Desert island twits

When four misfit plane passengers and a power-mad air steward are marooned in the Indian Ocean after a crash, chaos – and plenty of comedy – ensues

Harriet, Douglas, Susan and Arnab have just been through one harrowing experience – and they’re about to endure another. Marooned on an island in the Indian Ocean after their plane crashed, they find that their fellow castaway is the man with whom you’d least like to be trapped. Brett the air steward is vain, selfish – and dangerous. The central character in Channel 4’s new dark comedy High & Dry, he’s more interested in becoming King Of The Island – and cosying up to fellow survivor Douglas – than he is in escaping.

‘He actively seeks ways of stopping people from getting away, such as preventing them from using a mobile phone and sabotaging attempts to use a boat to escape,’ says Marc Wootton, who plays Brett and also wrote the series. ‘He was attracted to Douglas while serving him on the flight and wants to advance that friendship now they are trapped together on an island. Pretty much everybody else just wants to end the nightmare as quickly as they can!’

At first, the situation seems heavenly for Brett. It appears that he’s alone on the island with Douglas and they have enough food and drink from the plane to keep them nourished for some time.

‘But then Arnab, Harriet and Susan appear and shatter his cosy dreams,’ says Harry Peacock, who plays Douglas.

Brett does his best to create a tropical paradise from which nobody would want to leave. He attempts to create a makeshift hotel, and organises a game of I Spy to pass the time. Meanwhile, the formidable Harriet plans to use stones to form a huge S.O. S. on the beach, so that a passing aircraft might be alerted to their fate.

‘She insists on full stops between the letters,’ says Vicki Pepperdine, who plays her, and who starred as Princess Anne in Channel 4’s spoof royal comedy The Windsors. ‘As she says, “Just because we’re marooned, it doesn’t mean to say we can’t be grammatically correct.”’

Despite being filmed in the Indian Ocean paradise of The Seychelles, the stars say it was not idyllic. Marc, who was partly inspired to create Brett by an over-friendly air steward on a flight from Los Angeles, says, ‘We wanted a filming environment that, to an extent, mirrored the experience of the characters. We also wanted to film chronologically to allow for beard growth and degradation of the characters and camp.’

Asim Chaudhry, who plays Arnab and is best known for his role in BBC

SUSAN (Grace Rex) Dungaree-wearing American whose racist, homophobic father was one of those who died when the plane crashed. He is totally bemused by their predicament, but content to stay put. ARNAB (Asim Chaudhry)