"We like the word cult," says Hirschfield.

"We are not trying to bump ER off the air," adds Donovan. "We are trying to appeal more strongly to a smaller audience. And we think we can pull that off, financially. If we can deliver to the speciality channels and give them 4% or 5% then I think we can make the show work."

If the show does go to a series, the trio can guarantee a few changes, and not just cosmetic (although Donovan admits that the bridge set of the Lexx will be altered after criticism from many quarters).

"We'll probably want to go a little bit further," reveals Donovan. "We want to explore things that other people are little bit afraid of. One of the main problems I have is that the SF literature which comes out of the US comes out of a conservative Utopianism. We're going to stick with nihilism. We want our characters to be likeable but not heroic... Well, only very reluctantly."

And what about new regular characters? "We're thinking about that," says Donovan."There's a character we introduce in movie #3 called Wist and we're thinking of bringing her in."

"She's very interesting," adds Hirschfield. "She's not very human And she's very, very, very attractive. So we'll be seeing a lot more of her." "In both senses of the word," adds Gigeroff, predictably.

Jeff is spurred on: "We may have a talking scrotum. We're just trying to negotiate with his agent right now."

"We really liked working with the guest stars, too," says Paul, referring to the appearances in the movies of actors like Barry Bostwick, Tim Curry, Malcolm McDowell and Rutger Hauer ("We all know he's done some good performances and some not-so-good performances, but this is Rutger as you want to see him," he assures me). "We're surprised we got the calibre of people we got. And we really want to stay with that idea and have really juicy guest stars. And sometimes if we don't get a guest star we would like to get a guest director or a guest designer who's a big name."

"And we want to get Elton John to score one of the episodes," reckons Hirschfield. "Strains of Can You Feel The Love Tonight, we think that would really help."

When asked who they'd like to get for the series, the list, predictably gets steadily sillier: "Lee Majors we've been working on..." "Olivier, we're very close. But that's tricky. We've got to get exhumation rights from Joan PlowrightŠ" "We'd like Steve Buscemi..." "Christopher Walken..." "Douglas Hurd, we're very close. We've got just the perfect part..." "Latoya Jackson, definitely..." "and Bubbles the Chimp."

"Oh yeah," says Donovan, completely matter-of-factly, "and for anyone who did like the song-and-dance routine in the second movie, there's an episode next season that's based on Brigadoon. It'll be the whole show, basically a one-hour musical."

"It'll be so great it'll make Evita look like a Madonna vehicle," backs up Hirschfield.

"And that's Brigadoom...," Donovan informs me, "with an 'm.'"

By now I'm starting to believe they could be telling the truth...