The series began with an unsuccessful short, Ident, in 1989 directed by Richard Golezsowski. After a long gestation period this developed into three unaired shorts and then thirteen ten-minute episodes that first aired over two weeks on BBC2 from December 1998. A second thirteen episode series aired from September 2001 on the same channel. As well as the core cast guest voices included Morwenna Banks, Judith Chalmers, Antoine De Caunes, Bob Holness, Bob Monkhouse, Jonathan Ross, Arthur Smith and Eddie Izzard.
The animation is unusual in that the models are almost two-dimensional and are animated to exaggerate this - they are flattened in appearance and animated on a sheet of glass with the backgrounds behind the sheet.
The stories are quite surreal - e.g. using Bob's shrinking ray to reduce the city of Birmingham to a domestic ornament (with a waste disposal problem).