Kiri Pritchard-McLean writes foster carer sitcom for the BBC
- Kiri Pritchard-McLean and her partner are developing a comedy based upon their experiences of fostering vulnerable children
- The sitcom is one of five broadcast projects that the stand-up is currently developing, alongside another sitcom with Ellie White attached and a radio adaptation of her live show Peacock
- Pritchard-McLean cites Gavin & Stacey and The Royle Family as inspirations for the fostering sitcom. "Wouldn't you love to write something where everyone's dead excited? 'Oh, do a Christmas special!' she told James Gill on his podcast
Kiri Pritchard-McLean is writing a sitcom about foster caring for the BBC she has revealed.
The comic, whose current stand-up tour, Peacock, is about her and her partner's provision of respite foster care for vulnerable children, is working with Expectation Entertainment, the production company behind Bridget Christie's The Change, Sophie Willan's Alma's Not Normal and Nick Mohammed's Intelligence, to adapt the couple's experience of providing a safe environment for kids over the last three years.
Envisioning the comedy as a warm, mainstream series in the vein of Gavin & Stacey and The Royle Family, Pritchard-McLean and her comic actor partner, whose identity she keeps out of the public domain, are developing the script with Expectation producer Nerys Evans, who commissioned Derry Girls, The Windsors and Catastrophe while deputy head of comedy at Channel 4.
Speaking to fellow stand-up James Gill on his Always Be Comedy podcast, Pritchard-McLean disclosed that she is also hoping to adapt Peacock for radio, to be performed for an audience of social workers and foster carers, "because that's going to add a completely different frisson". And she is writing a second, semi-autobiographical broadcast comedy with her partner, about cancer, set to feature him and Ellie White as the leads.
Like Willan, Pritchard-McLean is a former recipient of the BBC's Caroline Aherne Bursary for nurturing female talent. She told Gill that she is "really excited" about the fostering sitcom, "to the point that I'm almost inert with fear over it because I think it will be so good and so everything I want to make in a sitcom.
"I don't want it to be cool. I want it to be something that my dad could sit down and absolutely love and not feel alienated by, which has always been my raison d'etre, which is why I'm so aggressively mainstream in my work."
The script has "loads of heart " she said, reflecting that "the nature, the privilege of being a foster carer is like your home has got this open door ... you've got to have love, just loads of love."
Citing Gavin & Stacey and The Royle Family as "touchstones", she elaborated: "Wouldn't you love to write something where everyone's dead excited? 'Oh, do a Christmas special!'
"I'd love that, a Christmas special of my show about respite foster care, what a beautiful thing to be able to write. Honestly, it's the first thing I've been really scared about doing because it's all for the taking and it comes down to whether I'm talented enough or not."
Pritchard-McLean won't play her on-screen counterpart in the proposed sitcom, after pouring scorn on auteur comics like Ricky Gervais and Louis CK who write, act, direct and produce their own projects, questioning whether they're always the best person for the various jobs. Instead, she pointed to her colleagues in sketch group Tarot, who "take an idea that I have and make it better.
"I can't act and more comedians need to go: 'I can't act' ... I'll pop in [playing] a social worker every now and then and eat all the biscuits. But I think my partner, who I don't name publicly, he's a comic actor, he would play himself."
She explained to Gill that the pair are writing another comedy "loosely based on us but with a cancer diagnosis in there", again featuring him as the male lead and with White attached as the female.
"Three percent of me that's like mad girl, who am I happy for my partner to have a showmance affair with? It's Ellie White as it goes. Fair play, she's very good looking, very talented. Have her!"
Pritchard-McLean's Peacock tour continues on Saturday with a performance at the Stoke Comedy Festival and runs until early December. Tarot, which also includes Ed Easton, Kath Hughes, Adam Drake and Ben Rowse, will then shoot a short film later that month.
That will "hopefully" be followed in January by a second series of the recently broadcast Welsh language travelogue Alun, Chris a Kiri yn Seland Newydd (Alun, Chris And Kiri In New Zealand), in which the comedian went down under, accompanied by TV chef Chris Roberts and presenter Alun Williams.
The BBC declined to comment on the fostering sitcom.
The full Always Be Comedy interview with Kiri Pritchard-McLean can be heard via alwaysbecomedy.com/podcast