It was created by the team behind the sketch show Smack the Pony and hospital-based sitcom Green Wing, led by Victoria Pile who acts as co-writer, producer and director.

It is set in the fictitious Kirke University and follows the lives of the staff, in particular the power-crazed and callous vice chancellor Jonty de Wolfe (played by Andy Nyman),[1] lazy womanising English literature professor Matt Beer (Joseph Millson) and newly promoted senior mathematics lecturer Imogen Moffat (Lisa Jackson).

A full series was later commissioned and commenced airing on 5 April 2011, with the first episode being a re-shot and expanded version of the pilot.

His targets include English literature professor Matt Beer (Millson), an unrepentant womaniser, who does hardly any work and who is assisted by postgraduate student Flatpack (Jonathan Bailey), a man who reads hardly any books and instead is keen on sport.

The university is forced to call in Canadian restructuring guru Georgina "George" Bryan (Katherine Ryan).

[2] While Beer tries to carry out Wolfe's orders, he begins to develop feelings for Moffat and starts to suspect that he is falling in love with her.

At the meeting in which she is due to publish her damaging final report on the university, her pregnancy causes her to re-evaluate her priorities, realising that destroying the lives and careers of the staff would be cruel.

It has six of the same writers: Victoria Pile, Robert Harley, James Henry, Oriane Messina, Richard Preddy and Fay Rusling.

[1] Pile said of the character: "We've all had bosses that are power hungry and status obsessed and it's a kind of extension of what we all know and recognise in our fellow human beings, and sometimes in ourselves.

Jane Simon in the Daily Mirror wrote that: "There are some very funny moments but the staff at Kirke are perhaps a little too eccentric for their own good.

Vice-chancellor Jonty (Andy Nyman) comes on like a more megalomaniac David Brent, while womanising English lecturer Matt Beer (think about it) and speccy maths star Imogen Moffat (Joseph Millson and Lisa Jackson) have big shoes to fill if they're to be Campus's answer to Guy [Secretan] and Caroline [Todd, characters from Green Wing].

She wrote of the pilot: "Although, like Green Wing, Campus works as an ensemble of freaks, perhaps the most intriguing mutant is Vice Chancellor Jonty de Wolfe (Andy Nyman).

Initially, he looks like the weakest character – a small, bumptious David Brent clone who keeps attempting Jamaican patois to make a point.

But by the end of the show he has turned into a more sinister version of the shopkeeper in Mr Benn – wandering around the library in a floor-length taffeta ballgown, urging depressed students to commit suicide and, on one occasion, simply disappearing in the middle of a monologue, as if it were a Las Vegas floor-show, leaving his English lecturer Matthew Beer (Joseph Millson) holding a madly clattering clockwork monkey, and his jaw.

Tim Dowling in The Guardian wrote that: "The central problem with Campus is that the gossamer-thin thread that tethered Green Wing to a plot has here completely snapped.

He's all over the place – shouting out the window, jumping out of cupboards, putting on accents and indulging in freeform sexist and/or racist rants.

"[41] Graeme Thomson wrote for The Arts Desk that, "Campus tilled familiar ground with diminishing returns and zero warmth",[42] while Dan Owen for Obsessed With Film about Wolfe that: "He's David Brent meets Charles Manson.

Jonty, Matt, Lydia et al are comic creations, little grains of truth worked up into misshaped pearls of comedy weirdness.

[6] A spokesman for Channel 4 said that, "C4 are very proud to have championed Campus and those fans who watched adored it, but there simply weren't enough of them to justify a second series.

[46] While the Comedy Showcase pilot version of the first episode has not yet been released on DVD, it is currently watchable available via Channel 4's on demand service 4oD[47] and in August 2016 it was added to Netflix worldwide.