Interview: Andy Nyman ('Campus')

Channel 4's new surreal comedy series Campus has plenty to live up to as many are already tipping the university-based sitcom to be the next Green Wing. Helmed by Victoria Pile (Smack The Pony, Green Wing), the show is a definite relation to the madcap hospital series. We caught up with the programme's leading man, Ghost Stories co-creator Andy Nyman, to find out more about the show.

Coming from the makers of the the superbly surreal and absurd Green Wing, the show [Campus] about the fortunes of staff at the troubled Kirke University certainly sounds promising and features top talent such as Andy Nyman and Will Adamsdale.

However, judging by the short teasers currently being screened between scheduled programmes it's about as funny as a man with a loudhailer and a girl accidentily locking herself to a bike rack.

Oh, wait a minute, did you just say those are the funny bits Channel 4 is trying to sell it with? Oh dear.

Andy Nyman interview

Actor and magician Andy Nyman plays Jonty de Wolfe, a deranged university Vice Chancellor...

Not before time, the creator of Smack the Pony and Green Wing, Victoria Pile, is returning with a new comedy. Campus, set in the fictional Kirke University, will screen on Channel 4 from 5 April. The semi-improvised sitcom piloted on the channel's Comedy Showcase in 2009 when it attracted good reviews and a smattering of criticism for describing Stephen Hawking as a "famously disabled spastic" in the first minute. I've now seen the first two episodes and can confirm that that joke, from David Brent-esque vice chancellor Jonty de Wolfe (Andy Nyman), has made the cut, but there is still much to appreciate in Campus. Like Green Wing, the hour-long episodes have a surreal, stop-start momentum, a woozy soundtrack from Jonathan Whitehead and a familiar cast of characters: lecherous lecturer Matt Beer and bespectacled spod Imogen Moffatt are already set to be the show's Guy and Caroline. Watch out, too, for the administrative office, staffed by rising stars Sara Pascoe and Will Adamsdale.

Tuesday, Radio 4: Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker hosts comedy panel show So Wrong It's Right, with guests Victoria Coren, David Mitchell and Rufus Hound, signing off with his catchphrase, "go away!". Thursday, Channel 4: Brooker hosts comedy panel show You Have Been Watching, with guests Victoria Coren, David Mitchell and Andy Nyman, signing off with his catchphrase, etc. Shamefully, no explanation was given - although panel show fans are known to find change disturbing - for Hound's absence.

Finally, Channel 4's Comedy Showcase returns - essentially The X Factor for sitcoms. Every week there's a new pilot, with the most popular being commissioned for a whole series - before, presumably, having a nervous breakdown and being admitted to the Priory.

First up for the phone vote was Campus - the new project from the Green Wing team: essentially Green Wing but set in a red-brick university, not a hospital. The show is already so well-formed that finding it having to audition for a series seems bizarre - like Patti Smith turning up to an X Factor audition in Cardiff, and doing Piss Factory to a gob-smacked Simon Cowell.

The writer/director/producer Victoria Pile has two trademark techniques: creating worlds where a horrible, dark surreality keeps oozing through the cracks; and characters who take childlike gestures to extremes - walking past a shelf and pushing all the books off with a triumphal air, stealing lipstick from a handbag and putting it on during a conversation, shouting "Shut!" at a door that's already shutting.

Although, like Green Wing, Campus works as an ensemble of freaks, perhaps the most intriguing mutant is Vice Chancellor Jonty de Wolfe (Andy Nyman). Initially, he looks like the weakest character - a small, bumptious David Brent clone who keeps attempting Jamaican patois to make a point. But by the end of the show he has turned into a more sinister version of the shopkeeper in Mr Benn - wandering around the library in a floor-length taffeta ballgown, urging depressed students to commit suicide and, on one occasion, simply disappearing in the middle of a monologue, as if it were a Las Vegas floor-show, leaving his English lecturer Matthew Beer (Joseph Millson) holding a madly clattering clockwork monkey, and his jaw.

The 2007 Comedy Showcase resulted in series commissions for The Kevin Bishop Show, Plus One and Free Agents, from which The Kevin Bishop Show has made it to a second series - making it very much the Leona Lewis of the enterprise. But Campus is far superior stuff to Kevin Bishop. It makes Kevin Bishop look like ... David Sneddon. Campus - it's a yes from me. I'm putting you through to Boot Camp.

The comedy taster series has yielded successes such as The Kevin Bishop Show and Free Agents, and Campus already looks a racing certainty for development. Created by Victoria "Green Wing" Pile, this unveils another cast of freaks who have somehow come to be employed in an ostensibly respectable institution, in this case, a redbrick university. Glory-mad vice-chancellor Jonty DeWolfe (Dead Set's Andy Nyman) presides over priapic English professors and incompetent administrators, while the influences of The Office and A Very Peculiar Practice loom large, but not distractingly so. Could prove unpleasantly great.

This strand dedicated to showcasing up-and-coming comedy talent returns for a second series. In Campus, the first of seven one-offs, a selection of vaguely familiar faces (among them Andy Nyman from E4's zomcom Dead Set) assume the roles of staff working at the fictitious Kirke University. Written by some of the team behind Green Wing, Campus is dark but only mildly funny.

This is the series where Channel 4 kicks some fledgling sitcoms out of the nest to see which ones will fly. The Kevin Bishop Show, Plus One and Free Agents all came out of 2007's try-outs and I'd put money on Campus getting the green light - especially as it's set in Kirke University (motto: "With Wings").

It feels like Green Wing Goes To College, because it was made by that show's creator Victoria Pile and her team. Like Green Wing it has that same air of institutionalised in-breeding about it and is backed by another distinctively woozy soundtrack by Trellis.

There are some very funny moments but the staff at Kirke are perhaps a little too eccentric for their own good. It's as if the challenge was how weird can we make these people and still have them breathe oxygen?

Vice-chancellor Jonty (Andy Nyman) comes on like a more megalomaniac David Brent, while womanising English lecturer Matt Beer (think about it) and speccy maths star Imogen Moffat (Joseph Millson and Lisa Jackson) have big shoes to fill if they're to be Campus's answer to Guy and Caroline.

How many misfits does it take to run a university? Should this question ever pop up in the miscellaneous round of a pub quiz somewhere in Weirdchester, you'll be grateful for having watched Campus, the new show conceived by Victoria Pile and the team behind Green Wing and Smack The Pony.

At the show's heart is chief misfit Jonty de Wolfe. Played by Andy Nyman, the megaphone-wielding, peppermint tea-sipping Vice Chancellor turns kooky, quirky and crass up to eleven. Joseph Millson (Casino Royal) is lecherous literature lecturer Matthew Beer, and Dolly Wells (Star Stories) takes a marvellous turn as a behind-the-scenes worker nicknamed "the big shit" as a schoolgirl. "Because I was a big shit," she explains, "and also because I do big shits."

Campus is set in the fictitious Kirke University and looks every bit the "ensemble comedy". The camerawork is jittery without irritating, and the writers have conjured a veritable symphony of comic characters. On the evening the show was introduced with no little wryness as "not the Green Wing set in a university." Derivative? Perhaps. But I'd be happy to watch the Green Wing set anywhere, thanks very much.