This book incorporates primary material consisting of a number of interviews conducted by the author with members of the British terrestrial television comedy industry. This research was funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Grant (Ref: APN19118) and took place in 2005–6. The aim of the interviews was to gain an insight into the working processes of those within the industry and, perhaps more importantly, to capture the ways in which such personnel talk about the work that they do. A full list of the interviewees, with a brief biography of their working career, is provided below.

The interviews were informal in nature and of various lengths, ranging from thirty minutes to four hours. Some took place in workplaces while others were in bars, coffee-shops or the interviewee's home. While I had key questions in mind before each interview, conversations were allowed to develop to take into account interviewees' responses. Holliday notes the difficulties in carrying out such qualitative research, and warns that ‘Researchers must be wary of reducing reality to the “culture” they themselves construct’ (2007: 41). Certainly, others carrying out this research might well have asked different questions, and would no doubt have drawn different conclusions from the data. Their presentation in this book, therefore, is not intended to offer a definitive account of the industry or those who work within it.