The characters' personae are based on stereotypes: Garden, a bright but bizarre "mad scientist"; Brooke-Taylor as a conservative, vain, sexually-repressed, upper-class royalist coward, and Oddie as a scruffy, occasionally violent, left-leaning rebel from Lancashire. The characters played up to their stereotypes, debunking them but were not necessarily based on the actor playing the character, even though the actors played characters with their own names, and had some minor characteristics in common. In reality, Garden is a medical doctor, Brooke-Taylor was a lawyer who was not at all conservative ("But I had the double-barrelled name so I was always going to play the Tory") and Oddie is a pacifist, ornithologist and active environmentalist.