"I read an article in a newspaper about this young guy who had died in Fiji and he was very handsome and he was about my age and I sort of said..." "Or I was thinking, "Gosh, wouldn't it be weird" ""if you'd actually had a really bad sexual experience with that guy" ""and now he's died in this tragic way?" ""Like, what are your resp..." "Like, do you go to the funeral?" ""Do you just tell all your friends, 'I shagged that guy." "He was awful!"'" "And so that sort of was the springboard for the conversation about it." "It was." "And that happened around the time we were working on 'Last Man Standing', and when 'Last Man Standing' didn't go ahead to a second series, we wanted to keep working together and so that was one of the ideas that we developed a bit further" "and here we are today." "Yeah, we had lots of ideas." "We tried out..." "I mean, we had lots of things on the boil." "We always really liked this project and it bubbled along for quite a few years." "We kept getting money for the stages of development, so we got some money from Film Victoria and from Screen Australia and it always just kept inching it forward in increments and then the ABC showed an interest." "On this project, it's hard to define the writing roles really because it was so stop-start, but traditionally our initial roles were always Kirsty edited my scripts." "But we work really impeccably well as a story team together." "So we really like story-lining together " "Sitting down and having meetings about the story and working through that - and then one of us will go away and write." "I mean, we both write bibles and..." "We really write separately." "We don't sit in the same room with our laptops." "One of us will take away an idea, work on it, send it to the other one, the other one will do an edit or make edit notes." "Kirsty's much better at doing edit notes than I am." "I will either just forget or just do them later and then go, "No, it was all pretty good." ""Oh, I hated page 3, but everything else was really good."" "And Kirsty's just got this beautiful editor's brain." "She goes, "Page 6 " ""how about just tweaking that little line to blah, blah, blah?"" "And because we've worked together for about seven or eight years in a writer/editor arrangement," "I trust her editing my work more than I trust anyone." "If she comes back with a big red pen and says a whole page of dialogue doesn't work," "I just, for the most part, say, "Fine."" "And she knows that if I do kick up a fuss over something then a discussion is open." "I was gonna say that - but that's mutual, if you don't agree with my note," "I trust that because I trust your writing." "And I think when we worked together on 'Last Man Standing' so closely that's what became apparent - that we worked really seamlessly together in that, you know, if I needed to pad your material," "of course you get final approval on it as a script, but it kind of meshed in." "So we can sort of..." "We don't have exactly the same style, but it works together when we're actually writing together." "On this show, I've written one episode and Marieke's written the other five and for me, that was quite a big challenge in that I'm not as experienced a writer as Marieke and also... basically I needed to fit..." "I needed to find my own way of writing, but also..." "But it's our style, the way we write." "Yeah." "James Corden and..." "Ruth Jones for this project." "They're the writers/creators of 'Gavin  Stacey' and we're a little bit in love with them." "Yeah, and they seem to have a very similar kind of dynamic as well." "Although I think they actually write together." "I actually think they..." "Apart from that, they've got a very similar dynamic and apart from one of them's a man and one's a woman and apart from the fact they were also in their show, which we are." "And they're much fatter than we are." "They are." "Although with the catering on this show, who knows?" "Anything could happen." "So, yeah, again..." "I mean, it's perhaps trite to say Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant." "I was about to say those" "Because I noticed that in some of the awkward moments in the dialogue." "Ooh." "High praise indeed." "Actually, someone we know that hates Trent's other show 'Review with Myles Barlow' also hates 'The Office' so we just think that he's in good company." "You know, if you hate 'The Office' and something else..." "You just know that, "Oh, wow, I'm as hated as 'The Office'." ""'The Office' is pretty good."" "I'm just trying to think of other..." "There's a show that..." "Anything that Armando Iannucci does - the British comedy producer/director who did 'Alan Partridge' and 'The Thick of It' - most things he does are fairly awesomely brilliant." "And Christopher Morris." "I mean, these are all aspirational." "This show is actually nothing like them." "That's just like saying to someone, "What are your comedy tastes?"" "I don't think we aspire to be like any other writers than ourselves."