‘Christians complained about the stuffed buzzard wearing a crucifix round its neck. Birds can’t be Christians, they said. It’s the most complaints we ever got’
The first time I saw what was to become Shooting Stars was Vic Reeves – AKA Jim Moir – doing The Big Quiz during Vic Reeves Big Night Out live. I’d never seen anything like it. It was full of meaningless questions and had an attitude. I remember thinking: “There must be something we could do with that.”
We got lucky. We were doing a Vic and Bob Christmas TV special and thought we might be able to get away with having that “Big Quiz”. It must have had something as the BBC approached us saying: “We think you could do this as a show.”
It was the most intense writing we ever did. We’d sit for hours trying to think up true or false questions, but because we loved it we were happy to give it the time it needed.
Jim put George Dawes, played by Matt Lucas, in the romper suit, but after that, anything you see him wearing was Matt’s choice. We wouldn’t know what he was going to wear or say. He would come to me before filming and say: “At some point, can you ask me if I like going to the cinema?” I never let him tell me what this was setting up. Then we were genuinely in hysterics on the show because we hadn’t heard it before.
