It is 8.51am and Kate is a bit too quiet. She and her five schoolfriends from Newark huddle together nervously in a Day-Glo painted dugout with a mound of prawn cocktail crisps, Coke cans, tubes of Jaffa Cakes and a vat of Haribos. "Anyone want some sweets?" the pretty researcher asks often and insistently. But the 11-year-olds, ignoring all attempts to sugar-rush them into more visible excitement, just pick at grapes and chew their fingers.
In nine minutes, Dick and Dom in Da Bungalow will be transmitted live to around a million viewers on BBC One and CBBC. A few feet from the children - or "Da Bungalowheads" as they will be known this Saturday - a student rag week appears to have seized control of a television studio. Dressed-down, hungover-looking crew wrestle with cameras while talking about the previous night - "and we ended up at a party with Abi Titmuss..." - while others position comedy objects on the set, a living room decorated in swirling Seventies kitsch, all purple carpet and eye-bleeding wallpaper.
A man dressed as a bat loiters with today's celebrity guests, Keith Harris and Orville. As the floor manager, TJ, calls, "Two minutes to air", the show's stars are in the studio kitchen. Dom (Dominic Wood) is making himself a cup of tea; Dick (Richard McCourt), wearing a curly blond wig, is gasping at a final fag, bringing to mind, perhaps somewhat unfairly, Krusty, The Simpsons' cynical, chain-smoking clown.
But "the boys", as everyone calls them, have reason to be tense. The two-hour show is almost as chaotic as it looks. With no script or Autocue, just a running order, it is held together only by Dick and Dom's talent for syncopated comic riffs as they respond to whatever is thrown at them - a child's off-hand remark or a bucket of custard. Indeed, the production team often ratchet up the spontaneity by surprising the duo: they once had a brass band march through the set and, on another occasion, secretly shipped in the pair's old teachers and girlfriends for a This is Your Life pastiche.
This kind of Saturday-morning, seat-of-your-pants TV has provided a rigorous training camp for generations of presenters. And Dick and Dom, just like Noel Edmonds, Lenny Henry, Chris Tarrant, Phillip Schofield and Ant and Dec before them, look certain to graduate into proper grown-up television with its accompanying household fame. This spring on BBC Two, they will present a modern revival of Ask the Family, that fondly remembered Seventies battle of the nerds, while a growing reputation for risqué jokes is already expanding their adult fanbase.
In 2003, Dom was censured by Ofcom for appearing in a T-shirt with the slogan "Morning Wood" emblazoned on the front, a reference to his surname, he insisted, not a state of male arousal. And in January, Conservative MP Peter Luff berated Dick and Dom in Parliament. "You can join me in playing How Low Can You Bungalow?" he said, picking out items such as Pants Dancers (featuring children with underwear on their heads) or Bunged Up (a game involving turtles popping out of toilets) for special opprobrium: "Is that really the stuff of public service broadcasting?"
Yet the show does serve one sector of the public: eight to 12-year-olds who appreciate the comic qualities of bums, poo, snot and farts. Dick and Dom is, loosely, a game show of silly slapstick competitions run over the weekend: the premise being that the kids have a mad sleepover in Da Bungalow, then appear on the Sunday show. In fact - to my younger son's utter disillusionment - Sunday is pre-recorded on Saturday afternoon, so cast and crew don't have to work Sundays with Da Hangovers.
This is the BBC's biggest children's TV hit since Live & Kicking a decade ago. Dick and Dom's success lies in appealing beyond their target age range, throwing in double entendres, which will (hopefully) whizz over a ten-year-old's head but win sniggers from dads or older siblings. But not mothers, it seems. As Dom tells me later, "Mums hate us, they switch us off."
Sure enough, during The Yum Yum Game, in which children must catch green "muck-muck" (cold mash and mushy peas) hurled by dinner ladies dressed as witches, then eat it, gagging, I have to look away. I catch the eye of Kathryn, the children's BBC chaperone, and several other women. I sense we're all thinking appalled thoughts: "What a waste of food!" and "Look at the mess!"
Switch over to Dick and Dom's ITV rival, Ministry of Mayhem, however, and the pair suddenly seem very wholesome. While MOM, with its celeb interviews and fashion tips, addresses children as mini-consumers, in Da Bungalow they are just children, enjoying a timeless, innocent silliness. It costs nothing, after all, to dance in your pants. "You don't have to be cool and trendy to be in our club," says producer Steve Ryde, "just a kid having fun."
As the show breaks for a cartoon, Kathryn swabs the children down. Whether it's the adrenalin of live TV or just the E-numbers kicking in, by the time they are briefed for Do You Know Them Or Snot? the Bungalowheads are beginning to enjoy themselves. In this game, each child must identify the voice of a family member or be plunged into a tub of green slime. "Please don't flick gunge at Orville," warns TJ. "Keith Harris won't like it." After failing to recognise her auntie, Jasmin faces the gunge: "It's cold!" she moans. "I don't care if it's cold," cries Dick. "Get in!" The pair have found a tone that children appreciate, neither condescending nor overly nice; although backstage they are delightful to the terrified Bungalowheads, on-screen they screw up kids' e-mails if they're boring and make fun of their names. Although Dick and Dom are 28 and 27 respectively, their screen personae are not adult. Rather, they are irresponsible teenage big brothers encouraging younger siblings to wreak havoc on the grown-up world.
They had to stop their notorious Bogies game, which involved competing to see who could yell the word loudest in a quiet public space, after it disrupted the nation's libraries. It's been replaced by an equally silly item in which they slap stickers of their own gurning faces on to the backs of unsuspecting passers-by. Accompanied by a faux sports commentary, it is laugh-out-loud funny.
