Exactly what occurred to the Outnumbered solid: One’s a tattoo artist who rails in opposition to male gaze. Another’s the son of two porn stars menaced by gangsters. And as to what occurred to the mum and pa…

One glance at the Instagram page of a budding tattoo artist called Ramona Marquez is enough to show she’s working hard to make a name for herself.

There are sketches of flowers, foliage and barbed wire – the latter her first successful commission for a client – for those who (in her words) ‘want to join her tattoo journey’.

With her own designs – including a fire-breathing dragon to mark her 18th birthday – inked liberally over her torso, legs and arms, this dark-haired 23-year-old cuts a striking figure.

It is all the more striking when you consider her transformation from the cherubic-looking Karen Brockman in the BBC‘s hit sitcom Outnumbered.

With her blonde curls and incessant questions (‘what’s a sociopath?’, ‘why do people take pictures of their food?’) Ramona proved one of the breakout stars of the comedy.

Running for five series from 2007, Outnumbered followed the riotous exploits of the Brockman family: beleaguered history teacher Pete, his wife Sue and their three wayward children Jake, Ben and Karen.

Now, after an eight-year absence from our screens, the Brockmans are returning for a Christmas special. Promising a maelstrom of ‘neighbours, hyenas and bus replacement services’, it depicts the chaos that ensues when Sue and Pete attempt to gather their offspring – plus a new granddaughter – for a traditional family Christmas.

Fans would expect nothing less, of course. But the adventures of the show’s real-life stars have proven every bit as colourful as their onscreen antics: from brushes with gangsters and allegations of drug use to marital breakdown and bold statements on sexuality. It’s certainly safe to say that these mischievous youngsters are all grown up – as Ramona goes to show.

She started playing the chatty and inquisitive Karen at the tender age of six – becoming the first child to be nominated for the British Comedy Award for ‘best female newcomer’ two years later.

But, despite her early success, spending her adolescence in the public eye took a negative toll. In 2016, then aged 15, she was falsely accused of taking drugs and became a victim of ‘trolling’ on social media.

‘It is pretty upsetting,’ she posted on social media at the time. ‘I just don’t understand why people feel the need to be a**holes.’

Since then, she has lived a life largely away from the spotlight, taking time out from acting to study Mandarin and Spanish at the University of Manchester.

She did, however, contribute an essay to the 2020 feminist anthology Women Don’t Owe You Pretty where – with a forthrightness that her fictional alter ego would applaud – she railed passionately against the ‘male gaze’ and ‘heteronormativity’ (the idea that relationships between men and women are the ‘norm’).

She also revealed that she had ‘fallen intensely in love with multiple women’.

Today, she describes herself as ‘lesbian, vegan and a sober girly’ on her personal Instagram account. It’s a markedly different path to Tyger Drew-Honey, who plays her onscreen eldest brother Jake.

In the show, he was last seen heading to New Zealand after planning to break up with his girlfriend (played by a then-unknown actress called Daisy Edgar-Jones…)

But the life of Tyger, who turns 29 next month, is about as far removed from his suburban fictional alter ego’s as can be.

His father Ben Dover (real name Simon Honey) is a veteran porn star who has starred in more than 130 x-rated movies and once boasted of sleeping with precisely 1,792 women. (Among his back catalogue are the classics Ben Dover In London and Ben Dover’s Yummy Mummies.)

Tyger’s mother Linzi Drew also worked in the industry and published a tell-all memoir – Try Everything Once, Except Incest And Morris Dancing – three years before only child Tyger came along. While she gave up working in porn when she became a mum, she went on to edit the British edition of x-rated magazine Penthouse.

Despite this, Tyger has emphasised that he enjoyed a conventional childhood of ‘nice schools and nice holidays’, growing up in the £2million family home in Surrey and attending Danes Hill School, where term fees cost almost £9,000.

But his parents’ work almost scuppered his chances of being given his famous role – as he revealed in a recent interview.

‘My dad had done some sort of bad deal in the porn industry,’ he told actor Louis Strong on the podcast Headstrong.

‘Basically we had gangsters coming round our house in blacked-out Range Rovers in the middle of the night, every night.

‘So we ended up moving into a hotel for about a month-and-a-half while we sorted out this pretty scary situation where

we were being blackmailed and threatened.’ Saying that he almost didn’t audition for Outnumbered as a result, he went on to be cast as Tyler at the age of ten. Since then, he has made BBC documentaries – including one about porn in which he interviewed his own parents – and appeared in comedy series Cuckoo with Greg Davies.

But he has admitted struggling to find work since Outnumbered ended – sometimes working on a building site to make ends meet.

‘I hope the hype and the momentum of this Christmas special continues so that we can all have a successful year ahead,’ he said this month. ‘Because the past three or four years have been tough for this industry.’

His onscreen brother takes a rather different view. After seven years playing the mischievous Ben – a pathological liar prone to conducting eye-popping experiments such as blasting insects in a microwave oven – Daniel Roche took the decision to bow out of the industry.

Daniel started playing Ben aged seven and was nominated for Best Male Newcomer at the British Comedy Awards just two years later. But the talented rugby player moved away from acting when he was scouted as a teenager for the Wasps professional rugby union club.

‘This was the same time that GCSEs were happening, then A-levels, then university, so acting was always going to have to take a backseat for a while,’ he told Vice magazine two years ago. ‘We told my agent to not actively put me out there for jobs.’

Still he couldn’t keep out of the headlines. In 2016, he was filmed playing a drinking game at that year’s Reading Festival – when he was just 16. It sparked an underage drinking storm, although he later revealed that he had been ‘abducted’ by fans who recognised him as a child star.

‘Around 20 people tried to cable tie me to a chair and I fought them off,’ he recalled. ‘They made me down a bunch of alcohol while filming it. I was fighting them off and I was terrified. But once I saw it was all in good jest, it was good-natured, I went along with it and found it funny.’

The following year, then 17, he was pictured chanting the name of the Class B drug ‘ketamine’ on a leaked video from Boomtown festival in Winchester.

Daniel – who still has Ben’s unruly curls albeit with a beard – then went on to take a history degree at King’s College London. After graduating with a first, he is now studying for a MA in international conflict.

Despite his academic prospects though, he has revealed he is ready to return to acting.

‘Ultimately, you want to spend your life doing what you enjoy and I’ve always enjoyed acting,’ he said. ‘I just want to get back into the swing of it. I’m not saying I want to be standing on stage with an Oscar for best actor.’

By their fictional offspring’s standards, the lives of the Brockman parents – Hugh Dennis and Claire Skinner – have been rather low-key.

Hugh has remained a familiar face on the comedy circuit since Outnumbered ended in 2014, regularly appearing on panel shows such as Mock The Week and the sitcom Not Going Out. Among his famous friends is Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer – whom he was pictured playing football with last weekend.

Claire has also remained in the industry, popping up with bit parts in TV shows such as Vanity Fair and Ted Lasso.

Both have divorced since the show ended. Hugh, 62, divorced his wife Catherine Abbot-Anderson in 2015 and Claire, 59, split from her director husband Charles Palmer a year later.

But they have since found love again – with each other. The couple revealed they began dating in 2017 – although this ‘lovely little life surprise’ (as Claire described it) did not become public until a year later.

But, in a move worthy of his onscreen alter ego, Daniel Roche at one point appeared to suggest that the relationship had been going on for longer than they admitted. ‘They’ve been doing it for years, they’ve been going out for years,’ he wrote in an Instagram story after the news.

He hastily backtracked: ‘I never ever meant to suggest that Hugh and Claire had been in a relationship for years and I wouldn’t have done because it simply isn’t true.’

This year’s Christmas special will mark the first time that Claire and Hugh will have worked together on the show since becoming a couple.

But clearly they’re delighted to be reunited. ‘It’s great, feels like we’ve never been away,’ Hugh told a recent interview.

It was a sentiment echoed by his onscreen daughter, Ramona. ‘It’s like being back with really good friends again who you’ve known for ages and just hanging out,’ she says.

With the children now in their 20s – and Jake a father to a spirited three-year-old – the Christmas special will pick up as the Brockmans attempt to assemble the clan for a traditional family Christmas at their now downsized home.

Naturally, it wouldn’t be a Brockman reunion without satisfyingly enjoyable impending catastrophe. After all, while the Brockman siblings are all grown up, some things never change.

Additional reporting by LINA DAS.

• The Outnumbered Christmas special will be on BBC One on Boxing Day at 9.40pm.