio 4, three as the Cheese Shop, and one with a spin-off from their sketch show "Fella's Hour" (presented by Steve Davis although not the Steve Davis, obviously). The sketch shows were recorded around University campuses and were fairly well received, but the fourth series, according to Gez, was "universally hated by the listening public."

After nine years working together they finally broke up. "We basically got sick of each other," he admits, but they have all remained friends. "We're all on very good terms, but collectively we totally ran out of the right sort of energy. There was too many of us, we always knew there were too many of us. We were always waiting for one or other of us to get sick of it. Unfortunately that didn't happen, so eventually we had to break up."

The dynamics of working as part of such a big group obviously began to take it's toll. "When we started off it was great having six of us because we had six lots of ideas floating around but then it started to become a bit of a lumbering democracy. We had this terrible voting system where all these sketches were voted on whether they were good or not. Inevitably we had this tactical voting thing where you'd think, 'I want this sketch through so I'll vote for this person's sketch in the hope that they vote my sketch through' and in the end you end up with mediocrity where somehow all the really funny different stuff gets hidden, and you'll just get the stuff that everyone agrees is just okay. I think we were all pushing in different directions."

Following on from the break up, three of the group Gez along with Ben Ward and Richard Webb took over the comedy slot on Live & Kicking from Trev and Simon, who left the series after an impressive ten year run. They therefore found themselves with some very big shoes to fill. "The first programme we did we were absolutely shitting ourselves. But I suppose you over-exaggerate the importance of it. We thought after today our lives will never be the same again. Clearly this day is going to be the biggest day of our lives. We're going to walk down the street the next day and everyone will be going 'Oh it's them!' which it clearly doesn't work like that in the slightest."

For two series which meant two years they wrote and performed four sketches a week on the live Saturday morning show, often roping in celebrity guests to appear with them. "I'm rubbish with celebrities. I was meeting all these people every week and I was not able to say anything to any of them." Thinking back on the people that appeared with them, he names Meatloaf and Cher as the best performers. "I remember Boyzone ruined a couple of sketches. Linford Christie was pretty bad. Jonah Lomu (the All Blacks rugby player) was spectacularly bad. He was the school rugby captain for the day. But obviously I can't play rugby, he can't act, it's fine! He really went into his shell, he became this little trembling school boy and not in a good way."

Among the recurring sketches were the aforementioned Men In Trousers, and The Krazees, which were a west country 60s pop band, a parody (if such a thing is possible) of The Monkees. "Again we had these illusions that we'd do this one song and then the next day record companies would be ringing up saying give these boys a deal.," he confesses. "We got a few letters from kids asking when it would be released but.."

More recently, Gez has stayed within the realms of children's programming, working as a script writer on shows like SM:TV, Viva S Club ("That was a brilliant job, I really really liked that. I just did it all in one sitting, with a bit of whisky to help me through"), My Parents Are Aliens, Seriously Weird and Don't Eat The Neighbours. As the titles show, the kind of programmes which are now deemed suitable for children are not quite as sweet and innocent as they were in days gone by. He admits that he does enjoy having the opportunity to write on two different levels at the same time, aiming at both children and adults. "I think that's why I like writing for the kids, because you can put those little nasty touches in. There is also an element because it's for the kids that I'm not so stressed about it being artistically brilliant, it kind of frees you up. If you're not worrying about every joke being a brilliant revolutionary joke it's very liberating doing that."

These days, Gez has another distraction snails. The second series of his radio sit com At Home With The Snails was broadcast late last year, and immediately grabbed our attention, as it stood out so dramatically from the usual Radio 4 comedy. Although the characters are, he admits, based on the stereotypical Radio 4 listener, they are to be found at the more extreme end of Home Truths correspondents. The story revolves around a man who slowly becomes totally obsessed with snails, retiring at the end of the first series to live with hundreds of them in the shed at the bottom of his parent's garden, while his father writes a book about his son's obsession. Finally cured of this unique problem, the second series opens with the aftermath of his parent's faked deaths, and their attempts to manipulate their son's increasingly fragile hold on sanity, in order to gain another book deal.

Despite all of this, the story that unfolds is surprisingly touching and gentle, moving at a delicate pace, and probably most surprising of all bringing out the great appeal of snails. Although pleased with how the radio shows were received, Gez is quite frustrated by his inability so far to gain a television cross over. "After I did the first series, we tried to get a bit of a thing going for TV, but we hit a bit of a wall. They seemed to think it was really great, but can't see it working on TV."

Warming to his theme, he continues. "There seems to be this thought that snails are quite difficult to work with, which I don't think is true. I think snails are probably quite easy to work with. They don't move very far. Once you've got a room full of snails, they're not all going to run away. They're going to stay there. Or that snails are slightly unphotogenic, and they'll put people off. Which I don't think is true, I think snails are very beautiful things. Very photogenic. You see a photo or a film of a snail, they're just fascinating. But maybe that's just me."

The show began as a one man stage show, with the main character so obsessed with snails that he has various operations to turn himself in to one. He used a live snail in the show every night, so kept them for a while, resulting in the great observation details that fill the radio show. "It is really amazing when you watch snails shagging, it's really quite fascinating. And then when they have babies, you wake up one day and the aquarium are just full of these rice krispie things."

At the 2002 Edinburgh festival Gez brought up another one man show, whose genesis was equally unusual. "I had this idea about a window box that has a baby inside it, which is a terribly sick idea. That was clearly far too disturbing for a comedy show." The show centres around a vet, who met his girlfriend for the first time when putting her dog down. Meeting up for the first date, he brings along her dog, now stuffed, "as a kind of inept romantic gesture thinking that it will make everything all right". When they move in together, he accidentally kills his girlfriend's hamster, and buries it in the window box. The dog witnesses the hamster crime, and he becomes convinced that the dog is going to give the game away. "It's a crazy play, but it somehow works." After the Festival, he went on perform the play in the Barons Court Theatre in London.

Having performed at the Edinburgh Festival, Gez confesses to being slightly underwhelmed by the current crop of stand up comedians. "I'm not a massive comedy fan. I hate puns, for instance, and probably most people who like comedy like puns, but I can't stand them. I suppose maybe I'm just a bit fussy. When you're doing it for a living you're not really watching it with a fresh mind, you're analysing it a bit too much. Apart from Daniel Kitson I can't think of stand ups who stand out. The trouble with stand up is it seems they're all just doing the same thing. But I don't know whether it's that there's not the scope for them to be doing wildly original thing."

Despite his success so far, Gez does seem surprisingly modest about his career and talents. "There's a lot of people in comedy who aren't actually that funny, and I class myself in that bracket. I think why I'm doing it is because I want to write and I want to perform, and comedy seems to be that kind of area. But I don't consider myself funny enough to be doing it." We'd like to take this opportunity to wholeheartedly disagree.