Have they got news...

So, who will be Angus Deayton's successor? Well, nothing you've read so far is true, Hat Trick's Jimmy Mulville and Denise O'Donoghue tell David Lister

Who, after all these weeks of Angus Deayton replacements, will succeed him as the host of Have I Got News for You? I put that question to the man who should know: Jimmy Mulville, the joint managing director of Hat Trick Productions, which makes HIGNFY.

"What are you doing next year?" he replies. I could kid myself that he means it; but as he is a former comic actor, and a Liverpudlian, he probably doesn't. "You know," he goes on, "I went to a party the other day, and somebody came up to me and offered themselves as a replacement for Angus. And, of course, agents are ringing all the time. But of the guest presenters, I would say there's maybe only one person that we've had on that I would be interested in having on again."

So might Deayton yet come back? Even the former Angus-baiters seem to be calling for his return.

"Well, the thing about Angus..." Mulville begins. A voice interjects: "We don't comment at all about Angus." Enter the other joint head of Hat Trick, Denise O'Donoghue. She stares, perhaps glares, hard at the man who is both her partner and her ex-partner. He remains her business partner in the country's most successful independent company. She was his wife. But they are divorced, though they work together every day, running the company that created not just Have I Got News for You but also The Kumars at No 42, which won a comedy award at the weekend, and a string of TV hits going back to Whose Line Is It Anyway? and Drop the Dead Donkey.

It is an intriguing relationship. Over the course of our lengthy three-way chat, Denise will stare/glare at Jimmy on several occasions. But they are firm friends, and she is also close to her ex-husband's wife, Karen, and Jimmy and Karen's children. During the Mulville–O'Donoghue marriage, Jimmy went through years of alcoholism and cocaine addiction. But he was over all that when the marriage broke up. "It's a very common phenomenon," he says. "People in recovery experience a change in their relationship."

Before he married Denise, he already had one broken marriage, and his father had hanged himself after contracting a highly painful form of viral polio. His life then "became even more frenetic, because I was running away from my feelings. I had survivor's guilt." He had been drinking since the age of 15. At 27, he discovered cocaine and would spend several hundred pounds on it in an evening. When he met Denise, then a management consultant, in 1981, he was an alcoholic and could be verbally violent and disappear for weeks on end.

But, with her encouragement, he checked into a treatment centre. And with his gift for comedy (he was a president of Footlights at Cambridge University) and her head for business, the company they formed in 1985 thrived.

Denise is not shy of joining in a conversation that links the professional and personal, and quickly shows herself to be as engaging a character as her ex, if initially more diffident.

"We did our crying away from the office," she says firmly.

"We worked hard at renegotiating the relationship," adds Jimmy.

"If we hadn't," continues Denise, "the company would have imploded. But in America you could see them looking at us and thinking, 'There's a 26-part series in this.' They couldn't get their heads round it. Not only were we English, but we were divorced and running the company together. We simply like working together."

The pair share a philosophy on creative management, which explains much about the success of Hat Trick. Successful shows such as HIGNFY (currently in Finland, Denmark, Norway and Estonia) and The Kumars at No 42 are cloned for different countries. The Kumars, for example, will be a Mexican family, the Ortegas, in America, and a Greek family in the Australian version. Whose Line Is It Anyway?, which finished here in 1997, still features on Friday nights on ABC in the States, where 170 shows have been made. It was the first British show to be remade for the US by the original producers.

"We own all the intellectual-property rights for our shows," says Denise, "which is unusual for independent companies. I insisted on that all the way along. And we have always been an ideas-and-formats company, rather than a stars company."

Hat Trick has now expanded with a slate of comedies and dramas next year, and new names have been added to the family. Cheryl Taylor, who brought Black Books to Channel 4, is the head of comedy. Mark Redhead, who did Bloody Sunday for Granada, is head of drama. And Hat Trick has also formed a partnership company with David Young, ex-BBC, called 12 Yard Productions – an allusion to the penalty area on a football pitch that had to be explained to O'Donoghue by the Everton-supporting Mulville. All the new ideas for next year are arresting – particularly, to pick just one, a Talking Heads-style series for Jane Horrocks, embracing her acting and singing abilities. Mulville describes it as a "Singing Heads".

Denise describes the culture of the company as "a can-do culture, an enabling culture". Jimmy says: "Some people don't like working here. We're not as laid-back as some companies. We don't have a pool table and a basketball net, or an aquarium. We're interested in ideas, and not strategies to make money. We're less bullish now than we were."

Denise corrects him: "We're as bullish, but less rude."

But with a £70m turnover and the biggest profit margins of any indy company, nor – surely – are they philanthropists.

"No, we're a business," Denise asserts. "But from day one, we offered percentages of profits. Word of that gets around, and it brings good creative people in."

And what of the creative person who has recently gone out – Angus Deayton? "So much that has been in the press has been wrong," says Mulville. "These stories that we were approaching Stephen Fry or Clive Anderson were complete fiction.

"We will continue to look for people next year. We will draw up lists. Fist time round, we held auditions in a room above a pub. This time, it's a bit like looking for Scarlett O'Hara. It won't be a complete unknown. But it may be a journalist whom we all know but who hasn't done TV before, or an actor who is not an A-lister."

And then they reveal something quite startling. HIGNFY could be, in the eyes of the BBC, an educational programme, part of their new political package. "The BBC now want it to bring the news to people who don't normally get the news," says Denise.

"We got a circular from them," says Jimmy, "saying: could you tender for a show that brings politics to young people? We said: 'We make Have I Got News for You.' Once Angus had left and the interest in him had died down, we could get back to doing a show about the news."