[2] The series' basic structure revolved around the trio, always short of money, offering themselves for hire – with the tagline "We Do Anything, Anytime, Anywhere" – to perform all sorts of ridiculous but generally benevolent tasks.

This means that the white South Africans no longer have anyone to exploit and oppress; hence, they introduce a new system called "apart-height", where short people (Bill and a number of jockeys) are discriminated against.

Other storylines were more abstractly philosophical, such as an episode in which the trio spend Christmas Eve together waiting for the Earth to be blown up by prior arrangement of the world's governments.

The show featured extensive use of slapstick, often performed using speeded-up photography and clever, though low-budget, visual effects, such as when they built a railway station together and awoke the next morning to discover that some construction equipment outside (steam shovel, bulldozer, backhoe) had come to life and were lumbering, growling, and battling like dinosaurs.

This stunt was revealed to consist of a lorry with an image of a railway engine attached to its side passing behind them, combined with separate footage of an express train.

Other episodes featured parodies of contemporary pop music composed by Oddie, some of which went on to substantial commercial success in the British charts, among them the hit single "Funky Gibbon" as well as character-based comedy.

The characters' personae are based on stereotypes: Garden, a bright but bizarre "mad scientist"; Brooke-Taylor, a conservative, vain, sexually repressed, upper-class royalist coward; and Oddie, a scruffy, occasionally violent, left-leaning rebel from Lancashire.

In reality, Garden is a medical doctor, Brooke-Taylor was a lawyer who was not at all conservative ("But I had the double-barrelled name so I was always going to play the Tory")[4] and Oddie is a pacifist, ornithologist and active environmentalist.

Because it seemed to appeal particularly to younger viewers, some critics dismissed it as a "children's programme" and juvenile in comparison to the other contemporary UK "alternative" comedy hit, Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Graeme Garden appears briefly as Max Von Sydow in the trailer for Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in reused footage from Twice a Fortnight.