Chickens

What The Inbetweeners did next

Here's everything you need to know about Chickens.

Simon Bird & Jonny Sweet interview

Simon Bird and Jonny Sweet talk about Chickens.

Audio: Chickens Q&A

Stars and creators Simon Bird, Jonny Sweet and Joe Thomas are joined by cast members Sarah Daykin, Emerald Fennell, and Barry Humphries at BAFTA to talk about the new WW1-set Sky1 sitcom Chickens.

Video: Bird, Popper and Rosenthal talk Chickens

Simon Bird, Robert Popper and Tom Rosenthal, makers of Channel 4's Friday Night Dinner talk to The Guardian's John Plunkett about the new series, whether this is a golden age for comedy and their new show for Sky, Chickens.

Jonny Sweet interview

Award winning comic Jonny Sweet talks about his upcoming WWI sitcom...

Set in the fictional Kentish village of Rittle-on-Sea in 1914, Chickens follows the lives of the three young men left in the village who have not joined in the army and are thus despised by everyone else in the village.

Cecil (Bird) tried to join but got rejected due to his flat feet; teacher George (Thomas) is a pacifist and refuses to join for conscientious reasons; and Bert (Sweet) is a philandering coward who seems to be completely unaware the war is going on. Other than unpopularity, the water in their cottage is brown, Bert's brother Bobby has been killed at the front, and kindly George is in danger for losing his job at the school.

Like most pilots, it's not perfect, but it does have plenty to drive it forward and will no doubt be made into a series due to the popularity of its stars. Highlights for me include George going mad when he is forced to cane a boy, and Cecil doing something unspeakable to a special tree.

Chickens review

It's a decent setup for a sitcom, although I have concerns about the longevity of the premise, as there's surely only a finite number of ways you can poke fun at cowardice.

Much like Peep Show, it's understandable that some people assume that the stars of gross-out-but-sometimes-oddly-sweet teen sitcom The Inbetweeners - Simon Bird, Joe Thomas, James Buckley and Blake Harrison - actually wrote the show, as they seem to fit their characters so well. Not so, however - that honour belongs to (Damon Beesley and Iain Morris) but Bird and Thomas are in fact pretty experienced comedy writers, having performed (and impressed) at the Edinburgh Fringe with their show The Meeting, created with award-winning stand-up comic Jonny Sweet.

For Chickens, these three have got back together and produced a properly entertaining half hour pilot in which they play the only three men left in a pretty Heart-of-England village during the First World War. They each have their reasons for staying behind: Cecil (Bird) isn't allowed in the army on account of his flat feet, teacher George (Thomas) is a conscientious objector and Bert (Sweet)... well he just finds it difficult to remember there's a war on, what with all the girls (and women, and old ladies) of the village distracting him the whole time.

There was an element of farce about this - Cecil ends up accidentally peeing on a tree planted in remembrance of a dead soldier - but as with so many sitcoms, Chickens actually works best when it's just the three leads chatting and bickering. Jonny Sweet, I think, pretty much steals the show. As a self-centred lothario, he's simultaneously incredibly creepy and massively watchable - here, as with his stand-up, it's his delivery that makes him so much fun. All the best comics can make an apparently simple word sound hilarious and Sweet is no different. Just take a listen to how he says the word 'crow'.