As Anna quite rightly pointed out in her Outnumbered post earlier this morning, the sitcom was something a bit special. Not only did it break a few of the sitcom rules, it also trusted both adult and child actors to improvise. The result was that the show managed to capture some very special moments; the kinds of moments that every family with children experiences every day.

We also received the most comments and feedback about a show we have ever received, which meant that we really  – no, we needed– to talk to the show’s creators, to find out how they managed to make such a winner, and a show that struck a chord with so many people. Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin (the writing team behind Drop The Dead Donkey) were a joy to talk to, and over the jump you’ll read why the thought the show was a success, secrets behind the oh-so-important casting process and what they thought of the scheduling (something that had many of you up in arms). Enjoy!

TVS: Outnumbered received the most comments we’ve ever received about a show. Were you expecting that kind of response?
Guy Jenkin: We were very pleased when we made it, but I’m actually quite surprised at the level of active response the series it’s got – there letters printed in the back of the Radio Times and they said they had received more letters about it than any other programme. I hoped people would like it, but I didn’t think it would be the type of show people would write in about. I think what probably stands out is that it’s not like anything else that has been on TV. When we were finished, we were confident of that. You’ve just got to write what you think is funny and interesting. I think viewers do to, and actually, I think viewers are less conservative than commissioning editors. If you look at things like Father Ted, Ab Fab, One Foot In The Grave, they really weren’t like anything else. I’m laying claim to that sort of high company, but we were looking to do something original.
Andy Hamilton: Hopefully it was an accurate depiction of the bog-standard chaos of family life with small children. It’s a daily rollercoaster. I guess another reason why people like it was because of the children – we didn’t script them ruthlessly. The observational element seemed to be really something that struck a chord. Normally family sitcoms have got these precocious teenagers in them, I guess mainly because they don’t want to run the risk of working with small children!

TVS: The spot-on casting of the children was inherent to the show’s success. So many people told us that they loved the children in the show. How were they found? Was it quite a rigorous casting process?
GJ: It was quite rigorous. More than most shows both the finding the children and the way we worked with them was so integral to the piece you couldn’t separate. We had a very good casting agent who did a very wide trawl, and who tried to avoid the standard stage school kids. We just got them to improvise, and it was a long, long process. Ramona (Marquez) is in one of boy’s classes at school and had never done any acting before. My partner had spotted her and said that she was very confident and singular.
AH: The process was quite a careful one. We had a casting director who saw hundreds of kids, and then we had many sessions where we would sit and improvise with them. It was all about getting to know what they could do and what they were like as people. So it was quite meticulous – we spent about six months working on that before we made a selection.

TVS: What led you to the selection?
AH: We had both felt that, in the past, we had never got a complete, natural child performance, except in a series that I did once called Bedtime. I used my daughter Isabelle in a scene when she was about seven. After a conversation with one of the actors she was going to do the scene with I decided not to show her the lines, and just let her play the thoughts and the sequence of questions. What was great about that was in the middle of a line, she’d rub her nose, get distracted and do all the things that kids do – they hardly look at you or fiddling with something. It looked very natural, and we started to wonder whether this was a way we could work with kids in the future.

TVS: Ramona especially caught the eye, and all the kids’ improvisations clearly caught out the adult actors too. Was that process fun, or daunting because you never knew what the kids were going to come out with next?
GJ: Ramona sometimes did come out with some amazing off-the-cuff stuff. It wasn’t quite as improvised as you’d think. A lot of the stuff that we wrote looked improvised, but we let the children put in their own words. So it was quite fun catching out Claire (Skinner) and Hugh (Dennis). The success of it I think was because the kids were so fantastic, but also down to Claire and Hugh for having that kind of spirit of adventure.

TVS: Series two has been re-commissioned for next year. Another question our readers have been asking is: will it be on in a decent time slot? In an ideal world, would you like Outnumbered to be on in a better, primetime timeslot?
GJ: I’m writing it at the moment. I think we would like it to move forward, mainly because a lot of audience have kids and are knackered at that time of night! It drew a lot of flak for being scheduled at that time, and we were upset by that because when the BBC came to us they said: “we’ve got this 10.30 slot and we’d like to try something”. From the moment we started writing it we knew that was their intention, and we knew that they weren’t going to totally bury it. I don’t think that will happen for the second series.
AH: Yeah, we both hope that the second series would be on a more congenial slot. The reason, as Guy hit upon, was because it was Peter Fincham’s scheduling and he wanted to make it an ‘event’. I think he was worried that it would get a bit lost in a primetime slot. He wanted to use the scheduling to draw attention to it. The only danger, when you compress it like that over consecutive days, is that it’s over before word-of-mouth can make it a real break-out success. The other problem for new comedies is that if you put them in a primetime slot, ITV may put something really big against you. Nowadays, and it’s a sad fact of modern telly, is that you’re only as good as your last overnight viewing figure. If it’s not decent, all the good reviews won’t save you. So as a way of gently nursing us into it, it was fine. But we’d love it to be a big, accessible show.

Read more of our Top 50 stuff here.