ON THE OFFENCE
When it comes to Outlaws, his comedy-thriller about a bunch of people sentenced to community service getting mixed up in actual organised crime, Stephen Merchant knew the territory. It’s not that he had, like Greg, the character he plays in the series – which he wrote and directed – been sentenced for soliciting in a carpark.
No, when Merchant was growing up in Bristol both his parents worked for the organisation that administered community sentences. The mix of people they dealt with intrigued him.
“You’d have the businessman who’d got caught drink-driving or some
