The show started at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1999, and starred Mack, Catherine Tate and Dan Antopolski.
[2] Mack later expressed regret at not including them in the TV show, stating: "I'm not a great believer in regret, but looking back over the last eighteen years of me doing this job, not keeping our sketch show Bits together and jumping at the first offer to put a version of it on telly is probably the biggest mistake I've made.
"[3] The original line-up of the cast was Lee Mack, Jim Tavaré, Tim Vine, Karen Taylor and Ronni Ancona.
For the second series, Kitty Flanagan replaced Ancona, who left to concentrate on BBC One's Alistair McGowan's Big Impression (which was shortened to simply Big Impression to reflect Ancona playing as many parts as McGowan himself).
Other comedic writers/actors, such as Jimmy Carr, John Archer, Ricky Gervais, Matthew Hardy, John Mann, Stephen Colledge and Daniel Maier were also responsible for the show's humour, though as mentioned earlier, were not featured in the show.
The opening and closing credits have been removed for all episodes, and a number of sketches have been edited out to fit the series onto a single disc.
The main cast consisted of Malcolm Barrett, Kaitlin Olson, Mary Lynn Rajskub, and Paul F. Tompkins, as well as Lee Mack from the British version of the show.
The main cast consisted of Emmanuel Bilodeau, Réal Bossé, Édith Cochrane, Catherine De Sève and Sylvain Marcel.
Mack states in his autobiography that the show also utilised sketches that were written by the UK team but never recorded.