...with her real-life daughter

Alan Partridge star Felicity Montagu is to star in a new sitcom with her real-life daughter Olivia Nixon.

In Guilt Trip, the pair play a mother and daughter – Laura and Ros – walking the Thames Path for charity before scattering the ashes of Ros’s ex-husband.

The 30-minute Radio 4 comedy co-stars Tim Key, Javone Prince, Drop The Dead Donkey’s Jeff Rawle and Katherine Jakeways, who wrote the script with contributions from Montagu and Dixon.

Producer and director Jane Berthoud, a former head of BBC Radio Comedy, explains that Ros sees the walk as ‘as a way of reclaiming her daughter’ after she got close to her father and stepmother (Jakeways) before he died.

‘The father’s death has prompted them to do something a million miles away from what they’d normally do. Ros likes to think that she likes a bit of walking and outside exercise but she doesn’t really.

‘And it’s not something Laura would do. It’s difficult for them, a sort of bonding exercise, but they’re sparring in the way that mothers and daughters do.’

Key plays Laura’s ex-boyfriend, while Prince is a boat captain who takes a shine to her. Juliet Cowan plays a ‘bonkers’ barge owner, Bosnian-Herzegovinian actor Velibor Topic is an animal welfare officer and Rawle another hiker the pair meet on their journey.

Produced in-house at the BBC, Guilt Trip was workshopped and recorded with the cast outdoors.

It reunites Montagu, who played Alan Partridge’s long-suffering PA Lynn, with Key after they both appeared in Alpha Papa and Jakeways’ previous Radio 4 comedy North By Northamptonshire.

Comedy is a family business for the Montagu/Nixons. Olivia and her brother Luke played siblings in the play Horrids at the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe, featuring the vocal talents of their mother. And the director was their father Alan, who previously produced The All New Alexei Sayle Show and Hale and Pace.

The first of Guilt Trip’s four episodes its scheduled to air on July 27 at 11.30am.

- by Jay Richardson

Published: 3 Mar 2016