Playing a woman hoping to marry a Death Row prisoner

Diane Morgan is to star as a woman bidding to marry a Death Row prisoner in a new BBC Two comedy pilot.

The Philomena Cunk comic also wrote Lethal with Pippa Brown, who previously created BBC One sitcom  The Other One with Holly Walsh.

Details of the test episode - which will air as part of BBC Two’s New On Two strand next year –  come just days after Chortle reported that Angela Barnes was working on another comedy, Bird, about a woman obsessed by a Death Row prisoner. News that the BBC has brought a show with a broadly similar premise to the pilot stage is likely to be a blow to the rival project, which is being touted around broadcasters by producers Black Dog Television.

In Lethal, which is made by the BBC Studios-owned production company Lookout Point, Morgan’s character Becky hopes to use a relationship with a soon-to-be executed prisoner as a way to obtain her Green Card and US citizenship.

 The comic said: ‘Some people will walk through the parched desert to get into America, some will cross a vast ocean, only one woman is prepared to marry a maniac to get there. And that woman is me. Well, a woman I play. But I probably would too.’

 Shane Allen, the BBC’s controller of comedy Commissioning  added" ‘Lethal is a cleverly conceived comic tour de force in which an ill-conceived plan soon spirals and unravels disastrously. In Becky, Diane gets to flex her well-honed comedy muscles with another sublime creation.’

Morgan also stars in the BBC’s Motherland and Ricky Gervais’s Netflix series After Life, while her ow comedy Mandy aired on BBC Two earlier this year, while her co-writer Brown previously produced BBC Three’s Bad Education and Psychobitches for Sky Arts.

Since launching in 2016, BBC Two’s New on Two  helped launch sketch show Famalam, Lee Mack’s Semi-Detached, , Sophie Willan’s Alma’s Not Normal and Spencer Jones’s The Mind Of Herbert Clunkerdunk.

Lethal is set to be filmed early next year. 

Made by:  Lookout Point, developed in association with Tiger Aspect
Commissioned by Patrick Holland, controller of BBC Two and Shane Allen, controller of comedy commissioning.
Executive producer: Pippa Brown
Commissioning editor for the BBC: Ben Caudell

Published: 2 Dec 2020