BBC pilots TV adaptation of Kirk Flash's hit podcast This Is Gay
- Kirk Flash is adapting his award-winning, homemade podcast This Is Gay for the BBC
- Produced by Baby Cow, the show explores the darker side of modern gay life and takes inspiration from Chris Morris's Blue Jam
- Recorded on Flash's laptop, the podcast earned him the BBC Sounds Rising Star Award and a Channel 4 National Comedy Award nomination
Kirk Flash is piloting an adaptation of his award-winning podcast This Is Gay for the BBC, British Comedy Guide can exclusively reveal.
Written, starring and directed by Flash, the short is being produced by Rupert Majendie (Brian And Charles, Pls Like) for Steve Coogan's production company Baby Cow (This Time With Alan Partridge, The Trip).
Exploring the darker side of modern gay life, This Is Gay was largely made by Flash on a laptop in his bedroom but won the BBC Sounds Rising Star Award and was awarded Silver for Best Comedy at last year's British Podcast Awards, as well as earning a Channel 4 National Comedy Awards nomination.
Also featuring the voices of Peter Clements (The Baby), Asha Reid (Nutritiously Nicola), Syrus Lowe (Avenue 5, Go Jetters) and Katherine Cowell, the podcast's seven episodes, released in 2021, have an irreverent, absurdist style as they satirically reflect on topics such as corporations "pinkwashing" their marketing during Gay Pride and Margaret Thatcher's Section 28 policy. But the series also recreates the experience of a cucumber being incorporated into sex from the vegetable's point of view, a cruising forest goblin and a homophobic smart speaker.
Flash has acknowledged the creative debt This Is Gay's unsettling soundscapes owes to Chris Morris's late 1990s BBC Radio 1 sketch series Blue Jam, which was subsequently adapted for television as Jam on Channel 4 in 2000.
"I got a lot of my inspiration from Blue Jam" Flash told Jon Holmes on The Comedy Club Interviews on Radio 4 Extra last year.
"It sounds a bit like a nightmare. But a funny nightmare and I've always liked things that are slightly unnerving and I wanted to apply that. And well actually, the gay condition is funny and it's also hard and heart-breaking and triumphant and kind of scary at times and I kind of wanted to mix it all in and that's what the sound ended up being."
The Guardian praised the podcast as "innovative", while the Metro called it a "non-stop comedy sketch show ... wall-to-wall with zany characters and strange situations".
Flash described This Is Gay to Holmes as "half-documentary, half-sketch show.
"It combines real statistics about what it is to be a gay person today and also what it was in the recent past with comedic reflections on that.
"In writing This Is Gay, I realised that there are so many places in my regular life that being a gay man affects it in some way, whether that's me butching up a little bit when I go to the gym because I don't want to attract attention. Or leaning into my gayness even more if I'm being stopped by police, which did happen a couple of years ago and I based a sketch on that.
"I'd just moved into an area. My area isn't nice but the area right next to it is very nice, it's by the river and everything. I was going on my allocated daily walk at the time, it was during the pandemic. And two policemen in a car stopped behind me and said that I had matched the description of someone burglaring in the area.
"And I mean, I am a black man ... It never happened to me before. I've got cousins who've been stopped and searched before and I felt I was the one lucky black man who's not, I grew up in South London.
"But instinctively I went into the campest voice ever and I just said 'oh my God, I'm so embarrassed, I don't know what's going on, I don't know this area, sorry!'
"It just made me feel safer ... I feel like black masculinity is criminalised automatically by some people. I subverted it with a horrible send-up of that. I didn't want to come across as aggressive. I could see their faces melt because they were clearly like 'well, this guy's too gay to rob houses'."
The BBC declined to comment on the pilot.