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The smell of the greasepaint, the roar of the crowd, welcome to the world of Big Top, a lively, colourful, upbeat new comedy series for ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ One.

Circus Maestro is a grand traditional circus. For hundreds of years it has travelled around Europe delighting family audiences with its astonishing selection of the world's most death-defying acrobats and most uproarious clowns! At least, that's what the posters say.

In fact, the circus has been running since 1973, touring the same nine sites in the North Staffordshire region. And these aren't the world's greatest circus acts. They're a mixture of fading talents and struggling wannabes, all wishing they were somewhere just a little bit more glamorous and successful.

Circus Maestro may be struggling, but crucially it's not in the least bit rubbish. It has a hard time drawing in the crowds, but when people do see the show, they are genuinely entertained by it. The performers, although not the best in the world, are talented... except for the clowns.

But the circus is fraught with problems which the ringmistress Lizzie, played by Amanda Holden, must overcome.

Writer Daniel Peak won the 2002 ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ New Talent Sitcom Writer's Award, and has since gone on to write for several sitcoms and children's programmes, most recently No Heroics, The Revenge Files Of Alistair Fury and Not Going Out.

He wrote the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Three series I'm With Stupid, starring Ruth Jones and Mark Benton, which won an RTS award and was remade for NBC in America. He is currently co-writing a brand new puppet show, Mongrels, for ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Three.

Daniel explains how he came to write Big Top: "A couple of years ago I went to a circus near Macclesfield, the first one I'd been to since I was a kid. The girl running the ticket office was about nine years old, and the man on the hotdog stand was in the ring a few minutes later, juggling deckchairs with his feet. I realised there was a very small team of people doing absolutely everything: performing the show, selling the programmes and afterwards packing up the tent to move to the next site.

"At the same time I was talking to Big Bear Films about sitcom ideas, and we all really wanted to do a big ensemble show. Big Bear's Head of Development, Suzi McIntosh, started talking about her friend Linnet, who is an acrobat. So we thought: let's come up with some circus characters."

Daniel had known Marcus Mortimer and John Stroud of Big Bear Films for many years, having worked with them on their long-running sitcom My Hero.

He says: "I wrote a couple of episodes, and for a few years now Marcus and I have been suggesting sitcom ideas to each other. I never really liked any of his ideas and he never liked any of mine, but we kept pestering each other until we found something that we both really wanted to do: this."

There don't seem to have been many TV programmes set in a circus: "I don't know why that is. When I first mentioned writing a circus show, a lot of people seem surprised that it hasn't been done before. The fact that the characters live in small, confined caravans seems to make it ideal for a studio audience sitcom."

He continues: "A lot of sitcom ideas are about families, or about workplaces or about people who live together. With a circus you get all three: a group of people who are often related, and who work together and who live in their place of work.

"They all live in tiny caravans, so they can't really escape from each other, and twice a day they have to go into the ring and risk their lives for the entertainment of a few kids.

"A circus is a self-contained world. I think only about four scenes in the entire series take place outside the field where the Big Top is pitched."

Once they had decided on the setting for the series, it was time to pull together ideas for the characters, as Daniel explains: "I started off with about 12 characters, wrote lots of story ideas for them all, gradually worked out which characters were the least interesting and killed half of them off.

"So out went the nine-year-old ticket seller, Boyco's Russian wife, Benji the alcoholic knife-thrower and some others. The six that remained felt like the clearest, funniest and best for generating stories.

"I was very keen not to make this a show about a rubbish circus, where the main joke is how rubbish they are. So these characters are all hard-working, dedicated and quite good at what they do (apart from the clowns – they really are rubbish). So, for example, Boyco the acrobat is extremely talented: he just doesn't realise it."

Daniel continues: "The characters are united by their shared desire to put on a great show – and divided by the fact that each performer thinks he or she is the star.

"The character in charge – Lizzie the ringmistress – is the only one with no circus skills of her own, which undermines her authority over the others. Lizzie would love to sack the terrible clowns, but she's kind of stuck with them, as they are her aunt and uncle. It's also handy that most of our characters wear costumes that make it fairly obvious what their jobs are."

Daniel and Big Bear submitted a six-page proposal to the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳, with some character descriptions and some ideas for stories: "That got us the script commission. We spent a few months on the first script, and that went down well enough to get us a 'rehearsed read', where actors perform the show with scripts in their hands, a bit like a radio play.

"I was amazed at the cast that was assembled for the read-through and even more so when the six main actors all agreed to come back and do the series.

"It was great because it meant I could write the next five episodes knowing who would play the parts and having seen how they brought the characters to life."

He laughs: "Seeing it all come to fruition has proved a bit frightening, to be honest. I sit at home and write a scene, and a couple of months later there's John Thomson hanging off a trapeze with his hair on fire.

"I still can't quite believe the cast we've got, how much each adds to the characters as written and how well Amanda Holden ties it all together. With Tony Robinson and Ruth Madoc we have got links to two of my three favourite sitcoms of all time (for all three we'd need Don Warrington or Frances de la Tour)."

Co-producer Marcus Mortimer agrees: "I don't think I've ever seen a new situation comedy with such a rich blend of funny and famous comedy actors and the chemistry between them is fantastic. I guess Big Top is a bit like having all your favourite chocolates in one box."

Although a big fan of circuses since he was a little boy, Daniel had to do a fair bit of research before he wrote Big Top: "I went along to lots of circuses while I was writing and got to talk to some of the performers. Zippo's in particular were really helpful. I'd also recommend Gerry Cottle's autobiography to anyone.

"Having said that, I don't claim that Big Top is anything like an accurate portrayal of real circus life, and Circus Maestro is not like any of the circuses I visited. If Circus Maestro were real, it would be shut down by health and safety within a week. And all the real circus people I met were much nicer than the characters in the show!"

Suzi McIntosh adds: "In Danny's hands, the idea of running away to the circus suddenly seems like a great one. His script is a hoot. He's opened the doors to a hilarious world where there is never a dull moment, and the laughs come from places where you least expect them."