Comedian Alex Horne, of Taskmaster fame, is bringing his musical comedy band The Horne Section to Channel 4 in a new sitcom which sees him try to become the frontman of a new late night music chat show filmed live from his family home.

Horne, 44, is joined by a whole host of celebrity friends appearing as themselves or as characters in the hilariously meta sitcom, which sees The Horne Section - one of Britain's most popular musical comedy acts - get up to all sorts of zany antics as they desperately try to please Channel 4 execs and get their Jools Holland-inspired music show on the air.

Ahead of the series' launch on Channel 4 and All 4, Alex Horne tells us more about what we've got to look forward to.

How would you describe The Horne Section TV show?

I think it's quite a silly, heartfelt comedy about a band made up of old friends who spend their lives trying to make each other laugh.

We mainly wanted to be funny. There's a lot of TV comedy programmes that delve into deep issues. We don't do that. It's hopefully a funny show with music in it.

Hopefully within that you get some other stuff as well, but the main idea is that every time we're on screen we're trying to make you laugh.

How different is the show's version of Alex Horne to you in real life?

I think he's quite a lot different. He's definitely got a bigger ego and he thinks he deserves to have his own show.

It's definitely me but just an ever-so-slightly more monstrous version. We never wanted it to go too cartoony so it's hopefully believable.

I'm definitely a lot odder in the show than I am in real life. I'm very boring in real life!

You and the band have done all sorts of live shows and tours - how does this differ from what you've done before?

The main difference is everything we've done before has been pretty much live and one take. Even when we're doing stuff on 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, you have one go at it and it's gone, and all our podcasts and live shows are always in the moment. So suddenly we had to be actors.

We recorded about six minutes of the show per day, which is really slow, so we had to adjust to suddenly taking our time over things and doing things again and again.

I think all musicians' instinct is to perform it and then move on to the next bit and as a stand-up as well that's my instinct, so that was a learning process, but we had the director, Babs Wiltshire, who was really good at coaching us through that.

Is it actually filmed in your house?

No, I wish it was my house! It's the house of an incredible musician who appears in episode five of the show and she's called Imogen Heap. It's her house and she's got a recording studio there. We went to all these location recces and just fell in love with it straight away.

They've never shot a TV series there before so it's a new location, which is great. She's (Imogen) won Grammys. In her recording studio she's got a couple of Grammys up which I wanted to have in the background.

What was your favourite music video to shoot?

Probably the first one - we shot one where we're all in a car, it's called 'Is it the Police?'

I don't know anything about cars but it's a 1960s car and all six of us were crammed in. It's the very first thing we shot in the whole sitcom and it was a bit like The Blues Brothers, which is my favourite film ever.

Like us, it's a band going round the country being badly behaved so it was a nice way in and we were really happy with the outcome of it; it's stupid, we wear sunglasses and it's funny.

It was all very homemade, the cameraman filming through the window... Most of the shoot was really fun because it's just me and my mates mucking about but luckily, we're led by professionals!

Can you tell me about some of the brilliant guests that are involved in the series?

Martin Kemp and Anneka Rice did the pilot and they were so good we were desperate to have them back. Luckily, they enjoyed it too so they were easy ones.

I wanted Greg Davies to be in it because it makes sense in the narrative and he's the funniest. Well, him and Tim Key are the funniest people I know so I was always desperate for them to do it.

Having Imogen Heap was just amazing; we wanted a proper musician... I think you've either heard of her or you haven't but if you have, you'll be amazed that she's on our stupid show.

We've got Big Zuu, Dr Ranj Singh, John Oliver who is in every episode and he's enormous in America; he's won a million Emmys! So that's odd. He said yes straight away.

It's an odd ensemble but hopefully it's always unpredictable. We didn't want it to be the sort of show you look at and think, 'Oh, it's the same old faces.'

How excited are you for people to finally watch the show?

It's pretty amazing to have your own sitcom so we've chucked everything at it, I suppose. We've tried to not regret anything. On that front I would say we really like it, so we're really happy.

No matter how it goes we don't really mind, but it's very strange thinking this is what we wanted to make. If people don't like it I don't know what that says about our sense of humour because this is exactly our sense of humour, which I guess is the name of the game, but it is very exposing!

Normally, because we're a live band, if something doesn't go well, we know and we do something else, whereas if this doesn't go well, we are saddled with it.

So it's quite an exciting, scary time.

The Horne Section is on Channel 4 at 10pm on Thursday November 17 and on All 4 now.