Jordan Gray gets ITV sitcom and Radio 4 series
- Jordan Gray will write and star as a supermarket worker in Transaction for ITV, with Nick Frost playing her boss
- Adapted from a series of Comedy Central shorts, the transgender stand-up's character Liv is a positive discrimination hire who's happy to make that everybody else's problem
- Gray is also making a Radio 4 series satirising the entertainment industry, imagining what would have happened if she'd continued her singing career after appearing on The Voice in 2016
Jordan Gray is making an ITV sitcom about a transgender supermarket worker with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, and has landed a loosely autobiographical Radio 4 series.
The transgender comic writes and stars as Liv in Transaction, with Frost playing her boss and Thomas Gray [no relation] (Peacock) as her best friend and co-worker.
Gray told The List magazine that Liv is "an affirmative action hire who's happy to make that everybody's else's problem".
The sitcom is being produced by Pegg and Frost's production company Stolen Picture (Out Of Her Mind, Truth Seekers) and is an adaptation of a series of shorts, also called Transaction, that Gray and Thomas Gray starred in for Comedy Central in 2020.
It is the first British television sitcom to feature a trans lead actor since BBC Two's Boy Meets Girl, which starred Rebecca Root, Harry Hepple and Denise Welch, and ended after two series in 2016.
Gray also explained to The List that the ITV commission was the only reason she could afford to perform her second solo show, Is It A Bird?, at the Edinburgh Fringe this month.
The stand-up and superhero fan, who has worked as a transgender consultant on a yet-to-be revealed sitcom that Matt Lucas is developing with The Windsors co-creator Bert Tyler-Moore, also told the magazine that she had written "a live-action superhero comedy script based on very niche intellectual property from the nineties that, when it comes out, fingers crossed, people will very much recognise but would never have expected to be made into a film".
Meanwhile, having worked in the music industry and been the first trans performer on BBC One singing contest The Voice UK in 2016, Gray is making a Radio 4 comedy about the experience, partly inspired by Lisa Kudrow's US television satire about the entertainment industry, The Comeback.
"When you're in music, you take it incredibly seriously", Gray told The List. "And The Voice exacerbates it, six million people watching does that. It's only in the fallout you can start poking fun at yourself. So I'm playing myself without self-awareness, [as] if comedy hadn't come along and I'd clung to the idea that I could make a living from music off the back of a reality TV appearance."
Becoming a role model on the singing contest had been "exciting, instant floods of emails from young gender-questioning people, LGBT kids that were thinking of taking their own lives, about being the first person they could relate to.
"I'm pleased with how I've grown into the role. If you're first you have to make it up as you go along."