ON THE OFFENCE

Stephen Merchant's new comedy-thriller gathers a gang of petty crims in a story inspired by his parents and hometown.

- Stephen Merchant

When it comes to Outlaws, his comedy-thriller about a bunch of people sentenced to community service getting mixed up in actual organised crime, Stephen Merchant knew the territory. It's not that he had, like Greg, the character he plays in the series - which he wrote and directed - been sentenced for soliciting in a carpark.

No, when Merchant was growing up in Bristol both his parents worked for the organisation that administered community sentences. The mix of people they dealt with intrigued him.

"You'd have the businessman who'd got caught drink-driving or some student who'd got in trouble for some minor thing. Or there was an old guy who was stealing cabbages from allotments just to get community service because he was lonely and he liked the social aspect of it."

His parents' experience also taught him how the system worked - or didn't. His father had to deal with the service's tools constantly going missing and the offenders finding increasingly elaborate ways of pinching them. Or if there was a photo visit from a local MP, it might require a quorum to be rounded up from the pub.

Merchant thought a group that represented a crosssection of society doing community service offered a chance for a different kind of crime thriller - one that didn't involve cops or private detectives.

Yes, Merchant, for many years the comic foil to Ricky Gervais, is best known for comedy. But he didn't write Outlaws - a show that was a BBC-Amazon co-production - as a community-service spin on The Office.