Doin' It Their Way

Noel Fielding (l) and Julian Barratt of The Mighty Boosh

Trying to describe what happens over the course of an episode of The Mighty Boosh is futile, but let's just say Vince Noir (Noel Fielding) and Howard Moon (Julian Barratt) are basically the British version of Laverne & Shirley – best friends who work together, live together, and also happen to make journeys into alternate realities through portals in the run-down zoo they're employed at in season one, the flat they share in season two, and the shop they run in season three of the BBC series.

The cast of supporting oddballs is pretty astounding, too: Old Gregg, an amorous, transsexual deep-sea creature; Naboo, a perpetually stoned shaman; Mr. Susan, a fabric-y monster who resides in a mirrored netherworld. The list goes on. Interspersed throughout their adventures are some mind-exploding, warped musical numbers.

What started as a live improv show in the late 1990s became a pilot for the BBC in 2004, when Steve Coogan championed the duo and his production company, Baby Cow, produced the first season. Adult Swim has recently been showing episodes on Sunday nights, and the show has officially taken on cult status. All three seasons of The Mighty Boosh see American release on DVD this week, with tons of extras tacked on, and there's talk of a Mighty Boosh film in the future. The Chronicle recently caught up with Fielding and Barratt, just off a six-week tour of the live show.

Austin Chronicle: Is there going to be a season four?

Noel Fielding: I think so, yes. After the TV show, there were two tours back-to-back, really, so we've just been taking a bit of time to rejuvenate.

Julian Barratt: Noel's training to be a doctor as well.

AC: Oh, you've been in medical school, too?

NF: Yeah, just trying to keep my options open. And Julian's been playing a lot of golf lately. Got your handicap down to two, didn't you?

AC: The "Fame" episode from season one [in which Vince joins an electro band and Howard is possessed by an evil jazz spirit] – does that feel like self-fulfilling prophecy?

NF: It's been exactly like that. I got sucked into a Hoover just this morning.

JB: The way we write, the world we write about quite often blends into the world we live in.

NF: Yeah, we like to put those real-life aspects in, balance the fantastical, like, the ludicrous nature of being in a band, by bringing monsters in and out. And the monsters have usually got some fashion or musical thing going on. Basically, we take our friends in bands and turn them into mermaids and sasquatches.

AC: Looking back on the first season, does it seem rudimentary compared to season three?

JB: It's sort of like making your first album – all the work you've put in over the years goes into it, and then the next two you have to come up with that year. After the first series, we'd pretty much used up everything we'd done live. After that, it was crunch time. Can we do this again? And it turns out we couldn't.

NF: The pace was faster in the third season, we got right into the stories a bit quicker, but some of our best ideas were probably in the first season.

JB: We didn't know the rules of TV in season one, so we had some unusual ways of doing it. I would look at the wrong camera a lot, speak too quietly.

NF: In season one, we were sort of worried they would take our baby and dress it up in stupid clothes. It's like that Jack White song – I can't remember which one – but he talks about being in this massive studio and trying to go back to that feeling of writing in his bedroom.

AC: Your dialogues throughout all three seasons feel very natural, which I'm sure comes from being able to read each other pretty well. How much of what you do on the TV show is improv?

NF: We try to do looser takes, but there's very little time with TV, and you can't improvise as much as you'd like to. It'd be great to have that luxury and muck about, but you usually have four scenes to film, and if you start improvising, the producer starts freaking out. "They said 'oven glove'! That's not in the script!" Rich [Fulcher, who plays the scene-stealing Bob Fossil, among other characters] is actually quite good at that, because he never says the same thing twice. He's not responsible for driving the plot along like us. We just give him an outfit and let him scream.