Ali's director talks about their experiences in the US

Pioneeering cable network HBO, home of Sex And The City and The Sopranos, commissioned a six-part series, which also featured Kazakhstani reporter Borat, and camp Austrian fashion reporter, who has previously only been seen on short skits on the Paramount Comedy Channel.

Now, as the American series prepares to air Britain, director Dan Mazer says the team had trouble keeping a straight face as the great and the good faced a barrage of idiotic questioning from their inept interviewer.

"I'm the worst person for laughing during filming," he said. "If I can avoid being there, I will, because there's a serious possibility that I'll corpse - which, of course, can ruin everything.

"Early on with Ali G, we were interviewing Sir Rhodes Boyson, and I was absolutely Doubled Up with laughter behind the camera.

"Sacha is normally brilliant at keeping a straight face, but if you watch the interview, you can see that he starts to go as well.

"It's not as bad with characters like Borat, because on the whole, he appears in situations where you can just walk away if you're going to laugh. But with Ali G, when he's doing an interview, it's much more difficult.

"We had a cameraman in New York who was brilliant, but couldn't control his urge to laugh. He sorted it out by wearing earplugs, so that he couldn't hear anything that was being said while he was filming. After that, he had no problem."

The series features some typically obscene and absurd behaviour, such as Borat's attempts to integrate into polite American society, Ali G's day at the police academy, or Bruno's encounters with right-wing extremists - yet the team are rarely rumbled.

"We genuinely don't get found out," Mazer says. "It's largely because Sacha is so brilliant at knowing just how far to go. He instinctively knows when he's gone too far, and reins himself in.

"You've got to remember, we're often with people for two hours, and you only see bits of it. A lot of very finely judged preparation has taken place.

"Very occasionally, I'll give Sacha a signal to indicate he's taking things a little too far, and we're in danger of being found out.. But mostly, he's a superb judge, and reacts according to the feedback he's getting."

Mazer says the programme was well-received when it aired on the HBO network in the States, but blames British media for only concentrating on the bad reviews

"In fact, it went down incredibly well," he said. "When it came out, we got hundreds of glowing reviews, and one bad one, in the Washington Post. That was the one that seemed to get noticed in Britain, rather than all the other ones.

"I've got a theory about this: In Britain, we're no longer world leaders in anything. Our cricket team's rubbish, our economy is fading, we're no longer a world power. We're in America's thrall. Yet the one thing we still maintain, and cling on to jealously, is that we've got the best sense of humour in the world.

"So we don't like the idea that people in other countries get our sense of humour. We prefer to cling to the idea that our comedy is too sophisticated for the Americans And yet the truth is rather different. If you look at sitcoms, with a couple of exceptions, all the best ones come from America, like Friends, Frasier, Seinfeld and so on.

"I actually think Americans get the undertones of satire almost better than the British. It can't be coincidence that the best comedies on our TV are all imported from America."

But then even the bad reviews never said that Ali G was too sophisticated, complaining instead that the satire wasn't subtle enough. Maybe the Americans are the more comedy-literate, after all.

* Ali G in Da USAiii starts on Channel 4 on April 11.

First published:April 1, 2003

Published: 22 Mar 2009