Aisling Bea did a dissertation on 'Allo 'Allo!, is writing TV pilot
Aisling Bea is writing a new television pilot, as the French and philosophy graduate has revealed that she wrote her university dissertation on the long-running BBC One sitcom 'Allo 'Allo!
Studying at Trinity College in Dublin, the future stand-up and This Way Up creator penned a 10,000-word thesis on "the representation of tropes" in David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd's pre-watershed sitcom, which starred the late Gorden Kaye as René Artois, a philandering cafe owner in German-occupied France during World War II.
The essay also covered how the hugely popular sitcom "dealt with darkness as well using comedy" Bea explained to presenter Nihal Arthanayake on his BBC Radio Five show.
With her favourite character Arthur Bostrom's Officer Crabtree, the British soldier disguised as a French policeman, forever mangling his declarations in terrible Franglais, Bea hailed the mainstream sitcom's subversiveness and understanding of how "people get things wrong in other languages and go through two languages.
"Even though people would have said it's a simplistic view of France, it actually knew it was a simplistic view of France and was undoing all of that" she argued.
Suggesting that she could have written 20,000 words on the subject, Bea did admit that she wrote the dissertation "two days before it was due" and didn't earn top marks.
"I feel like the people who come out with second [class degrees] and 2:2s were ultimately better rounded people who were better craic [than those who obtained firsts] ... I learned a lot about life and I got solidly 2:2s" she declared.
Bea, who was appearing on Arthanayake's show to promote Get Away, the comedy horror film in which she stars with Nick Frost on Sky Cinema, also disclosed that she is writing her first television show since her Bafta-winning Channel 4 comedy drama This Way Up ended in 2021.
The comic, who has ADHD, shared few details about the new pilot beyond her creative difficulties with procrastination and the suggestion that it will be linked to her native Ireland through music.
"I have to start on Monday a whole new TV show and I'm doing as much hoovering and cleaning" she said.
She elaborated: "I'm writing a new show that has music in it. And I've been trying to reconnect, I grew up listening to a lot of traditional Irish music and my granddad was a fiddle player. In his house was this traditional Irish music."
Interviewed by New York magazine earlier this month, the former So You Think You're Funny? winner also said that it was unlikely that she would make a third series of This Way Up anytime soon because of the impact that filming during the Covid epidemic had had upon her mental health, but may revisit the comedy in the future.
She added: "I'm developing a new TV show, which I have to write the pilot script for, in January. It's nerve-racking to go back in and start writing again at full commitment to a new series, but I'm excited about it, and I have hopefully put healthier things in place for myself to make sure that doesn't happen again. "