As well as Mitchell and Webb themselves, the writers include Jesse Armstrong, James Bachman, Sam Bain, Mark Evans, Olivia Colman, Joel Morris, John Finnemore, Simon Kane.

Colman, Bachman, and Evans were also members of the cast, alongside Gus Brown, Sarah Hadland, Daniel Kaluuya and Paterson Joseph.

The series was shot on location in June 2006 and three audience recording sessions were held in Studio 4 at BBC Television Centre on 14, 21 and 28 July 2006.

This series was shot in high-definition[13] on location during June/July 2007 and three studio recordings with an audience were held at TC8 in Television Centre on 3, 10 and 17 August 2007.

In a 2020 episode of the podcast Rule of Three, David Mitchell, Jason Hazeley and Jonathan Dryden-Taylor discussed several of the series four sketches.

The series had a bleaker tone, contributing factors potentially including the public mood in the aftermath of the 2007–08 financial crash, inspiration from the writers' upbringings during fears of nuclear warfare, and an increase in the prominence of dramas at the time.

Though Mitchell said he was uncomfortable with it in 2020, reference is made in the sketches to all the children having died in the apocalypse, an idea independently conceived by both pairs of writers.

The character Sheila seems to believe that society will return to normal if people continue practising pre-Event routines in a ritualistic fashion, such as producing game shows.

Mitchell linked this to another sketch conceived by the writers in which inhabitants of Pompeii begin to frantically recycle after the nearby volcano erupts.

[14] Another sketch about a spaceship employee who returns from a sick day to find all of his colleagues involved in a religion referencing a deity called "Vectron" was taken from an occurrence during the writing process.