Actor Paterson Joseph has been leading a double life – from comedy one minute to tragedy the next, he tells Kate Whiting.

PATERSON JOSEPH found himself leading a strange life while filming BBC1’s post-apocalypic drama Survivors and C4 comedy Peep Show at the same time.

He found himself dashing back and forth between the two sets. “It was so disturbing,” admits the 45- year-old actor best known as David Mitchell’s self-assured boss Alan Johnson in Peep Show.

“It worked out that on a Saturday I went up from London to Birmingham to do Peep Show, and on the Sunday Johnson sacked everybody.

“Then I came back on the train and on Monday morning I was down a coal mine in Survivors, and then on Tuesday I went back to David Mitchell with a Hitler moustache and I was thrown off set for giggling.

“On Thursday, I was being attacked by thugs and chained, and then I woke up on Saturday morning in a hotel room, going ‘Where am I?’.

“It took me half a minute to think, ‘don’t be silly, you’re filming Peep Show and then it’s Sunday morning and your work’s finished and you can go back to Survivors’. It really was a stretch, but I hope I did justice to both shows.”

The second series of BBC1 drama Survivors, which follows a group of individuals who’ve survived a deadly virus that’s killed 99 per cent of the population, promises to be darker than the first.

“It gets very dark, but not to the point that a 15-year-old couldn’t watch it, ” says Paterson. “My son’s six-and-a-half and there’s no way he’s watching it until he’s at least 12.”

The show, a remake of the Seventies original, has taken on greater significance in a year that saw the threat of a global pandemic become more real with the outbreak of swine flu.

The scare stories were at their height when the cast of the show were filming in the summer. But Joseph doubts swine flu will prove as prevalent as the Survivors virus.

“In France, they’re constantly saying more people have died from every other kind of flu than have died from swine flu – that’s French pragmatism.

“I think we’ve cranked up the panic here in the UK but it shows we’re vulnerable to viruses, we’re not superhuman and some of us will be immune and some of us won’t. The programme highlights that and serves to warn us about our fragility.”

His character, Greg Preston, was shot in the last episode of the 2008 series and, as the new one begins, he’s fighting for his life. The actor obviously hoped his character would survive, but admits he wasn’t worried either way.

He reveals that he’ll be back in episode two at the very least. We also find out more about Greg’s past through his delirium, caused by blood loss and shock.

“When I first heard about it, I was so excited, because there’s an idea planted in one of the flashbacks that pays off massively later on. The sci-fi geek in me is very excited that I get that little message about the future.”

After a day of filming Survivors, whether on a deserted motorway or down a bleak mine, it’s hard for the actors to switch off.

“It’s not an indulgence to say that you are affected by the stories that you’re telling – and we did 80 days’ filming on this, so of course you think about the world unpeopled,”

he admits.

“I still do it. I sometimes look at the street, any street and just imagine it with no traffic, no people and no electricity, nothing.

“And there’s that feeling that all your friends are dead, all your family is dead, everybody that your friends and family knew, the Government doesn’t exist anymore, everyone you meet is a potential killer, rapist, looter, they’ll take everything you have.

It’s an awful place.”

■ Survivors: Tuesday, BBC1, 9pm.