Will and Greg

“Right. We’re doing some dogging.”

As the order echoes around the bus, Will Andrews and Greg McHugh rise slowly from their lunch, extend apologies and depart to join a group of 15 men as they masturbate outside a car on a grim Glasgow industrial estate. They’ve truly brought this upon themselves.

“It’s surreal hearing people talking about how they’re going to create things you wrote in a wild, sweaty panic eight months ago,” Andrews had earlier marveled.

“They’ve built a Nazi bunker with a revolving wall,” McHugh chips in. “We’ve been watching a guy arrive every morning to paint it.”

This is the final day’s filming of The Incredible Will And Greg, a quick-fire sketch show set to be broadcast on the 31st of this month on Channel 4. Featuring such memorable creations as crazy Dr Frank and pervy tennis coach Bobby Mason, you can catch a sneak preview of Andrews and McHugh playing them and others, their trousers ultimately at half-mast, for another week in the Pleasance Courtyard with their excellent live precursor The Will And Greg Show.

With the two furiously pedalling on exercise bikes as the audience enter the venue, this show is the exhausting culmination of three years' hard work that began with the Rough Cuts new material tryouts at The Stand comedy clubs in Edinburgh and Glasgow. The duo might seem to have lucked out by securing a TV deal before the Fringe (“the most expensive trade show in the world” according to McHugh) but, in reality, this synchronizing of live and recorded output has been carefully coordinated. One of several Fringe shows backed by The Comedy Unit this year, Scotland’s largest independent comedy producer, responsible for the likes of Rab C Nesbitt, Chewin’ The Fat and Still Game, it follows last year’s acclaimed sketch show Ugly Kid. Starring Andrews, McHugh, Susan Calman and Leah McRae, with the addition of Michael Manley, it became the Channel 4 pilot Blowout.

Hired by the Unit in 2004, Andrews' remit quickly became to attract and develop “younger, quirkier” talent from the live circuit, going on to direct McHugh in the Scottish BAFTA-winning Gary: Tank Commander on both E4 and More 4. The camp squaddie appears in the TV show, trying to recruit schoolchildren into the army, for which McHugh reckons “some of the kids' reaction shots will be hilarious.” The programme also features Peep Show’s Isy Suttie and Jim Muir, the man behind the debauched Reverend Obadiah Steppenwolfe III. Having recently made a children’s sketch show for Graham Norton’s So Productions, Zimbabwe-born Andrews now plans to join the Scottish McHugh in London, performing stand-up as his Geordie dole sponging character Tony Carter. Yet both will continue bringing their television sensibilities to live work.

“If you look at Little Britain or even Mitchell and Webb, they, like most TV acts, came through radio,” 28-year-old McHugh observes. “But Channel 4 tend to commission things quite quickly on the basis of being excited about them. We’ve not been through the radio phase, and I’m not sure whether that’s a good or a bad thing, but it’s been quite a leap and so there’s a lot of pressure on us to deliver. Still, I think that in the transition from radio to television, things can get overwritten and become very wordy, whereas we’ve always thought very visually and kept a clear idea of what TV sketch writing is.”

Necessity and directives from their television bosses have become mothers of invention for Andrews and McHugh, especially with the absence of female collaborators in their current Edinburgh offering.

“There’s some telly sketches that you just can’t do live,” 30-year-old Andrews reflects, “such as a baby falling out of a tree. And it’s difficult because we’ve never done a double-act before, we’ve always had others to play with. So a lot of the technical thinking has gone into: how do you tell a story for two people? Mainly though, the process has been exactly the same as Ugly Kid, which is fast, fast, fast, no sitting down, no props or costumes to speak of, no blackouts, just keep going and retain the energy.”

They’ve fashioned a couple of female characters from rubber gloves, which allows them to “do something really odd about domestic violence,” confesses McHugh. The sketch “remains one of my favourites” Andrews admits, “because it can get quite lonely just the two of us.”

Both retain tremendous faith in The Incredible Will And Greg but are wary of “certain vagaries of the Fringe” that could undermine it.

“It’s a real double-edged sword,” says McHugh. “You can create a great buzz with Edinburgh or a damningly negative one.”

Andrews is striving to assert that both shows are “light and friendly, not dark” when our interview is interrupted. “Oh, are we doing some dogging? Imagine someone calling you up and saying, yeah, we need 15 men masturbating outside a car!”