Humphrey Ker & David Reed pen Sherlock Holmes Christmas comedy musical
- The Penny Dreadfuls' Humphrey Ker and David Reed are working on a comedy musical about Sherlock Holmes with Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber
- Sherlock Holmes And The Twelve Days Of Christmas features the great fictional detective pursuing a serial killer who's dispatching his victims with methods suggested by the carol
- Ker says the musical is "very Penny Dreadfuls-y. Silly business with some funny songs!"
Humphrey Ker and David Reed are partnering with Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber for a comedy musical about Sherlock Holmes.
The former members of The Penny Dreadfuls sketch group are writing the book for Sherlock Holmes And The Twelve Days Of Christmas, featuring the great fictional detective pursuing a serial killer who's dispatching his victims with methods suggested by the carol.
West End luminaries Rice and Lloyd Webber are penning their first songs together in 28 years for the festive production, with the venue and opening night yet to be revealed.
Ker told British Comedy Guide that The Twelve Days Of Christmas is "very Penny Dreadfuls-y. Silly business with some funny songs!"
The plot is original insofar as it has not drawn significantly from one of Arthur Conan Doyle's novels or subsequent use of the character by writers such as Neil Gaiman, Stephen King or Stephen Fry. Crucially though perhaps, although Holmes has been in the public domain in the UK since 2000, the character only came out of copyright in the US in 2022, meaning a Broadway transfer could be a possibility.
Increasingly best known as executive director of Wrexham AFC following Welcome To Wrexham, the documentary about Hollywood actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney's takeover of the football club which airs on Disney+ in the UK, former Edinburgh Comedy Award best newcomer winner Ker, and Reed, who played Peter Cook in Radio 4's comedy drama Behind Beyond The Fringe, will next be seen on screen together in Daddy Issues, the BBC Three sitcom starring Aimee Lou Wood and David Morrissey as a divorced dad who moves in with his daughter to help her through pregnancy, written by Reed's wife Danielle Ward (Brassic, Mongrels).
The Penny Dreadfuls met as part of Edinburgh University's student comedy troupe The Improverts, with Ker, Reed, Thom Tuck and, for a brief time, founding member Jamie Anderson, performing numerous live shows and radio episodes between 2006 and 2020, initially set in the Victorian age but later branching out into other eras of history.
Ker, Reed and Tuck's earliest radio outing on the now defunct BBC Radio 7, 2008's four-part series The Brothers Faversham, focused on four Victorian brothers, one of whom, Theseus Faversham, was reputed to be a finer detective than Sherlock Holmes.
Fellow Improverts alumnus Miles Jupp has often co-starred in the radio series, as did Ingrid Oliver in the early episodes and, since 2011, Margaret Cabourn-Smith. Every one of The Penny Dreadfuls' one-off specials since then, focusing on characters such as Macbeth, Odysseus and Don Quixote, and culminating in 2020's Richard III Rebothered, have been penned exclusively by Reed.
Sherlock Holmes And The Twelve Days Of Christmas is being produced Rice's son Donald.
Rice and Lloyd Webber, who created the stage smashes Jesus Christ Superstar and Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, plus Chess and Evita, worked together on the 2011 update of The Wizard Of Oz but last wrote an original score together in 1986, for the short musical Cricket, commissioned for Queen Elizabeth II's 60th birthday celebrations.
The lyricist told the Daily Mail: "Andrew and I wrote one song together late last year and we are working on a couple more. The show is a comedy rather than a full musical - but we will do four or five songs in all.
"Andrew and I have always got on and I have really enjoyed writing the words. The show is successful without the songs - they just add to it. The hope will be to have it on this Christmas."