About No Tomatoes
No Tomatoes is a sketch show created by Ian Potter, who has also worked on The 11 O'Clock show and Week Ending. The series is best described as a show that can never be adapted for television, because the ideas and mental images created would be almost impossible to put on screen.
The series started as a collection of sketches written for Jon Rolph. However, he moved to television, so Potter sent the sketches to Gill Isles at BBC Manchester. Potter kept on writing sketches, eventually making enough for a pilot episode of No Tomatoes, the title of which comes from the punchline of Potter's favourite joke at the time. The central theme for the pilot was to deliberately create sketches that could not be done on television.
Potter produced a collection of MP3s, which he wrote and performed himself. The pilot was sent to a BBC Programme Development Group on Tuesday 25th July 2006. This pilot got positive feedback from everyone in the group, with a series of six episodes, each 15-minutes long, being commissioned for BBC 7 on 10th January 2007.
There were some changes introduced for the broadcast series, most notably a new producer (Paul Hardy) and two addition actors (Paul Copley and Helen Moon). The episodes were recorded on the 2nd-3rd July 2007, and were first broadcast on the 24th September.
To give an idea as to the surreal nature of the content: the sketches include a man discussing the artistic value of 'The Laughing Cow', some complaining trees, and the word 'Skit' undergoing surgery to change from a noun to an adjective.