BBC Radio Scotland has announced a trio of new comedy shows for its Saturday schedules.

The first of them, Sabotage, starts this week at 12.30pm.

It is a six-part live sketch show is described as being like ‘an Edinburgh Festival offering, with a touch of The Goons thrown in…  with a Celtic twist’.

Characters include Lord Pargon - a Tolkien-esque warrior trying to get to grips with 21st Century urban living; Detective Normal - a painfully pedantic soul; and Amanda, an over-imaginative tour guide.

The show is performed by Grant O'Rourke, Lisa Gardner, Jennie Cook, Steven Howie and Jason Arnstein and written by Norman Ferguson, Tom Brogan, Fraser Campbell, Helen Watson, James Picardo, Andy Bollen and Melbourne-based George Smith.

Another sketch team, the Franz Kafka Big Band, have also landed a six-part series, to be aired later this year.

Their shows, set to a surreal soundscape, are written by Colin Edwards, whose writing credits include TV and radio work for Julian Clary and Fred Macauley.

Finally, a third series of The Why Front returns in mid-August.

The sketch show, written and performed by Elaine MacKenzie-Ellis, Julie Coombe, Alan MacAfferty and Gordon Munro, will be recorded in front of a live audience at Glasgow’s CCA every Wednesday from July 27.

Also going out on Radio Scotland will be three pilot episodes of new sitcoms created from the station’s comedy writing initiative

Close by Iain Bain, Free Falling by Graeme Johnson and The Queen's Heid by Alan McFadzean and Bob Harris were recorded in Glasgow last month.

A BBC spokesman said: ‘They were all received well by the attending audiences and will now be broadcast on Radio Scotland on Saturdays later in the year.’