“The philosophy was – they’ve shot it purely for education, never for aesthetic reasons, just information. So if we always shoot it for that, it will end up feeling right.”

And while Look Around You is never locked down to a particular date, it perfectly invokes the Britain of the late 1970s and early 1980s. “It was an era that we quite liked watching, Britain looked absolutely disgusting then,” say Popper. “And it was a really turbulent time. I remember growing up then. Running away from skinheads, and being beaten up and chased. It was grim, and on all the programmes you’d just see a lot of wasteland.

“We wanted it to feel grubby and real and just reflecting what we remembered from that time. It was horrible, but in a lovely horrible way, if you see what I mean. Aesthetically it is horrible, but we still love the look of it.”

Despite – or maybe because of its obtuseness – Look Around You was a hit amongst critics and their comedy peers. The show was nominated for a BAFTA in 2003. The Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening called it "one of the funniest shows I've ever seen", and cult US anti-comedy team Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim were also fans. It aired on Adult Swim in the US, and despite the precise Britishness of the show, the banality of terrible educational television resonated with international audiences.

In spite of the reaction, it still took nearly three years for the show to return to British television screens. They were keen to make more, but the BBC saw them as a launching pad to make something else. “The BBC said those ten minute slots are for trying out things, they don’t do second series of them,” says Popper. “So I just badgered them, and eventually they asked if we had any 30 minute ideas. With humans in it.”

All of which culminated in 2005, when we finally got the second series of Look Around You. Instead of ten-minute faux-educational shorts, it was a half-hour show which had, as the BBC had asked, “humans in it”. Set in the same undefined early 1980s milieu, it was now a fake pop-science magazine show, in the vein of the Beeb’s Tomorrow’s World, which ran from 1965 to 2003.

Popper and Serafinowicz were now endearingly cheesy hosts of the show, presenting studio segments and VTs on surreal, ridiculous science topics, including ‘Petticoat 5’, the first computer for women, and a competition to predict what music will sound like in the year 2000 (including the second series' most memorable moment, a fantastically polite introduction to rap music for 1980s BBC viewers).