Sketch team Clever Peter and Brighton have long had a happy relationship.

Not only did the show win an Argus Angel at the 2009 Fringe, it was also where the team found its feet after original founding member Miranda Hennessy was forced to pull out of a 2008 performance.

“Miranda had a filming job so couldn’t do the final weekend we were playing in Brighton,” says William Hartley, sporting the yellow jumper in a trio whose onstage look seems to have taken its inspiration from children’s TV.

“Ed [Eales-White, blue jumper], Richard [Bond, red jumper] and I had to revamp the entire show for the three of us, and the rest is history. It seemed to work well with three of us.”

With Miranda handing in her green jumper, the team went on to create three full-length sell-out Edinburgh shows, and earlier this year took their comedy to the airwaves with their own four-part BBC Radio 4 series.

They are now returning to the venue where they received their Argus Angel as part of this year’s Brighton Comedy Fringe, which launches this weekend.

“Working on radio was completely different,” admits Hartley.

“Our stuff is very visual, so what we wanted to do with the radio show was translate the feeling and style we have on stage to radio.

“Our writing has improved a lot from having done the radio show – it’s using different areas of the imagination, which is always good.

“We only lifted about 20 per cent of the series out of our three live Edinburgh shows – it was pretty much all new material. A lot of the stuff we liked onstage we couldn’t make translate.”

Concentrating on the radio show has meant the group hasn’t been touring much, with only a couple of best-of shows at the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe and both Richard and Ed doing solo shows. But with this new short tour mixing the best of the live work and radio shows, Clever Peter, which also includes writer and techie Dominic Stone, are working towards getting on the box.

“We have a strong idea of what we want to do, and we have got some great producers on board,” says Hartley. “It’s just getting the yes or no from the powers that be.”

The team grew around the nucleus of Hartley and Eales-White, who first met doing long-running comedy show The News Review in London.

“We went up to Edinburgh and did a show after a few people dropped out,” remembers Hartley. “It was terrible, and made us furious. We felt we could do better and so started to write some stuff.”

The remaining team members were brought in from Ed’s former university in Winchester before the line-up changed again in Brighton.

Clever Peter’s writing methods differ from straight improvisation to individuals taking ideas home to work on.

“We’ll set up a date to meet and everyone will bring along ideas – some can be just one line,” says Hartley. “We will make a decision as a group about what we like and what we don’t.

“Some of the sketches can be really technical and need to be rehearsed and blocked, some are fairly freestyle. It all informs the style of what we do.

“I think that is what makes us stronger as a foursome. We bring different abilities and strengths to the table. We have a very strong knowledge of how Clever Peter would do it and it is always aimed at the audience.

“It’s all about making the audience laugh as much as possible in the time frame we have.

“We feel it’s a failure if there is one person in the audience who hasn’t laughed out loud during the show.”

  • Upstairs At Three And Ten, Steine Street, Brighton, Saturday, October 27. Starts at 7.30pm, tickets £9.50/£8. Call 07800 983290