Series writers and actors Joe Wilkinson and David Earl talk about the inspiration behind the series, and getting Craig Cash to play the lead role.

How would you describe Rovers?

Joe: Good Luck, Dave.

David: It's about a group of non-league football fans that support potentially the country's crappest team, that's the long and short of it. They love Redbridge so they're forced together every Saturday before and after the game talking balls about how badly they've played.

Joe: The only thing they've kind of got in common with one another is their bad football team I guess.

How did the idea for the series come about?

David: I was having some cheese and bread with my girlfriend and I said "I might text Joe Wilkinson and see if he fancies trying to write something..."

Joe: So I said 'no'.

David: So I texted Joe and he was up for it, and we just got talking about our favourite sitcoms, and Craig Cash's came up - so we attempted to write a pilot. To begin with it started out as a roadside café, then we turned it into a football clubhouse.

Joe: We basically sort of write about what we know and we've both been obsessed with football our whole lives - it seemed the only thing we know about. We only know about wasting our lives obsessing about football, basically.

It definitely seems like there was a lot of inspiration from real life in the series. Have either of you supported a really terrible football team?

Joe: Well I support Gillingham...

David: We went to watch a lot of non-league football, so we started following a Crawley side and a side near Brighton. They were in the Ryman South, which is like the southern equivalent of the Evo-Stik. We watched quite a few of those games, and made contact with a guy who worked at Burgess Hill FC, so whenever we needed any details of how they do the day-to-day running we'd get in touch with them.

Joe: Yeah and we got into the games for free eventually.

David: Show off.

Joe: That was a big bonus. He was our Wikipedia page, basically.

David: We'd text him randomly on Tuesday morning asking what time the chairman would get in, and he'd go, 'oh, about 1pm'. He basically knew non-league football inside out, so a lot of the inspiration is him and Burgess Hill FC. Except they were doing quite well... Which was annoying.

You've amassed a great cast for the series. What was it like working with such a fantastic comic ensemble?

Joe: They made it so much better than we ever could have hoped. We genuinely had to pinch ourselves that we got who we'd got really.

David: It seems obvious, but we were so desperate to get people on set who made us laugh and it would be so easy to go for second best, but we wanted to get the people on the stand-up circuit who made us laugh, character comedians that made us laugh, so we were over the moon.

Joe: We didn't really realise until afterwards how lucky we were. But, as David said, we didn't settle - it was hard getting good people, but so worth it.

David: And also getting Craig and Sue is ridiculous.

Joe: They're royalty really - I got flustered every time Sue walked on to the set.

How were you able to get Craig in as the lead role and director?

David: We wrote the pilot and, as Craig is one of our heroes, we sent it to him. Amazingly he liked it and he's worked with us on it for the past year or so, and we just kind of kept saying we'd like him to play the part, and we wouldn't let it go...

Joe: We wore him down eventually.

David: We just said, you're the only person we want to play the role of Pete.

Joe: He'd come up with suggestions of other people for the role of Pete. He wanted to direct it but he wasn't sure he could play the lead as well. So he'd suggest someone for the role and we'd say no, and that just went on until he basically crumbled.

Was there a lot of room for improvisation?

David: Not really, because the script was quite tight, but whenever we could we would allow the cast a bit of space to play for a bit.

Joe: Yeah, we got the stuff down on the page and then where there was a chance to improvise there was space. Someone like Steve [Speirs], you can't really stop him. As a character he makes all sorts of these weird noises that you'll see in the show. That was all Steve.

The team is rubbish, and the club has seen better days, but at the same time it's really quite an uplifting series. Why do you think that is?

Joe: It's basically about their lives, it's not about the club. It's not about football really. It's about friendships and stuff. I guess that's why, hopefully, it's uplifting, because they forge friendships. It's not about the team getting relegated - that's hardly the face of it - it's about spending time with these characters. We just wanted to write something where as a viewer you'd want to sit with them. You'd want to sit in that room, talking rubbish, with that bunch of people. We wanted it to be a fun place to hang out. So hopefully that's why there's a bit of joy in it. Because it's just a bunch of wallies talking nonsense.

As well as writing you play the parts of Bruce and Lee in the series. How would you describe them as characters?

David: Well, we wrote them as a two-headed monster. They're a couple of wind-up merchants who dedicate their afternoon to annoying Pete.

As a pair of southerners supporting a northern team, they kind of add a north/south divide to series...

David: We wrote some small parts for ourselves and asked how these two brothers could be involved in this club if it's set up north, so we thought an easy way in would be to bring that conflict in. Plus, neither of us can do accents.

Joe: Yeah it's just another reason for Pete to get wound up by them.

Another clash in the series is how the old-school club comes up against the modern world on a number of occasions. Is that based on any real experience?

Joe: A lot of what people know of football is Premier League: Manchester United, Man City... all that kind of stuff. That's how people perceive it, but this is what most clubs are. Basically 50, 60 people going to the game, no money, players getting paid £20 a week - we wanted to show people that's what real football is. Most of the clubs are in the dark ages because they don't have any money.

David: Our clubhouse set was actually quite nice compared to some of the ones we found when we were scouting around.

Joe: Some of them were too bleak! The bar's a kind of combination of a few we saw, but it's mainly based on where we filmed the exterior stuff, which is a club called New Mills, who strangely had an article in The Independent the other day saying they were officially the worst club of all time. We thought that was quite apt. How many games on the trot have they lost David? Something like 23 or something? Might be more now...

David: Yeah something like that. It's the idea that, I guess, there are only 10 or 12 teams in the country, or maybe the Premier League, that are doing really well for themselves, and all the other thousands of clubs are really struggling. And the fact that you support Gillingham...

Joe: Yeah. Our teams struggle. A lot of it was based on truth - most football fans have a torrid time. That's the truth of it.