Lead Balloon is a British television series produced by Open Mike Productions for BBC Four. The series was created and is co-written by comedian Jack Dee and Pete Sinclair. It stars Dee as Rick Spleen, a cynical and misanthropic comedian whose life is plagued by petty annoyances, disappointments and embarrassments. Raquel Cassidy, Sean Power and Tony Gardner also star. The first series of six episodes was broadcast on BBC Four in 2006, with the first episode achieving the highest ratings for a comedy on the channel. Repeats of the series were run on BBC Two and BBC HD, bringing it to a larger audience. The second series of eight episodes aired on BBC Two from November 2007; the third series aired from November 2008; and the final series aired from 31 May 2011 until 5 July. Comparisons were made by critics to the successful American comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm, and positive comments were made about Lead Balloon's characters, particularly Anna Crilly's Magda, the Eastern European housekeeper. The first series was released on DVD in November 2007. The show's theme tune is a cover version of "One Way Road", written by Noel Gallagher and performed by Paul Weller. Production Development The genesis of the series came towards the end of recording the 2005 series of Jack Dee Live at the Apollo, when Dee speculated as to whether his experiences of "witless" interviews could be turned into a television programme. Following a meeting with his agent, in which he turned down the lead role in a series, Dee began writing the character that would become Rick Spleen. He focused the writing on Spleen's domestic life, rather than his professional, but did highlight the clash between the two. A pilot, commissioned by BBC Four and recorded in December 2005, received positive feedback and led to a full series of six 30-minute episodes being ordered in January 2006 for broadcast later in the year. Writing Dee's frequent collaborator Pete Sinclair joined him to write the pilot script. The two worked for two weeks developing the characters and forming storylines from them, which prepared them for writing the series proper when it was commissioned. The two were strongly influenced in their writing by the "paradigm shift" of The Office that made "natural conversation" funny without a studio audience being present. Dee cites the early films of Woody Allen, Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm as other