'Being Human' being humorous

What do you get if you put a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost together in a flat? No, not a groan-inducing punchline, but a superb BBC Three cult show called Being Human. Toby Whithouse's creation contained enough gruesome bloodsucking and full moon monstrosities to send viewers scuttling behind the sofa. Yet amidst the vicious visuals and heightened drama lurked some memorable moments of brilliant humour. Here's our rundown of the scenes that had the audience howling (in a non-wolfy way) during the first season...

George's animal passion with Nina

After George's previous reluctance to get jiggy in the bedroom, Nina accosts him at work and takes him to a discreet room where she tries to lecture him about the possibilities of non-penetrative sex. She has mistaken his werewolf issues with impotence – a common mistake! However, it's a full moon and George is anxious to make a getaway. She refuses to let him walk away, and before she knows it the slowly emerging animal instincts take over George's libido and he, erm, takes her by surprise. Very energetically. So much so that when it's all over, Nina collapses in a heap on the floor with a big grin on her face. George wasn't the only one howling that night.

Chicken on a string

George woke up naked in the woods one day after a full moon, only to find fellow werewolf Tully looming over him. With a tendency to refer to himself in the third person, Tully offered George guidance and desperately wanted to be looked up to. He promised George a method of safe transformation during a full moon and insisted that locking himself inside a shed is the worst thing to do. Instead, Tully suggested an al fresco method and pulled the crucial ingredient out of a bag, much to the astonishment of George.

"It's a chicken in a piece of string," explained Tully. "We take it for a walk."

As George stared at the bit of poultry, Tully explained that walking round the woods with the bit of chicken dragging behind would create a scent that the werewolf would pick up on and guide it to safety. Genius!

"Do I look like a paedo?"

Mitchell's unfortunate encounter with a local lad - and the subsequent DVD mixup which saw the boy put on a vampire snuff movie in front of his mother - led to the flatsharers being branded 'peedos' (according to the scrawls on their wall). At the time, George was trying to distance himself from Nina, citing some disturbing personal details about himself that he refused to elaborate on. So when she turned up at the flat and saw the graffiti, her suspicions were aroused… which led to some very amusing dialogue:

"So, this is your secret?" Nina asks George on his doorstep, motioning towards the graffiti.

"Of course it's not," he gently reassures her, before shouting across the street: "Oh, and there's one 'e' in 'paedo', not two! You cretins."

"Nina, do I look like a paedo?" he then queries.

"If paedos looked like paedos, they'd never do any paedo-ing," she replies.

Tully on the prowl

Tully's silky skills with the ladies came to the fore in a café when he tried to show George how to lure the opposite sex after a two-year drought. He stated that werewolves should actually have an advantage. Pulling down the zip on his top, he beckoned over the waitress and asked her to take him for a drink after work.

"I could take you for a drink?" she exclaimed.

"Yeah, but I'm gonna need your phone number. And I guess you got an early start, so we'd better have you in bed by, what, nine?"

Bingo! She succumbed to the Tully charm offensive. "She can smell the wolf," he told George. However, the hospital porter's attempts to use the same chat-up line on co-worker Nina went terribly wrong (although only in the short run).

Tully's efforts to seduce ghost Annie didn't bear many fruits. He memorably quipped: "All I have is a lumpy sofa, balls like concrete and a corpse giving me mixed signals."