BBC New Comedy Award winner Anna Thomas & Paul Allen pilot new shorts
The BBC is to air more comedy shorts, about a lovelorn bigfoot and a risk-defiant futuristic grandfather, British Comedy Guide can exclusively reveal.
The corporation recently launched 11 shorts on BBC Three and iPlayer, including films from Ricky Gervais and sketch group Tarot. Now BBC One Wales is to broadcast two more from next week. Officially presented as one-off, standalone comedies, the shorts are nevertheless also being seen as pilots for potential series.
Written and directed by The Cleaner scribe Paul Allen, Grandfather Rights, airing on 27th June, is set in Wales in April 2064, where health and safety legislation has gone "quite mad".
Dewi 'Pws' Morris (Night Beat News) is Taid, grandfather to Calum (played by newcomer Lewis Ford), who insists his old driving licence allows him to drive all sorts of "dangerous" vehicles; vehicles that no one else can drive. That's because he passed his test before the 1st of January 1997.
Calum doesn't even like to leave the house without a defibrillator, so the two of them have very different attitudes when it comes to risk. But Calum also wants to buy a new Virtual Reality snowboarding rig. And Taid may just have the money to pay for it.
Grandfather Rights is produced by Phillip Moss (James And Jupp) for Small And Clever Productions (Age Of Outrage).
Lady Bigfoot meanwhile, airing on 3rd July, is written by and stars Anna Thomas, the BBC's 2021 New Comedian Of The Year, as the titular creature, alongside fellow stand-ups Matt Rees and Jo Enright and YouTuber Jimmy Johnson, aka The Welsh Viking.
With Thomas wearing a prosthetic mask, wig and bodysuit and directed by Ryan Hooper (The Toll), the short sees the lonely Bigfoot (Thomas) living a secret existence in Welsh woodland but taking a shine to Emyr, the park keeper (Rees).
But when she confides in her best friend, anthropologist Carol (Enright), she's warned that her activities haven't gone unnoticed by Jared (Johnson), an obsessive local crypto-zoologist determined to prove her existence.
Lady Bigfoot is produced by Bravo Two Charlies star Sarah Breese (Welcome Strangers) and Dan Thomas (Tudur Owen: Go Brin) for Beastly Media, which as BCG revealed earlier this month, is also making the animated sitcom The Golden Cobra to air on BBC One Wales next year.
"It's so exciting to be working with Anna because a lot of people wanted to work with her after the comedy award" Thomas told BCG. "I'd met her at a gig before and as soon as I saw an email with Lady Bigfoot/g] in the title, I knew this was someone we wanted to be in business with.
"We'll have to wait and see what the response is but obviously with projects like this, we always hope they will lead on to more."