James Bachman and Mark Evans have between them worked on an awful lot of the British television comedy output of the last five years. Many of which have since been cancelled (though they claim this is merely a coincidence). But recently, they have felt the need to return to the stage, to dance about like idiots for our amusement. Comedy Lounge went to meet them, and ask them why.

James (the one who looks a bit like Alan Davies) and Mark (the one who doesn't) have just returned from their first joint show at the Edinburgh Festival, and they're quite pleased with the results. Having spent the past few years writing jokes for other people, they decided earlier this year to bring a show up to the Festival, to, as Mark puts it, "get back into being comedians again. We've spent the last four years writing for other people and not doing stuff ourselves. We've never done a show together."

James: "I love Edinburgh, I love going to see stuff, which I think is actually quite rare, with the performers that I know."
Mark: "I don't. I love Edinburgh and I love drinking until 4 in the morning and then going home and weeping about my shit life. It's great."

The show they brought up was the imaginatively entitled 'Hmm.' (although they initially toyed with the idea of calling the show 'Err.', as in 'Can I have a ticket for err.?'), the basic premise of which was that both Mark and James are bored, but for complicated reasons have in their possession a nuclear bomb. One of the main incentives for taking the leap back in to live performing, explains James, was because "we know loads of producers and people from all the work we've done and we wanted to show those people that we're not just writers. It's a bit cynical but also just reassessing what we're doing. No, that sounds a bit wanky. Just getting back on stage and going Hey! This is what we like doing, do you remember?" "Reassessing our professional goal orientation?" suggests Mark. "Is that what you meant James?" "Yes, that is what I meant. You arse."

They chose an interesting year to make their debut at Edinburgh, as this year's Festival seemed to be the Chinese Year of the Double Act. They tried to see some of the other double acts, but most of the double act shows seemed to be coincidentally scheduled at the same time as their own - the standard 'double act' slot was this year between 5.30 and 7.30pm. "As a double act, you're only one step up from sketch shows as being the lowest of the low," says James. "It's the hardest thing to make anyone take any notice of. Because everyone's thinking hey they're a crazy zany double act!" "Most double acts do the same thing all the time," agrees Mark, ticking off a list on his fingers. "There's bickering. There's 'You're shit.' 'No, I'm not.' 'Yes, you are.' There's possible some homo-erotic tension of you're a male double act." "And," finishes James, "there's always You're Ruining My Lovely Song."

On stage, it is not immediately obvious who is the more dominant half of the partnership, as like most modern double acts, it lacks the strict definition between straight man and fool that earlier double acts had. In the show, the punchlines seemed to be shared fairly evenly between the two characters, with James perhaps holding the edge because he looked slightly less like an accountant. Off stage however, there is a more emphasised difference between them. During the interview, James tends to ramble on seriously about comedy, dissecting techniques and styles, while Mark whispers asides into the tape recorder, some of which we only heard when transcribing the interview the following week. "Just nod," he whispers at one stage, "he's in one of these moods again."

Mark: "James and I have very different opinions about things. I'm a workaholic nervous neurotic idiot."
James: "And I'm a lazy bastard. But I have ideas. I am in some sense the intellectual driving force."
Mark: "That is such a lie."

Back to Edinburgh. "We had a couple of dreadful nights," says Mark, "a couple of nights that really made me question why I was doing Edinburgh, why I wanted to ever go on stage and why it was ever funny to do what we were doing. But I managed to achieve my ambition which was to go up and get drunk every night and not actually put on three stone. I gained a little bit of weight over Edinburgh but lucky the hills and running around on stage for an hour a night managed to keep me slightly less fat than I might have been."

They protest strongly against the suggestion that Edinburgh was something of an elaborate audition for them. "It struck me about the summer of last year," says James, "I thought, what am I doing? We're doing well paid jobs, but writing unfulfilling. not being comedians, really. We're just writing light entertainment. I'd quite like to go back to jokes again. And proper comedy. We didn't start out as writers, we started out as writer performers, doing our own stuff."

James: "But I left university, what, 8 years ago?"
Mark: "You left in 94."
James: "Seven years ago. So I've been working properly for the last 3 or 4 years. I don't know what the hell I did with the three years before then." Mark:
"Yeah, I've been out of university for eight years. Hang on, I've earned my living - I can prove it - for the last four years. What did I do for four years?! Where did that bit of my life go?"

Legend has it that they started writing together when Mark was offered five hundred pounds to write treatments for a Spice Girl cartoon series and asked James to give him a hand because "he couldn't write and stare longingly at pictures of Geri Halliwell at the same time". The cartoon never saw the light of day, but it set them on their chosen career path. Naturally, this particular career choice met with some obstacles. "We had to put up with our parents going, 'Oh come on it's just a hobby' and being disappointed that we weren't going to the city or something," says James. "Which was particularly bad for my parents", agrees Mark, "because at that time my brother wanted to be a poet. So I was by default almost an accountant."

Their first big television break was working on Channel 5's The Jack Docherty Show in 1998. "We loved that," says Mark. "We really really enjoyed that because the atmosphere was great, everyone was great to work with. We really liked working with Jack who is great. For some odd reason he decided to really like us and trust us." "Maybe" suggests James, "that odd reason was because we are good."

Mark: "James likes Indie music. I like war."
James: "Mark, Indie music is a sort of catch all term."
Mark: "Yeah, I know. So's war."

The show had already been running for two years by the time James and Mark came on board, and they worked on it for the last six months of it's run. Mark explains that "after about a year and a half" of working on the show, Docherty had gone "a bit mental." "And so it was a fantastic atmosphere!" agrees James. "We'd have meetings and he'd be lying on the floor going [waving hands in the air], "Yeah, go on, do it!" and the producer would be saying "I'm not sure about this", but he'd be going, "I think it's funny, do it, it's fine". So we could actually get away with doing anything we wanted, as long as he liked it." "And that's why the Jack Docherty show was so much fun," says Mark, "because we were able to find out what works and more often than not what doesn't work. And we were allowed to do all these really loony ideas. Oh, *loony* ideas. I sound like a twat."

Mark's proudest achievement to date was writing the script for the Miss World pageant, a job that sounds a hell of lot more ostentatious than it was. "All I remember is that it was all glamorous locations for the ceremony and it was written by a slightly shabby man in a t-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, hunched over a computer for two days over a weekend - which was all the time I had to do it - in a freezing cold flat with a heater, going write jokes, write jokes, write jokes!" he laughs. "But I did get a review in the Daily Mirror saying that it was a whole new angle on the whole thing, saying it was extremely sardonic, and very post-modernly sarcastic about the whole thing. And I thought, good. That's me. I did that."

More recently, they both worked on the last series of The 11 O'Clock Show, where James says he "spent basically all the time I could on the internet, or under the table." They were also the two of six writers on the Ant and Dec Saturday evening vehicle, Slap Bang. "That was great because they're really good, and they do the material real justice and there was loads of really solid joke writing to do. It was really good fun."

Mark: "James is very influenced by Lisa Riley on You've Been Framed."
James: "I think she is excellent. What she does is combines the joy of Beadle without the withered hand. How much better can you get?"

The next big project they are working on is the BBC 2 sit com, Ed Stone Is Dead, designed to be Richard Blackwood's next vehicle in his bid to become Britain's answer to Will Smith. Richard plays Ed Stone, who is accidentally killed by Death, but as he's not supposed to die for another seven years, he's allowed to stay on earth for those extra years. "He's kind of like a zombie," James explains. "But without the falling off body parts." They describe it variously as a "sort of drama with sit com elements", "Friends without the laugh track", "a bit of Buffy." and "To The Manor Born, with a lot of Bless This House in it." Having written two of the thirteen episodes, and had a hand in both the plotting and the casting of the other episodes, they admit to being quite nervous about how it will turn out. "There are so many elements that have to work to make these things work. The casting, acting, directing, editing, music, writing. it's got to go out at the right time. it could be a disaster and it would actually be no one's fault. You just can't tell." James draws parallels between this and what recently happened to Attention Scum. "I hope that doesn't happen to us. that if the first episode doesn't get a huge audience, it doesn't then get relegated to two in the morning."

As to the future live performances, they are not ruling out a return to Edinburgh next year. "If you'd asked me three days after Edinburgh, I would have hit you," says Mark, "but I think we will return. I think we're going to try and do something different. If we said our ideas now you'd say 'That's ambitious', and you'd be absolutely right. We'll just abandon that because it's too hard. We'll do something shoddy."

James: Oh come on, we had that conversation, don't you remember? You know, when you cried? You were very open? We admitted to our strengths and weaknesses? I was very strong and you were very weak.
Mark: James, as I pointed out, I wasn't there, and you can persuade a tramp to do almost anything for one can of cider.

Find out more about Bachman and Evans at www.infinitemonkeys.co.uk