Comedy news: Cardinal Burns interview: "panic-stricken penguins whispering to each other"

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E4 will be launching the long-awaited (read: it was slated to launch weeks ago) sketch show Cardinal Burns, starring Seb Cardinal and Dustin Demri-Burns, in March. You may have seen a rather good promo sketch launched on Valentine's Day from the pair which certainly seems to bode well for the general quality.

Here's a few rearranged questions with the boys plucked from an interview released from Channel 4. It was rather longwinded as interviews go (we know: pot, kettle, etc) so here are the highlights. Original is here if you have a spare two hours.

Give us an idea of some of the characters we can expect in the series.

Dustin: There's Switch, the privileged spoken word poet; Banksy, who's the artist, but a suburban swinger on the side, and incredibly boring; and Charlie, who prides himself on being the office flirt, and has been there for years, and then the new guy turns up, who's actually a temp only there for the week, and he changes Charlie's life. Seb: Then you've got Young Dreams, which is three of us, on a fashion internship. Dustin is a Japanese fashion student, and I'm a sloaney girl from Godalming, and we live in a flat together.

Have you tailored your material for the TV, or is it pretty similar to your live stuff?

Dustin: It's pretty different, really. You get away with different things when you're interacting with a live audience.

The series is a sketch show. What is it about sketches that appeals to you?

Seb: It's so much fun playing out all these different characters and genres. They're short little stories. It's so satisfying, playing so many different characters.

Dustin: We like telling stories, we like the narrative, so often our stuff is over-long, and we have to condense it. A lot of stuff gets left out.

Do you find it difficult to have to cut jokes out?

Seb: Yeah, the editing process is quite hard. You see a lot of the gags being cut down, to make the sketches more succinct. But left to our own devices, we'd probably end up with three or four sketches per show.

Is there an accepted maximum length for a sketch?

Dustin: If we had it our way probably not!

Seb: You meet a lot of producers who think a sketch should be no longer than three minutes. But the stuff that we really like, like the League of Gentlemen, Human Giant and stuff, takes its time. It depends on the nature of the sketch - you can have one that runs for six minutes, as long as the ideas keep coming in.

Have you ever died in front of a live audience?

Both: Oh yeah.

What's that experience like?

Dustin: Horrific. Once we were dressed as penguins - we'd spent about £90 on these penguin outfits, and we were doing this gig in Leicester Square. We went out and ticketed before, and we basically just got tourists in, and half of them couldn't understand what we were saying. It was a weird audience, and we had this weird planet Earth sketch, and we just didn't really know what we were doing. I just remember turning around and seeing the fear in all of our eyes, and these stupid outfits, and just going up and whispering "Shall we just leg it?" And they were just watching panic-stricken penguins whispering to each other.

Are there any specific comedy duos or sketch shows that you guys have really enjoyed over the years?

There's one at the moment from America - Tim and Eric Awesome Show. It's really funny and very surreal. Human Giant we both like - that's an MTV sketch show. Their sketches just go off on mad tangents. League of Gentlemen are great. And Big Train is our favourite sketch show of the last however-many-years.