Career: After graduating, Fry and Laurie enjoyed a successful comedy partnership. Fry was a millionaire by 30, thanks to a successful rewrite of the Noel Gay musical Me and My Girl. He has appeared in numerous films and TV projects, including Blackadder, Jeeves and Wooster, Wilde, Thunderpants, Kingdom and The Hobbit. He's also written several books, and is well-known as a charming raconteur. He made his movie debut as writer and director with Bright Young Things, based on Evelyn Waugh's book, Vile Bodies. Fry is the presenter of comedy quiz QI, he has also made several acclaimed documentaries, including ones about manic depression and Aids, and he is the reader for the British versions of JK Rowling's Harry Potter series of audio books.

Career: Davies performed his first stand-up gig in 1988, and by the early 1990s was a rising star, picking up rave reviews at Edinburgh. He later gave up playing clubs to concentrate on radio. His Radio 1 series, Alan's Big One FM, led to TV appearances on shows such as One Foot in the Grave, before he was cast as the lead in Jonathan Creek, the light-hearted mystery drama that made him a household name. Other acting work includes Bob and Rose, A Many Splintered Thing, The Brief, Marple, Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (2008), Lewis and Whites. He presented the three-part documentary Alan Davies' Teenage Revolution for Channel 4 in 2010 and was a judge in 2011 on ITV talent show Show Me the Funny. He's also appeared in West End hit Auntie and Me. He has been a permanent panellist on irreverent quiz QI since the show began in 2003.

Career: Anderson did stand-up stints at London's Comedy Store and wrote scripts for such shows as Alas Smith and Jones, The Frankie Howerd Variety Show and Not the Nine O'Clock News. He found fame presenting Whose Line Is It Anyway? and has fronted Clive Anderson Talks Back and Clive Anderson All Talk. He hosted the Radio 4 series Unreliable Evidence and presented Mastermind when it briefly appeared on the Discovery Channel. These days, he concentrates mostly on radio work, having hosted the likes of Loose Ends and Clive Anderson's Chat Room.

Career: Jupitus left the civil service, and under the moniker Porky the Poet, started touring with different bands as their support act. While working the student circuit, he met Billy Bragg and Paul Weller, and became involved in the Labour Party-supporting Red Wedge movement. He had a short-lived job at record label Go! Discs. Jupitus directed music videos before landing a radio show on the BBC station GLR in 1995. He became a team captain on Never Mind the Buzzcocks in 1996, frequently appears on QI, has toured as a stand-up comedian, and hosted the breakfast show on BBC 6Music between 2002 and 2007. In 2009, he joined the West End cast of Hairspray, playing the role of Edna Turnblad. He also played King Arthur in a touring version of Spamalot in 2011.

Career: Hall has lived in the UK for more than 20 years, though he briefly relocated to Montana, where he still owns a small ranch. In 2000, he won the Perrier Comedy Award for his performance as Otis Lee Crenshaw, a persona that has so far spawned a book and the script for a film. Hall has become a stalwart of the stand-up circuit as well as a panel-show regular, notching up several appearances on QI and 8 Out of 10 Cats. In 2003, he presented a series about fishing, before returning to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2007 with his play Best Western. He picked up the theme again a year later in the documentary Rich Hall's How the West Was Lost, one of several programmes he's made about film genres. Hall has also published several books, and is an accomplished musician.