Wayne is not a malicious boy; it’s just that other people, especially adults and better behaved children, are inconvenienced by him and his copious bodily fluids as he hurtles through life refusing to stand in line, clear up after himself, wipe his nose or keep still and listen for even a nanosecond. Lucien is Wayne’s polar opposite - high-achieving, well informed, obedient and neat: a model citizen who likes knitting and is sometimes unbearably smug.

You may be convinced that you’ve met these two 10-year-olds, that they’re in your class or (with a bit of luck) in the class next door. If they seem familiar, it’s because you’ve seen them on TV; they’re on every day on Cartoon Network and four times a week on Children’s BBC, with 3.7 million viewers a week. They are The Cramp Twins, the reassuringly unreal stars of a cartoon series with much of the street cred of The Simpsons and appeal throughout the primary age group and beyond.

Animator Brian Wood created Wayne and Lucien five years ago in two slim graphic novels; now he heads a team of writers to keep up with storyline demand. There is seemingly endless potential in the emotionally complex characters (Wayne is often angry and frustrated, but full of curiosity and joie de vivre; the more moderate Lucien is fuelled by campaigning zeal on issues such as additives in pet food, child labour and the evils of advertising) and the environmentally unstable setting of a town in thrall to big business. “I wanted it to be as emotionally real as possible, not just to be played for laughs,” says Wood.

Both boys have a taste for adventure: Lucien’s involves ideals and desirable ends while Wayne’s features electricity, chemicals, scrap metal and unwilling participants, such as when he tries to stretch the twins’

diminutive friend Tony (“Shrimp Boy”) on a rack. “Sometimes Wayne is the kid we’d all like to be if we could get away with it,” says Wood. “While Lucien wakes up every day and asks, ‘What will the world do to me today?’

Wayne asks, ‘What will I do to the world?’ Wayne is creative - he’s always making things and trying things out - he just doesn’t intellectualise in the way Lucien does.”

Wood’s own life is reflected not in either boy’s character, but in their home town, Soap City. Now 33, he started a degree in landscape architecture after school (“I had to give it up after a year because my maths was so hopeless that anything I built would have fallen down”) and became intrigued by the idea of a purpose-built factory town such as Saltaire in West Yorkshire and, later, Port Sunlight on Merseyside (when he decided on a career change, he studied graphic design and animation at Liverpool Polytechnic).

Soap City is Port Sunlight reinvented for US cartoon-land, with picket fences and yellow school buses. “I gave it a New World setting because I did not want the clutter of history. But I have always been fascinated by the one-horse town with an omnipotent presence.” In Soap City, the ruling power is the HazChem corporation and its president, Mr Winkle. His daughter Wendy, a Violet Elizabeth Bott figure, is the only human being who can strike fear into Wayne. “She’s his Achilles’ heel because she’s not scared of him.”

HazChem owns the Cramps body and soul: mild-mannered Mr Cramp is a soap salesman and Mrs Cramp is addicted to cleaning with ever more ferocious products. “She’s like an industrial chemist, but it all happens in the house.”

It’s the sewers hidden beneath the squeaky-clean surface that say most about the young Brian Wood. His father, a civil engineer, created a sewage system with help from Brian and his brother, who were sent down some of the smaller pipes with a camera.

“Esther Rantzen should have been there. I was only six or seven. I didn’t like getting dirty, but I probably got pocket money out of it.” In the series, Tony and his family (descendants of the “swamp folk”, who pre-date HazChem) are responsible for sewerage maintenance, and Tony’s father hires him out chimney-sweep style. “There was a lot of me in that story. Spending all that time in sewers is bound to have an effect. We moved around because of my father’s job, mostly in West Yorkshire, and I saw a lot of pipework and other industrial architecture.”

He also changed school frequently, with dyslexia an ever-present problem. “I don’t remember reading with enjoyment and I think anyone I knew at school would be surprised that I ending up writing books.”

Brian broke into print after a publisher at Bloomsbury Children’s Books, Barry Cunningham (who had recently bought the Harry Potter novels), saw the showreel for his MA in animation at the Royal College of Art. Cunningham (who now runs his own publishing company, the Chicken House) was looking for new illustrators but Brian delivered the words as well. Two graphic novels for primary readers followed, Cramp Twins: they’re not at all alike and Swamp Fever.

In publication year, 1997, Brian became animator in residence at the Museum of the Moving Image. The short film he created there, School Disco, is spookily suggestive of social life in Soap Town. The hard boy who persuades the frightened DJ to play classic rock hits all night and is pursued by the girl with the spiky red hair could be Wayne’s big brother.

The Cramp Twins, BBC1 4.10pm Monday, Tuesday and Thursday; Saturday morning (various times). Also Cartoon Network daily at 9pm and on weekend mornings