Victoria Pile interview

Victoria Pile, creator of Channel 4 comedy series Green Wing, talks to Amy Raphael in The Daily Telegraph.

Pile works with a team of seven writers, but argues that they never set out to imitate the classic American way of writing comedy. "I had a small, hardcore team of sketch writers dating back to Smack the Pony who were interested in writing something with more depth.

"When we started work on Green Wing, we often wrote independently and then pooled ideas. We spent a long time defining the characters and discussing people we knew.

"We had little drawings of the characters so we knew them really well before we cast them."

It's strange to think that when Pile handed in the first series of Green Wing, she was convinced she'd never work in television again. "It's a hard bloody job to make comedy," she says, laughing.