By way of an introduction

For every 'Fast Show', 'Big Train' and 'Little Britain' there must be hundreds of similarly talented folk out there who met at Uni, did a bit of Python recital in the campus theatre and sent jokes in to Radio 4's topical weekly comedy shows to relieve the dull tedium of their first office jobs. Well, here's one of them, now frankly too old to be 'discovered' and with a chequered and murky past behind him. But he's my friend and he's asked me to do the intro for his new blog, so here it is in the form of an interview.

So who are you?
DAVE: A member of a washed up comedy collective.
Me: You've washed up today?
DAVE: It's Wednesday.
Me: Of course.
DAVE: Wednesday's washing up day.
Me: How long have you all known each other?
DAVE: I met Si (SIMON HOLLAND) at Cardiff University. There were no English educational institutions large enough to take his ego, so he came to Wales. It was all a clerical error. I should have gone to Cambridge, but there was a mix up on the train. I bet my rightful place taking the applause at the Footlights was taken by some Civil Engineering student called Emlyn Boyo instead.
Me: I see you're a genius at character names.
DAVE: They just come to me like that (clicks fingers).
Me: It's a gift.
DAVE: And a curse. At the same time.
Me: What happened after Uni?
DAVE: I lived in Simon's parent's house in Peterborough after University when I'd discovered there were no actual jobs in Wales.
Me: They'd just closed the mines, hadn't they?
DAVE: Yeah. I'd bought the helmet and everything.
Me: I understand you kept the lamp though didn't you?
DAVE: Yeah. Until it ran out of midnight oil.
Me: Is that why you stopped writing your sit-coms?
DAVE: No, I stopped writing when everyone told me my novel was crap.
Me: You mean your portmanteau of hilarious interconnected short stories? Now what for the love of God was it called?
DAVE: Welsh Rarebits.
Me: Welsh Rarebits! Of course! How could I have forgotten? Way ahead of it's time.
DAVE: Well, eighteen months ahead of it's time. I'm sure they copied my idea for Trainspotting.
Me: They just set it in Scotland, instead of Wales.
DAVE: Bastards. Irvin Welsh's Rarebits, it should have been called.
Me: Actually you tried to make a film of it twice, but you found it 'unfilmable', in a Proust, or Joseph Heller novel kind of way.
DAVE: No, we found it unfilmable in a couldn't find anyone to be arsed to do it kind of way.
Me: What was the first thing you all worked on together?
DAVE: 'Talgarth Times', our little in-house newspaper. It was on pink paper I nicked from work. More like toilet paper really. Very incestuous humour, just about us and our friends. Soft, strong and very, very long.
Me: This was when you'd all moved in together?
DAVE: Yeah, we were all working in London and rented this big house. That's when my wife-to-be came down to one of our parties. I chatted her up all evening and then sent her a Talgarth Times mentioning how we'd "copped off with each other".
Me: You silver-tongued devil.
DAVE: Well, it did the trick didn't it?
Me: So this would have been the original Talgarth Trousers lot?
DAVE: Yeah, but we weren't Talgarth Trousers then.
Me: Talgarth Garters?
DAVE: Talgarth Knickers. No, we were just Talgarth really.
Me: Where did the name come from? Talgarth's Welsh isn't it?
DAVE: Well I was only really prepared to live in London if it was somewhere Welsh-sounding. We were right by the Hammersmith flyover, by these big old houses with incredible windows.
Me: There was actually a shot of Talgarth Road in 'Trainspotting', wasn't there?
DAVE: Yeah, I know! They definitely nicked it from me. Perhaps one of them sold it to Irvin.
Me: This would have been when?
DAVE: About 1990-ish.
Me: And when did the videoing start?
DAVE: Well, every time we went anywhere our house mate Richard (RICHARD DORNAN) used to video it. He worked for Croydon Cable and they had this local channel. We were their only subscribers and this local channel would take anything, honestly.
Me: Literally anything?
DAVE: They were desperate for material to fill it up, and Richard was working for them so they started using our stuff. We called it Talgarth Shorts, because we lived on the Talgarth Road and we drank a lot of whisky.
And so when did it become Talgarth Trousers?
DAVE: Well, of course, once Live TV had seen 'A Skinful of Talgarth' they thought 'Christ, this lot are bleedin' brilliant- offer them two six-part series this instant!'
Me: Are you going to do your Janet Street-Porter impression?
DAVE: Do you think it will come over in print?
Me: Did Janet Street-Porter commission the series?
DAVE: Would that it were so, but no. We never met her actually. So we did Talgarth Trousers. The only problem was that Live TV's audience share was even smaller than Croydon Cable's. Even we couldn't receive it - couldn't afford the dish.
Me: And then Channel Four?
DAVE: Yes... Well Sadie decided she'd send some of our Cable stuff to Channel Four when they used to put rubbish on in the middle of the night.
Me: They put rubbish on all day now, don't they?
DAVE: True, but back then they didn't and I thought it was too good for them.
Me: And you did a pilot for Channel Four as well?
DAVE: Channel Four had six comedy pilots made and we were one of them. We were actually paid quite serious money for it as well. We were called Talgarth Pants. And we were, really. They went with this awful thing about a mad Irish priest instead.
And then came..?
DAVE: Erm... 'Hammersmithed'. We did two series for Live TV and we really thought, you know, we'd made it. But when we did the Talgarth Pants pilot it had been more of a sit-com set up, and I thought we could expand on that.
Me: In a portmanteau-like interconnected sort of a way?
DAVE: Shut up. So we started writing a thing based on ourselves. We were each other. We were caricatures of each other.
Me: You were each other's caricatures.
DAVE: But then the rest of them stole my great idea and butchered it.
Me: I understood that it was such a little idea that even after butchering it, it hardly amounted to a snack.
DAVE: So I went through this hell where I saw my idea being butchered and watered down at the same time. Like the reddish dribble you get when you defrost a joint. So I wrote 'Hammersmithed'.
Me: Which bore more than a passing resemblance to 'Talgarth Daze'.
DAVE: Only funnier, wittier... And without the word 'Talgarth' in the title.
Me: You should have called it 'Talgarthed'.
DAVE: Uum. So some of us made that. But Simon wouldn't touch it with a bargepole.
Me: Do you think you'll all get together again to do something?
DAVE: Seriously, it's impossible. It's easy to think we were all this big solid group of friends doing all this stuff for a long time, but actually you know, there were endless fractures.
Me: Fractures?
DAVE: Tom went to Hollywood.
Me: Didn't they do 'Relax'?
DAVE: I mean Talgarth was an umbrella under which a lot of different talents sheltered, but there were different people under it at different times.
Me: That's beautiful! You should write a book about it. 'Talgarth Umbrella'.
DAVE: Or a musical - "Les parapluies de Talgarth".