Loaded TV goes Rogue

Mockumentary sitcom for spoof boy band

Spoof boy band Rogue 5 are making a sitcom for Loaded TV, after triumphing in a Dragon’s Den-style contest.

The quartet are to make fake documentary about their progress through the music industry after impressing judges on the channel's talent hunt The Pitch.

Those judges include Jongleurs founder Maria Kempinska – who happens to manage the group. They also won the comedy club chain's inaugural Comic Idol competition in June.

In another striking example of cross-branding, Rogue 5 will also make cameo appearances in the channel’s hidden camera series, Marshal Law, which stars Jason Attar as a police community support officer and his criminal-minded twin interacting with real people. They were also interviewed in last month’s Loaded magazine, and are also expected to feature in the channel’s revival of Live At Jongleurs, the stand-up show which originally aired on the Paramount Comedy Channel in the late Nineties.

Joe Acres, who plays Romeo and is Rogue 5’s chief writer and songwriter, is currently drafting the sitcom’s script with ‘people in the Loaded stable’, to shoot quickly in late October for broadcast in November. The comedy-heavy channel is expected to launch on November 1.

He and John Dean (who plays the sexually ambiguous Michael), Keith Henderson (the hefty Keef) and Darcy Thomas (the band’s rapper Winston), always perform and conduct publicity in character ‘to blur the line of seriousness and give us licence to be as grotesque, clueless and idiotic as possible’, with an unnamed fifth member said to be in rehab.

They charmed judges on The Pitch, which auditions acts for broadcasts slots on the channel, with a rendition of their track ‘Bromance’.

Acres maintains that they were ‘lucky’ to win. ‘They’re quite strict and cruel actually. One of the judges told another act that she was about as funny as leukaemia, which I thought was a bit harsh.’

The sitcom will be ‘shot from our point of view, as if we’re shooting ourselves on handicam … four losers trying to get seen and noticed, never realising how stupid we are’.

Unlike Flight Of The Conchords, they don’t want to ‘burn’ their back catalogue on television. So Acres will be ‘writing to order, songs that actually go with the storylines, instead of it being like Glee where it’s just a song for a song’s sake. We’ve got enough ideas to spread between this and our live work’.

There are also plans to release an album early next year. ‘I’m just trying to make sure the songs are pukka’ says Acres. ‘It seems to take longer to write a decent comedy song than it does a decent song, just because the jokes have to be really on point’.

And those will be aimed squarely at the lad mag’s readership.

‘Girls with big tits, I imagine it’s going to be that kind of humour, which should be all right’ he confirms. ‘There’s a great deal of irony in our shows and hopefully youngsters will get it.’

Loaded TV is spending £2.5million over the next year on content and has already announced a sitcom described as Open All Hours in a sex shop.

- by Jay Richardson

Published: 24 Sep 2012

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