Actor Jonathan Coy - who you may have seen in Longitude, Downton Abbey and Hornblower - is no stranger to the Bloomsbury Group and the era, having played Harold Nicholson in high-profile TV drama Mosley. He explains: "My character in Gloomsbury is married to Myriam Margolyes's character and he's based on Harold Nicholson, who was a member of the Bloomsbury set and a sort of friend of the famous. His lasting achievement was his political diaries of that period because he was close to Churchill and a lot of the other big political figures of the day."

"I'd actually played Harold Nicholson in a drama written by Lawrence Marks and Maurice Gran about Oswald Mosley. Like many aristocrats of the day, Nicholson was quite right-wing and he supported Mosley at the beginning of his career but when Mosley started to get more extreme Nicholson backed away. So he was very much in the mix of high political and literary society at the time."

How different was it playing a spoof version of Harold Nicholson? "The fun about these versions of the characters is that Henry and Vera are like Harold and Vita in that they had this famously open marriage, where they had liaisons with members of the same sex, but actually the marriage was obsessively loving. They wrote hundreds and hundreds of letters to each other. There's fun to be had with the fact that half the time they're trying to be terribly open and modern and bohemian yet underneath that they can't resist obsessive jealously because they absolutely adore each other!"

"Other characters come and go in their life but there's a determination for them to stay together. They ultimately see off all these terrible characters like Lollipop and Venus and write letters and go into the garden together - it's really rather sweet."

In addition to a prior knowledge of the subject matter, Jonathan was attracted to Gloomsbury by the quality of the writing. He explains: "It's so richly funny and Sue Limb's scripts are brilliant pastiches of these characters and their work, written from a very good knowledge of the real works and done with a lot of learning behind it."

"Radio is still a medium where the writer is celebrated and variety is celebrated. People think it's easy because they think you just have to turn up and read the lines but actually to do it properly needs a lot of energy and dexterity. You have to get into the material and bring out what's in there with just what you sound like and without the help of clever camera angles. It's down to you and the words and one of the main things that we love about our work is that we love words and we have a great respect for the people who write them."