The stars of Outnumbered are the children who perform without a formal script

OUTNUMBERED, the hugely popular, semi-improvised BBC1 sitcom about the chaotic Brockman family which returns this week for an eagerly awaited third series, was summed up by a recent headline: "Daddy, I Made Up the Jokes!"

Sure, the two actors portraying the harassed parents – Hugh Dennis (who plays Pete) and Claire Skinner (Sue) – are terrific. But the real stars of the show are the trio of young performers – 14-year-old Tyger Drew-Honey (who takes the role of Jake), ten-year-old Daniel Roche (Ben) and nine-year-old Ramona Marquez (Karen) – playing their three offspring. Every time they appear, the kids run away with the scene. And, as the aforementioned headline indicates, what makes the youngsters' performances even more impressive is the fact that they are almost entirely improvised.

Before each sequence, the directors of the show, Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin, simply explain to the children the basis of the scene, ignite the fuse, and then retreat to watch the fireworks explode. This off-the-cuff approach imbues the youngsters' performances with a genuine spontaneity.

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For instance, in the first episode of the new series, eight-year-old Karen is left to riff on the significance of wishes. "I used to believe in wishes," she muses, "but then my wish about Ben and the hyenas didn't come true ..."

The Scotsman is visiting the set of Outnumbered during the lunch break at the south London house where the sitcom is filmed. Downstairs, the open-plan kit-chen is carnage. It is a fallout zone strewn with discarded cereals packets, green plastic dinosaurs, empty egg boxes, half-eaten biscuits, grey hippo figurines, and soft toys that have very much seen perkier days. Sue is frantically rushing round, trying desperately to tidy up before a last-minute house buyer comes to visit in the afternoon.

Upstairs, the three young actors are all flopping on the same bed. Dressed in their school-uniform costumes, they are fantastically un-phased by the presence of a journalist. The trio possess the closeness, the argumentative tendencies and the ability to finish each other's sentences of real-life siblings. They are clearly having a blast working on Outnumbered.

They are absolutely engaging livewires. Witness their spirited reaction to some of their schoolmates. Roche recalls: "I once laughed in class at the wrong moment. When the teacher told me off, another boy shouted, 'you can't tell him off – he's on TV!' That was really, really embarrassing!"

Marquez, who, according to Hamilton, has, "the face of an angel and the mind of a barrister," is equally irritated by some of her peers. "This girl at school is always walking up to me and saying, 'you're famous' before going away again. And another girl is always saying to me, 'oh my God, she's on TV!' That's so annoying. I'd hate it if people thought filming made us stuck up. Because we're not."

The programme-makers go on to explain why Outnumbered is a rare example of a sitcom that works better without a formalised script. Forty-eight-year-old Dennis says: "The improvisation is the core of the show. The children are fantastic at it. The strength of the improvisation is that it allows them to be children. You're not putting words into their mouths.

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"Now the kids can improvise even when we're having a big argument. During an improvised row, you very quickly find yourself saying what parents always say in an argument with their children: 'Why is the answer no? Because I say so!'"

Fifty-five-year-old Jenkin, who is himself the parent of young children, adds: "Sometimes the kids take us by surprise. They say something out of the blue, and we think, 'wow, where did that come from?'"

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Sitting behind the monitor near the rubbish-tip of a kitchen, Hamilton expands on the technique he and Jenkin have pioneered. "We only tell the children what's happening in a scene a few minutes before shooting it. That gives them a sense of being in the moment.

"Kids don't eke out their lives with diaries. They live for the now. One of the key components of the show is that these characters are saying their lines the way real kids do. We keep in a percentage of their pauses and repetitions."

Hamilton proceeds to give an example of the youngsters' naturalism. "At one point, we wanted Daniel to ask his dad about the same topic again and again. Daniel did it while looking out of the window at a fire engine. That was perfect. We don't want the children to be too respectful of the acting process. When an adult talks to a kid, that adult is the tenth most interesting thing in the room."

Drew-Honey agrees that the improvising allows the youngsters to deliver much more natural performances. "It's really relaxed. You don't feel any pressure, as there are no lines to learn. Occasionally, on set the directors will suggest a line, but most of the time it's purely down to our imagination. The lines come out much better if you do them naturally and put them in your own words. I never get nervous before my scenes. It's just another day at the office."

The young actor adds: "The only problem is that you get used to making up lines. In the school play last year, I played Vince in Grease. I got complacent and started to make up some lines – I thought mine were better. The director kept telling me to stick to the script."

Outnumbered has struck a particular chord with parents. They can sit there thinking, "At least I haven't lost control to that extent." Drew-Honey reckons that parents are drawn to the series because they can see themselves in the characters. "It works so well because viewers can relate to it. People watch Outnumbered and think, 'oh, that's happened to our family, too.'"

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Hamilton, the father of three children, underlines that the show chimes with parents. "Most families are like this: chaotic, turbulent, disorganised and just mad. Parents identify with the general slog of life in Outnumbered and the moral compromises required just to get through the day. The Brockmans try to stick to their principles, but they never succeed. It's a tale of constant heroic failure." Fifty-five-year-old Hamilton continues that, "If we show a particularly bad bit of parenting, people always come up to me afterwards and say, 'I did that, too.' Parents start trading anecdotes about who has endangered their child the most.

"Every parent has at some point unintentionally put their child in grave danger. It doesn't make you a bad parent – it's simply the law of averages. Take your eye off your children for a second and they're running in front of a lorry!"

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Sitting beside his long-term collaborator, with whom he created Drop the Dead Donkey in the 1990s, Jenkin chips in that: "Children love the series, too. They love watching children who are naughty and win hands down every time."

The one difficulty is that it is often hard to keep a straight face when filming with the younger children. Drew-Honey admits that, "sometimes I can't help laughing about what the other two are doing. I'm so desperately trying to keep a straight face that my cheek muscles hurt. Then I ask the directors if they can film over my shoulder so they can't see my face." So have the catastrophes that regularly occur in Outnumbered all befallen the directors, too? Hamilton says he hates to disappoint us, but most of the incidents that happen to the Brockmans are taken not from real life, but from his and Jenkin's imagination. "Mostly, we make it up. If I simply went around writing down everything that happened to me, I'd just be a journalist, and what sort of terrible life would that be?"

The directors are hoping to make a fourth series. "I'm sure after a very long sleep, Guy and I might have some more ideas," Hamilton says. "The great thing is, kids change all the time. So there's never going to be a shortage of stories for Outnumbered."

There is just one potential problem concerning further series: the fact that the young stars of Outnumbered will inevitably age. The directors claim not to be worried about that, however.

"We've put chemicals in their food," Hamilton says. "That's one advantage The Simpsons has over us – their children never get older," Jenkin adds. "But we've employed the coach who used to look after East German gymnasts, so I don't think puberty will be a problem."

• The new series of Outnumbered starts on BBC1 at 9.30pm on Thursday.

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