Bird was not, he tells me, the class clown. The best he can imagine is that his close-knit group of schoolfriends might have described him as ‘wry’. Instead he found his comedy footing at Cambridge, where he studied English at Queens’ College, and became president of Footlights, the university’s long-running sketch group, which has also nurtured such comic luminaries as Peter Cook, Eric Idle, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. ‘The big myth is you have to be an extrovert to work in comedy,’ he says, ‘but I don’t think that’s true. Footlights has this reputation of being a bear pit and really elitist and a fight to the death of who’s going to win… But it was just ten 18-year-old kids who wanted to try out comedy.’ He remembers sketches that rambled on for eight minutes, and that fostered a ‘house style’ that was ‘very gentle, very wordy… we spent three years just trying to write good, interesting dialogue’. He laughs. ‘That’s why it was a massive culture shock for me to do The Inbetweeners, because it was broad and very rude.’ Last summer’s film took £45m, smashing Bridget Jones’s UK record for the most successful opening weekend ever achieved by a comedy film. He is still great mates with some of his Footlights peers — among them Joe Thomas, his Inbetweeners co-star, and the comedian Jonny Sweet. Recently, the three of them have been working on their own series, Chickens, which is scheduled to appear on Sky1 next summer. ‘It’s set in 1914 in England, when everyone has gone to war, and we’re the only men left in a village full of women, who hate us. So imagine,’ Bird says in a softly mocking tone, ‘the hilarious situations that spin off from that.’ Is it, I ask, a bit like Last of the Summer Wine? He laughs. ‘Well, we like the idea that it’s sort of rustic,’ he says. ‘And I think it will be quite gentle.’
