"They quote Shakespeare, drink Earl Grey tea..." agrees Donovan.

The basic plot has a disparate bunch of rebels stealing the Lexx - an insect mechanically adapted into a spaceship and weapon of mass destruction - and entering a dimension known as the Dark Zone to escape the despotic regime of a near eternal being known as The Shadow. The scripts may not take themselves seriously, but the concepts underlying the series are almost Dune-like in their depth and magnitude. So how do they go about creating a whole new universe?

"By spending a lot of time drinking beer," quips Donovan.

"Paul had wanted to a science fiction show for a very long time," Gigeroff has clearly decided that some hard facts are called for, "and he made this movie years ago called DEFCON 4. Have you seen that?"

Um, no.

"Well, run to your video store now," laughs Hirschfield.

"Actually, run away from your video store," reckons Donovan.

"A lot of things went wrong during the shooting," continues Gigeroff. "After we had shot for two weeks we were two weeks behind schedule, so we finished it in a hurry. But we learned from it that the SF audience is very undiscriminating. It made money. It had a few good sequences in it, and with the science fiction audiences so starved of good stuff, they'd see a film in which everything went wrong except for a few sequences."

"I sort of feel the same way," says Donovan. "When I see something like, let's say for example, Stargate, I see the trailer and I think that sounds really exciting and then I see the movie and I realise that the good guys win because the aliens are a bad shot."

Donovan throws in another reason why he thinks television is ready for Lexx. "A lot of SF on television - Star Trek, Deep Space Nine - really does take itself very seriously. These are really weighty issues they deal with. 'Today's episode is the rights of man' or something like that. And it should be fun and not that serious."

"A little more irreverent," adds Gigeroff.

"I mean, Lexx is a big bug in space, you know?" agrees Donovan.

So you think that science fiction fans aren't after weight themes, just fx and explosions?

"That would be oversimplifying it," counters Donovan. "These series try to say things that are really profound without actually being that profound. We think that no matter what you say it is profound in some way."

"It's not that we have any contempt for science fiction," defends Gigeroff, "it's just that we're constantly disappointed by science fiction."

"We want Alien and we get Stargate," reiterates Donovan. "The only thing I liked in Independence Day was Washington blowing up. I got my $8 worth, but it has a lot of really stupid stuff in it. And the stupid stuff is taken seriously. It's not like we don't watch science fiction, or don't like science fiction... We just don't like most of what we see. It's just so sanctimonious. That's what we're trying to act against. Damn it, we like to blow things up!"

"And we like threat," adds Gigeroff. "As much as we like comedy we also like threat and danger and even crossing the line into horror."

Gore, and a surprising amount of it, plays a major part in the series. "Although we do have a quite a few bits of body-parts flying around it's all in fun," says Donovan, before remembering with obvious glee, "the scene in the first one where the guy gets turned into The Shadow - that's Lex here!"

Gigeroff picks up the story: "And you know that shot where they remove my brain? That wasn't a special effect. I said, 'I'm a fucking actor, I'll just do it. You cut my brain out. You're not going to find anything in there anyway...'"

"The only effect is that they had to put a fake brain in there in the first place," laughs Donovan.

"I just can't remember phone numbers anymore, that's the only difference," bemoans Gigeroff.