rranging a phone interview can be a fraught affair, riddled with all sorts of diary-balancing and frantic last-minute rearrangements, but that isn’t the case with Charlie Higson. When I emailed the BBC with the standard offer to work around the interviewee’s schedule, I received the following slightly despondent reply: “Charlie says he has no schedule any more.” It sounded a little like this would be less an interview and more a courtesy call to make sure he was still taking care of himself. I need not have worried because, as it turns out, Higson’s “no schedule” is the busy kind of “no schedule”. The call was originally to talk about his participation in the new BBC Two series Comedians: Home Alone. It’s an all-star sketch show, where comedians such as Vic Reeves, Bob Mortimer, Tim Key and Michael Spicer submit homemade lockdown footage. Higson pops up in episode three, reprising his old Fast Show character Swiss Toni. But then Higson reveals that he also animated his sketch, in three days, learning how to use an animation app from scratch. And that he also made a short documentary about the process. And that a new lockdown special of his Radio 4 show, Down the Line, was about to air. And that there would have been a children’s book out soon too, except coronavirus has pushed its publication back by a year. Why? “It’s about a kid going on holiday,” he explains. “To Italy,” he adds with a groan. It turns out that Higson, 61, is coping quite well with quarantine. “I’m one of those annoying people who was pretty much living in lockdown anyway,” he says. “The only difference is that my eldest son has moved back in for the duration.” This last bit appears to be key in getting Swiss Toni back on the air. “When the call came in asking ‘Can you do a Swiss Toni sketch from home?’ I thought ‘Well, not really’, because I don’t actually look like Swiss Toni,” Higson says. Toni was always one of the broadest Fast Show characters. Bronze and greasy, in a flammable-looking suit (it will come as no surprise that he began life in a sketch on The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer), he was less a human being and more a cackhanded David Dickinson waxwork made sentient, albeit years before Dickinson became a household name. Recreating this look after quarter of a century would have been almost impossible. This is where his son comes in. Frank, 27, according to his father, does “sort of directing and editing and stuff”, and together they struck upon the notion of animating Swiss Toni. They found old photos of the character, drew over them and hashed out a quick cartoon. Higson then called on Bob Mortimer – with whom he co-created the character all those years ago – for help with some of Toni’s more seamy dialogue (“Avoiding coronavirus is very much like making love to a beautiful woman shot through with STDs”). “Bob always used to write the really filthy analogies,” Higson recalls. “And then I would write the other non-funny stuff that people don’t always like.” Swiss Toni seems like quite a risky character to bring back. Although he was one of the most immediately identifiable Fast Show characters, even gaining his own BBC Three sitcom in 2003, in his graphically sexual monomania he does seem like a product of his time. Given that the recent Little Britain revival for BBC One’s Big Night In telethon received almost 200 complaints from suddenly offended viewers, was Higson ever worried about how he would fare in today’s climate? “He is very inappropriate and out of date,” Higson concedes. “But The Fast Show was never meant to be offensive. It was meant to be inclusive. Even with the most extreme and unpleasant characters, we derived it from something of real life. With Swiss Toni, his life was falling apart. We put on our shell and our suit of armour, which in his case is his shiny suit and hair, and we hide behind that.” The same goes for Down the Line, the brilliant semi-official Fast Show reunion show that aired on BBC Radio 4 between 2006 and 2013, and which prompted a smattering of outrage from listeners who initially mistook it for a genuine call-in show. Higson says much care was taken with the new instalment of Down the Line, given that it was a coronavirus special. “When I tweeted to announce it, a few people on Twitter said ‘Oh, I hope this is savage’. And I thought, no, you can’t really do that. We didn’t want to make jokes about people dying.” The episode (still available on BBC Sounds) was tremendous, and made all the funnier by the fine balance of topical reaction – bookshelf envy, mistaken symptoms, Joe Wicks – and sturdier perennial silliness. “Nothing dates more quickly than the absolutely up to date,” Higson says, dreading the moment when we will invariably be exposed to a glut of fiction about coronavirus in the months and years to come. “I’d rather read about something else, quite frankly, having spent seven years of my life writing books about a disease that rips across the planet and only affects older people.” This would be The Enemy, Higson’s colossally successful series of young adult zombie horror books, which concluded in 2015 with The End. Prior to that, he was responsible for the equally successful Young Bond books. While many of The Fast Show’s alumni have remained more visible, either with acting roles or fishing shows, it is interesting that Higson has found his greatest success writing for kids. “It began because I wanted to take a break from filming so I could be around my kids a bit more, because they were getting to that age where they needed to be with their father a bit more or whatever,” he says. “And I thought it would be great to write some kind of action-adventure story for them. The great thing was I could test it on them when I was writing. If they fell asleep on you, it meant you had to kill someone.” It is a gratifying medium for him; he marvels that “sometimes with these kids, it’s the first book they’ve read. It could be something they remember for the rest of their lives. That is an amazing thing.” That is how I feel about The Fast Show, I tell him. I was a teenager when it aired, and it’s one of the first shows I remember falling head over heels in love with. “That is lovely,” he says. “And luckily, our show is still well remembered. But I think it’s a shame that we don’t have sketch shows like that any more. It always used to be that each generation had their own sketch show that they thought had been made just for them. They’d go to school the next day and do the catchphrases and the lines. There was us, then for later generations you had Little Britain and Catherine Tate. But since then, there has only really been Horrible Histories. There isn’t that big show that teenagers in years to come will say, ‘Yeah! That was a show we all watched’.” Sketch shows, he says “are very expensive to make. And the BBC’s got no money, so they can’t afford to make them. No one else wants to take the risk because they are very risky.” As well as his book, the virus has also put the brakes on some of Higson’s screenwriting projects that were close to going into production. “God know what’s going to happen with them,” he sighs. “Everyone has been hit the same way. And nobody really knows how you start getting back into it. How do you film a love scene where everyone’s got to stay 2 metres apart? Normal People would have been quite a different show. They’d just be wanking in different rooms.” As the interview comes to an end, I quickly run through all of Higson’s projects to make sure I have not missed anything out. Swiss Toni, Down the Line, the Bond books, the Enemy books, the delayed children’s book, the screenwriting. Was there anything else? “Well, that’s enough, isn’t it?” he huffs. Then he adds: “Well, Frank’s had two video things that he’s making. And one of them involves building a robot head, which we did together. He’s got to deliver it tomorrow and he’s giving me dirty looks, so I should get off the phone. I’ve been busier in lockdown than I have been for months.”