The Delivery Man, tonight 9.30pm ITV

Argh bloody hell there's a sitcom starting tonight and I wrote somewhere between a third and one half of it*, put it down to administrative error on ITV's part.

What happened was, ages ago, I caught up with Victoria Pile (creator and producer of Smack The Pony, Green Wing, Campus) and her common law illegal immigrant (Scotch) partner Rob Harley (writer and producer on the above) in London, and they said 'we've got some projects on the go, dunno if you're interested in writing for some of them', and I steepled my fingers like this *steeples fingers* and said 'proceed', and they said '(first thing I've forgotten) and then (second thing I've forgotten) and also we're doing this thing with Darren Boyd as an ex-cop who quits the force and becomes a male midwife' and I was all 'Hellloooooo!'

Because my memory is narrative-based rather than working on the tradition 'reality' base of most hu-mans, this bit might be wrong, but I think what happened next is they gave me two thirds of a script that they'd been stalled on for six months, and I arsed about with it for a bit and then it was INSTANTLY greenlit by ITV. Okay that probably wasn't what happened, but I'm going with it.

So yes, lots of readthroughs and rewrites and auditions later - look, here's a picture of one of the readthroughs:

...it all got filmed in a big shed somewhere in Walford or Charnham or on the Jasmine Allen or one of those London places, and I was there for a couple of days and had to tell Paddy McGuinness to please say 'vanilla monolope' like it does in the script, it'll make sense when it comes out, honest, and then it was ready to go out, BAM, it's magic.

LOL, as David Cameron likes to say, it wasn't like that at all, because a half hour comedy on a commercial channel these days is twenty two minutes thirty seconds, so poor Christian in the edit suite had to spend ages trimming bits and holding them up to the light and tutting and trimming more bits, but now it's READY so watch it, or don't, up to you.

*estimates may vary