Library the focus of new ABC comedy

A dark new comedy on the ABC throws a light on the antics in a community library.

Frances O'Brien is a high-strung librarian who doesn't take late fees lightly.

In the lead up to her biggest week of the year, Book Week, she is particularly stressed.

It doesn't help when her former best friend Christine, the source of much of her anguish for the past 19 years, turns up demanding a job.

This is the starting point for The Librarians, a dark new Australian comedy which delves behind the hard cover of a suburban library.

Created by its stars Rob Butler (Frances) and Roz Hammond (Christine), the show revolves around the fictional Middleton Interactive Learning Centre and the cross-section of society which inhabits it.

As pointed out by co-producer and director Wayne Hope, who is also Butler's real-life husband, the public library is one of the few remaining free spaces in our communities.

"It's one of the last places you can go to now where you get heating or cooling and a copy of the newspaper for nothing, so naturally it attracts every freak under the sun," Hope says.

"Whatever walk of life they're from, they're all in there on a level pegging."

While the idea for the show initially came from Hammond and Butler, who met on the set of The Eric Bana Show, the library setting was inspired by Hope's regular visits to the St Kilda Public Library in Melbourne.

"We were going there with our young daughter a lot for story time, which is basically an hour of relief for very anxious young parents," he says.

"It jumped out at us, 'gee there's a lot of very interested people here'.

"In our local area we're right among the Jewish community of Balaclava, there's housing commission homes, the gentrified portion of St Kilda, plus the constant stream of druggies there for a bit of a nap, so there is this great cross-section of people."

The cross-section of characters who work at the The Librarians library is similarly broad.

There's the mail thief serving community service (comedian Bob Franklin), a paraplegic (Heidi Arena) and the terrible poet (Stephen Ballantyne).

TV veteran Kym Gyngell plays Frances's parish priest, who has unsurprisingly developed an ulcer, while newcomer Josh Lawson, who has impressed on Network Ten improvisational comedy show Thank God You're Here, is the young object of her affection. He is also dyslexic.

Hope plays Terry, Frances's hapless and under-the-thumb husband.

"You mention a library and everyone has a giggle," Butler says.

"Everyone remembers a time when they had a reason for going there. There's something intrinsically funny about them."

Hope says the variety of disparate people at a library make it ripe for comedy material.

"Any place you're told to be serious and quiet goes against the grain, and induces a response that can be comedy gold," he says.

The relationship between Frances and Christine was written before the show was placed in a library.

In the early stages of the six episode series, viewers will discover Christine's dirty secrets involving drugs, which is the reason she goes to Frances seeking a "legitimate job".

We also find they used to be best friends, before the free-spirited Christine left church-going Frances stranded at a caravan park.

"Frances and Christine could be set anywhere really, a restaurant, any type of workplace," Butler says.

While Christine is thoroughly likeable, despite being at the library for completely selfish means, the character of Frances will be a challenge for viewers in a similar way to that of Ricky Gervais' David Brent in The Office.

At the start, she is abhorrent, completely intolerant of others, even racist, and while her catch phrase is "I don't make the rules", that is simply her way of saying she does.

It was a tightrope they walked carefully while writing the script, Butler says.

"She does some horrible things, but we try to illicit sympathy at the same time," she says.

"In episode two there's a dreadful encounter where she tries to tell a joke and it falls flat, and there's a flashback to the party where her mum hits her over the head. Then you realise this has been happening her whole life."

In the tradition of black comedy, even darker than that of Summer Heights High, the hit Chris Lilley show it will replace on October 31, The Librarians sets out to polarise opinions.

"That's something we were looking at in the broader sense, whether it be through politics or just personalities. The notion of `I do like and I don't like', and how we define ourselves and each other so quickly," Hope says.

"As writers we've tried to get it a bit grey, give the audience the first flush to decide where they stand, and then challenge that first impression."