MARC GRACIE IS CO-PRODUCER AND DIRECTOR

"Tim and I had worked together when I set up UNREAL TV for Network TEN. I was in the middle of Sit Down Shut Up and Tim came to me with this idea having pitched it to TV1. "We decided to develop it using Chris Thompson who wrote a great first episode, which is when we felt we had something more than an idea because the gestation of the project was only very short. Now we’re shooting after the project only being thought of about eight months ago."

THE CASTING PROCESS

"The basis of the show is drama so we didn’t particularly have to have people who were funny per se. In fact the cast has ended up as actors not comedians. Even Michael Veitch who would be perceived more as a comedian has acted quite a bit post Fast Forward. "In fact I thought the casting process was going to be much more difficult than it was. The scripts were so strong and the characters were so defined already that once a number of good actors read the scripts it was just honing in on that. Also it helps just working in a media based show because most of the actors understand those characters. They get it. I think that made it easier in finding them. "The way the characters evolved was interesting. I’ll use Ruth Sharp as an example - she was a character whom we explored more and more. She’s strong and represents the 80s more than the others. We knew very early on that we had to make the other characters quite believable and three dimensional so we couldn’t impose too much of that satire on them. The Ruth character is essentially a two dimensional character which is why you can impose all that wardrobe and the lingo and the ‘greed is good’ stuff on her character. We’re lucky Fiona is so fantastic at almost being two dimensional. "It was an extremely hard-working unit. Everybody was thinking about two episodes every week, which is extraordinarily difficult in a directorial sense as well. It’s very tiring to go from one to the other within a week and the cast and crew really handled that exceptionally well. They are extremely professional people right down to Tom who is only 18-years-old! He’s actually the most professional young actor I have ever worked with."

THE LOOK

"It was a very fine line. Like the characters we wanted to define the 80s in the show but we didn’t want to tip it over the line so the show lost its realism in a character/drama sense. There was a lot of discussion with the designer, Carrie Kennedy who had previously done THE DISH. She embraced the period very well. We knew that we couldn’t go too far in an overall sense although we did bring things in like huge mobile phones and the first computers. "You may just get a pastiche of the 80s there but then you get involved in the characters and in the comedy and the drama. "We were well aware we were making the first fully-blown, comedy-drama show for Australian cable, so it had to have a certain quality about it. It’s been shot like drama too. Shows like Frontline, which in some ways is our predecessor, have that sort of doco, under fluorescent light feel to them. It is a way to make a show cheaply and easily but we didn’t want it to look like that. We spent a lot of time and energy to deliver a glossy looking show."

MARC GRACIE - MINI BIOGRAPHY

Gracie’s television comedy credits include Acropolis Now, Totally Full Frontal, Jimeon and Comic Relief as well as feature film directorial nods for The Craic, Crimetime and A Kink in the Picasso.