"It's a word you shouldn't bandy about, but I think Steve Coogan is a comic genius," declares Duncan Kenworthy, producer of THE PAROLE OFFICER. "He's the one figure in comedy today that everyone in the business admires, because he really is never anything less than excellent. His talent reminds me of Peter Sellers. It looks so easy, when you see it done well, and yet it takes a fantastic amount of analytical intelligence and total control. " Having watched Coogan capture the British public's imagination with such well-loved comic creations as Alan Partridge and Paul Calf, Kenworthy and fellow producer Andrew Macdonald realised that the time had come for the Manchester-born comedian to conquer the big screen.

"I had a long lunch with Duncan, about four years ago, and he asked me if I wanted to do a film," recalls Coogan. "I said yes, and that I'd like to write it with Henry Normal, who is my main collaborator and someone I work very well with. Henry and I sat down and came up with four or five ideas and showed them to Duncan and Andrew Macdonald at DNA. I knew I had to come up with something that would play to my strengths. Most of the comedy I do is about people who are not quite up to the job, who are slightly out of their depth. But, at the same time, I wanted to move on a bit from what I'd done before, to play someone who was more 'real' than the characters I've done on television. "

Henry Normal takes up the story: "Steve and I decided very early on that we wanted to do a comedy with action, because we both like films like Italian Job, the (1969) and Midnight Run (1988). We knew that we wanted it to be very definitely British, but with some of the flavour of an American action picture. We also wanted it to be a "fish out of water" story about a bank job. After throwing around some ideas about who would be an unlikely character to rob a bank, we hit on the idea of a parole officer. It was perfect, because he would know criminals. Then we just had to figure out how to get him into trouble. "

With Kenworthy and Macdonald equally enthusiastic about the idea, Coogan and Normal wrote a treatment and then the first of several drafts. "We worked on it for a couple of years, with Duncan and Andrew helping to nurture its passage from page to screen," recalls Coogan. "So there have been many re-writes, but it's been quite exciting. There are lots of things that have to be hammered out - different drafts where you mould characters in different ways. "

"We went through about five or six drafts," says Kenworthy. "Under some protest on Steve and Henry's part, because they're not used to going through such a rigorous process of rewrites. Which is not to say that television is less rigorous than film. I think there is a different degree of narrative detail that you need on film, because everything has to be worked through and tied-up in ninety minutes. In television, you can rely more on the quirkiness of the characters. "

Henry Normal remembers the rewriting process as occasionally frustrating, but ultimately rewarding. "It was a little like juggling with custard," he laughs. "Every change we made to one scene had a knock-on effect on everything else. But the main thing we were trying to do with the rewrites was to make sure that it felt like cinema rather than television, while reining in some of our wilder, more expensive ideas. "

Asked to describe the co-writers' working methods, Normal reports: "I sit at the computer and Steve walks around the room. Occasionally he might lie down. Sometimes he wanders out of the room and comes back in again. Actually, we wrote quite a lot of THE PAROLE OFFICER in a sunny garden in Brighton during the summer, which felt very strange, given that it's set in rainy Manchester. "

Meanwhile, Kenworthy had asked the award-winning director John Duigan to consider the project. "John and I had made Lawn Dogs (1997) together, so I knew that he had the skills to do this really well," explains the producer. Duigan's first impressions of the screenplay were extremely favourable: "I found it a very affectionate piece," he says. "Simon Garden, the central character, is someone who is quite touching and quite vulnerable. He's also admirable in a rather old-fashioned way, in that he is a man with principles. I also liked the fact that it was, in some ways, an ensemble piece. Simon gathers together this very disparate group of former criminals, plus a street girl, and they form a most unlikely gang. It had oblique echoes of something like The Lavender Hill Mob, but laced with contemporary virtues, such as being very dark in places. "

Once everyone involved was satisfied with the screenplay, the producers set about finding the right actors to portray the ragtag bunch of misfits that aid and abet Simon Garden in his quest to clear his name. Kenworthy knew from the outset that he did not want to stuff the film with celebrity cameos or familiar faces from Coogan's television incarnations. "It would have been so easy to cast Dawn French here, or Rowan Atkinson there, or people from Steve's series, but you can't afford to do that if you want to make the film real," he explains. "It would become a distraction and pull the audience out of the story. "

"It was one of those very pleasurable casting jobs, but quite complicated because we weren't sure which piece to fit in place first," Kenworthy continues. "Although, right at the beginning we said 'Om Puri for George' and everyone agreed that would be a great idea. When we look at them now, as a group of five, it's very satisfying that they all look completely their own person and yet they make a very interesting, cohesive unit. Each of the actors has brought their own skills and experience to the film. "

"I'm very happy with the cast," adds Coogan. "The people we have got are first-rate. In the work I've done for television, I've always tried to have good people around me, and then let them have something to do, rather than just being a clown surrounded by two-dimensional characters to bounce jokes off. "

With script, cast and crew in place, THE PAROLE OFFICER started principal photography in Manchester on 20th August 2000. The film shot for eight weeks around the city and in Blackpool and Liverpool. "In some ways it would have been easier to do all the stage stuff in London and just travel up north for two or three weeks to do location shoots," reflects Kenworthy. "But it wouldn't have worked as well. For one thing, we were determined to cast as many of the smaller parts as possible with northern actors. There are a lot of really clever, under-used actors there who are unknown to a national audience, but very good. "

"It was a really tough schedule," he continues. "We were quite nervous about whether we'd get through it all in eight weeks. It's a deceptive script, because it reads quite simply but when you start to look closer there is a stunt on virtually every page. " In the course of THE PAROLE OFFICER, Simon Garden finds himself attempting a dizzying series of action man heroics that would leave 007 gasping for breath. "The more James Bond-like the stunts are, the more comical it is to watch someone who works for the Social Services trying to do them," says Coogan.

Determined to make these key scenes believable, Coogan did most of his own stunt work, including falling backwards off a 20 ft building, abseiling between rooftops 100ft above the streets of Liverpool, as well as swinging, Errol Flynn style, from a ceiling light fitting to crash into a toughened glass window. Coogan also had to endure riding Blackpool's Pepsi Maxx big dipper ride for an entire morning with co-star Om Puri.

"And I had to disappear underwater in one scene and there were a few takes of that. It lasted for about 20 seconds, so I know what Leonardo DiCaprio went through. It was like a cut-price version of Titanic (1997) - the P & O version".

Talking of his stunt achievements, Coogan says: "I like having a go. It's like playing when you're a child. "

Having got to know each other during the final months of rewriting, the director and his lead actor arrived on set with an established relationship, and a few ground rules. "Writers tend to get short shrift once the script is taken away from them and put through the process of being filmed," notes Coogan. "They're often banned from the set. But they couldn't do that to me, because I'm in it. John and I had a talk about how that would work. Obviously, he's the director. It's his film, his vision of the story and it wouldn't have been very good if I was constantly saying 'that's not how I saw this scene'. In actual fact, that didn't happen. Occasionally he would ask me a question, or if there was a point I wanted to make, he would listen to me. John is very democratic. "

"I approached the shoot much as I would a drama piece, and that includes very precise planning," Duigan reveals. "Make as many technical decisions in advance as you possibly can, so that you have the time on set to perhaps try certain alternatives with the playing of lines and the flavour of performances. " Kenworthy adds: " With each shot we tried to do at least three takes: one small, one large, one very different. It's a rule of three that I learned from Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson. You go to both extremes and then try something left-field. It gives you more options in the editing."

Despite the complexity of the script, and more than their fair share of inclement Manchester weather, the consensus among cast and crew was that THE PAROLE OFFICER was an unusually happy shoot. "That comes from the top, from the director," claims Kenworthy. "If the director is someone who shouts at people, you can get through all the work but it may mean that people aren't giving their best. That sort of tense atmosphere invades the images in a very surreptitious way. And the reverse is true. If the shoot is as happy as this one, the hope is that that feeling somehow comes across on the screen. "

Producer Duncan Kenworthy has high hopes for THE PAROLE OFFICER, believing that it has the potential to work even in countries where Steve Coogan is unknown. Even so, he was careful not to dilute the essentially English flavour of Coogan's comedy in an attempt to guarantee international appeal. "You can have a conversation with the culture that you know, and if people in the UK like it, then maybe people in other cultures, like America and Europe, might be interested in overhearing that conversation," explains Kenworthy. "If you set out to make a blockbuster that will appeal to everybody, you end up with a film that has no centre, no integrity. "

"THE PAROLE OFFICER has been likened to an Ealing Comedy and it does have some kinship with those films, in that its sensibilities are, on one level, quite gentle and it celebrates personal idiosyncrasies," says Duigan. "But it's a very modern comedy as well. "

"There is the core Steve Coogan audience and I'm hoping that everyone who loves Alan Partridge will love Simon Garden," Kenworthy concludes. "But to broaden it out, as I've said before, I think that Steve Coogan is Peter Sellers reincarnated. And that kind of talent appeals to everyone. "

Says Coogan: "Most of the work I do, when it works, makes people laugh a lot hopefully, and think a little bit. I don't want people to think an awful lot and only laugh a little bit."

"If a character is too clever and witty, it's almost like he knows that he's in a film. My character, Simon, hopefully doesn't know he's in a film. He's slightly inadequate. If I can quote M People, he perhaps, in a way, searches for the hero inside himself. You'd buy him a drink, but you wouldn't want to spend the whole evening with him!"