Andy Nyman on new Channel 4 comedy Campus

Andy Nyman is particularly good at playing larger than life characters, as anyone who witnessed his diabolical Big Brother producer in zombie show Dead Set will attest...

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...

TV Preview: Campus, C4

Good news, Green Wing is back. Except it's called Campus, it's set in a university and has a completely different cast. But apart from that, Green Wing is sort of back. Hooray!

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.

Campus brims with offensiveness but needs more jokes

Another five episodes of this might be too much for anyone to stomach, but opting for more wilful surrealism over the gratuitously offensive could be one way to go.

Campus to make a first-class debut on Channel 4

Campus, a new TV series produced by Channel 4, is sure to be a hit. Hilarious and fast paced, the comedy is set at Kirke University featuring characters that range from severely neurotic to the mildly stupid.

Filming starts on Victoria Pile's Campus

Filming has started on Campus, writer Victoria Pile's first comedy project for Channel 4 since the Bafta-winning Green Wing.

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.