C4 announces its Comedy Labs

Shows for Pappy's and Anna & Katy

Channel 4 has announced its line-up for the next series of Comedy Lab pilots.

The roster includes shows from sketch groups Pappy’s, Totally Tom and Anna Crilly and Katy Wix. Wix also features in three of the seven Comedy Showcases C4 announced last week  – the higher-profile strand of comedy pilots.

The shows, which will air this summer, are:

Anna and Katy: From sketch double act Anna Crilly and Katy Wix and featuring guest appearances from Lee Mack, among others. Sketches include the biggest soap opera in Germany, daytime TV show Congratulation! and Eamonn Holmes's game show Pointer. The executive producer is Ash Atalla through his company Roughcut.

Totally Tom: A sketch show, written and performed by Tom Palmer and Tom Stourton, set in a macabre after-dark world of grotesque characters, including a bitchy pair of cocaine-fuelled ‘posh girls', a cop with an over-imaginative sense of drama, a pair of Scottish brothers locked in a cycle of poverty, and an edgy new teen-drama set in the Hitler Youth. The show is made by Baby Cow .

Kabadasses: is a sitcom based around the Asian sport of kabaddi, written by newcomer Nikesh Shukla, directed by Goodness Gracious Me’s Anil Gupta and made by Objective. It’s about Bobby, a slacker who finds himself living back with his disapproving dad. He and his best mate Vin, ‘a thug with a heart’, decide that their best shot at redemption is to set up the world's first all-white English kabaddi, despite not knowing the rules

Mr & Mrs Hotty Hott Hot Show: A comedy game show from sketch group Pappy’s - Matthew Crosby, Tom Parry and Ben Clark –in which anyone in the audience can win if they succeed in obscure games, having weird skills or ‘generally looking a bit odd’. This is the second Comedy Lab from the team, who made a studio-based sketch show in 2008.

The Warm Up Guy stars Tom Davis as Ian Bodkin, a loveable but deluded studio warm-up comedian who thinks he is a superstar in the making. It also features stand-upWill Smith as a rival warm-up, and George Lamb as the host of a new panel show Ian is trying to appear on. Davis wrote the show with James De Frond.

Rick and Peter: Written by Tom Basden, this stars T4‘s Rick Edwards and paraplegic Cast Offs star Peter Mitchell as caricatures of themselves, thrown together after Rick makes a regrettable gag on T4, and is put on a crash course in how to be more politically correct.

Comedy Labs have helped launch the careers of Peter Kay, Russell Brand, Jimmy Carr and Fonejacker

Channel 4’s comedy commissioning editor Nerys Evans said: ‘Comedy labs are an amazing spawning ground for future household names, giving their first TV breaks to a host of exciting new talent, both performers and writers. This year's alumni is a fantastically diverse collection of comedy talent.’

Published: 21 Jul 2011

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