TV Preview: This Is Jinsy

On Guernsey there is an ancient bylaw which states what you must do should an injustice occur anywhere on the island. First you kneel down and say the Lord’s prayer backwards in Breton French before all work is immediately suspended to allow the courts a chance to address the injustice. This is also the place where post-boxes are blue. When you watch five minutes of the unapologetically daft This Is Jinsy, Sky Atlantic’s first original British comedy series, you won’t be amazed to hear that the men behind the show grew up as friends on the Channel Islands.

As well as conceiving the series, Justin Chubb and Chris Bran appear in various guises throughout (as pigeons, town reporters or folk ‘dribblers’) while playing the two chief characters. Chubb is the Art Garfunkel-haired and white glove-wearing Arbiter Maven while Bran is his slightly cynical beige-suit wearing underling, Operative Sporall. From the Great Tower both men monitor Jinsy’s 791 inhabitants through an intricate surveillance system known as ‘the tessellators’ (of which there are 1067).

Among the island’s mainly woollen-wearing peoples are short-sighted handywoman Susan Noop, Dickensian lawyer Trince permanently damp from the stalactites he works under, and local gossip Mrs Goadion whose dress exactly matches her wallpaper. In all, it’s the most surreal TV display of offshore lunacy since a bunch of Irish priests ran amok on Craggy Island. While Chubb and Bran eventually fled for London to pursue their showbiz dreams, they haven’t forgotten those roots, returning in June to talk about the show at the Guernsey Festival of Comedy.

But Bran is quick to point out that none of the islanders should be worried about being cast in a negative light. “It’s based on an island and some of the character surnames are actual Guernsey names but none of the characters are based on anyone we know there,” he says. Which is a shame. You’d love to imagine that there’s a real Tracee Henge out there forecasting the weather in fabled language or a trio of flouncing balladeers called Fook And The Girl singing folky obits in honour of the recently deceased.

Whether this is the new League of Gentlemen or Father Ted or Mighty Boosh or Smell Of Reeves And Mortimer (you may spot elements from all of those shows), it’s the array of cameos that will have the curious tuning in. For episode one David Tennant plays the plastic surgery-obsessed wedding planner Mr Slightlyman and in the second instalment Peter Serafinowicz is Eric Dunt, a ruthless cupboard salesman who attempts to convince Jinsy’s populace that he is actually the island’s mystical ruler, The Great He.

Later episodes feature Catherine Tate as Roopina Crale, the Chief Editor for Glove Hygiene Monthly magazine and KT Tunstall as bearded folk singer Briiian Raggatan, while Harry Hill repositions himself as the new Stanley Baxter with regular appearances as the island’s punishment administrator Joon Boolay.

Was cobbling together such an array of A-List British talent a case of calling in a few favours or were some rather compromising photographs in your possession? “We were very lucky that the [BBC3] pilot had a nice response,” notes Chubb. “Harry Hill wrote to us to say he’d really liked the show and if we did get a series he might be interested in doing something with us, and we thought ‘oh, great’. Other people were approached with scripts and it helped that a pilot episode already existed and gave people something to see. They just thought it would be fun to play these colourful characters but we were amazed that so many fantastic people were keen to be in it.”

Having their visions realised with a full series is not a tale of overnight glory. As kids, Chubb and Bran messed around with Super-8 cameras, tape decks and a very scratched BBC sound effects record to made small films, radios shows and animations, partly based on a love of The Goons and Monty Python. When they left the island for the big city it was primarily to play in bands (Bran once drummed for Dreadzone) though Chubb moved into writing plays. Bran kept a camera in his hand to make music promos for Radiohead, Portishead and KT Tunstall (her appearance is probably the sole example of calling in that favour), while also directing a short film for Live Earth.

But the pair never stopped working together and the BBC3 pilot episode of This Is Jinsy was eventually picked up and shown last year, nabbing itself a nomination on the Rose D’Or best sitcom shortlist losing out to The Inbetweeners. Further to the pair’s disappointment, the pilot failed to lead to a full series but when their BBC commissioning editor Lucy Lumsden left to become Sky’s comedy tsar, she happily took the boys with her.

The triggering of a full series and a tough deadline meant a sudden flood of work landed in their laps. “We had to write eight episodes in five months and record about 30 different songs and music cues so it all became a bit intense,” recalls Bran. “But it was brilliant to have that opportunity and we had a lot of stupid fun around that.”

The absurdity of This Is Jinsy may well be the ideal antidote to these recession-led times allowing some people to disappear into a fantastical universe. “We were just trying to make a programme that amused us and we hoped that other people with a broad sense of humour would like it,” reckons Chubb. “We try to have a logical series of philosophical ideas behind the stories and concepts. Albeit in a silly way.”

● This Is Jinsy begins on Sky Atlantic on Monday, 10.10pm.