James Nesbitt pilots BBC comedy drama Close
- The Breeders team of director Chris Addison and writer Simon Blackwell are developing a new BBC comedy with Cold Feet star James Nesbitt
- In active development since 2023, the Bristol-set comedy drama Close has also had Lesley Manville attached
- Addison has revealed that he asked Nesbitt to recreate a bit of physical comedy by his erstwhile The Thick Of It castmate Chris Langham in the non-broadcast pilot
James Nesbitt is plotting a return to TV comedy with a new primetime BBC comedy drama, British Comedy Guide can exclusively reveal.
The Cold Feet star shot a pilot in November with the working title Close, from the Breeders team of writer Simon Blackwell (The Thick Of It, Back) and stand-up-turned-director Chris Addison (The Thick Of It, Veep), for production company Avalon (Taskmaster, Starstruck).
Shot and set in Bristol, little else is known about the non-broadcast comedy's plot, which has been in active development since at least 2023. However, Nesbitt's long-time friend, Mum star Lesley Manville, has also been attached to the project, as has Starstruck and Everyone Else Burns director Jamie Jay Johnson, with BCG believing Close to be a rom-com.
The producer is Claire McCarthy (Inside No. 9 Live, Starstruck), who currently works in-house at Avalon.
Speaking to his former The Thick Of It castmate Alex Macqueen on the It's Funny Because It's True podcast, which Macqueen hosts with advertising executive Tim Clyde, Addison shared a favourite example of physical comedy that he'd incorporated into the pilot.
"One of the funniest things, that is guaranteed to make me laugh every time I see it ... Imagine a door frame, an empty door frame, nobody is in that door frame" he said.
"You stand a performer just out of frame so they can't be seen. But they can lean in. And this is the key, they don't lean forwards in any way, they don't lean backwards, they lean entirely from the side, into the frame. I find it unaccountably funny.
"I remember going to see Noises Off, the greatest play ever written ... about 25 years ago, something like that at the Piccadilly Theatre in London. Chris Langham was playing Freddie and he lent into the door frame like that and I lost my shit.
"And he does it again in one of the first, three I think, episodes of The Thick Of It. He sort of leans in when Malcolm's in a room and it is unbelievably funny. Whenever an actor does that I find it funny.
"I shot a pilot last year with Jimmy Nesbitt and I got him to stand and do exactly that, by a wall, he leaned in. I had to be very specific with him about the physicality of it, no forward movement, it's all got to be lateral.
"It is extraordinarily funny."
Written by Blackwell, directed by Addison and starring Martin Freeman and Daisy Haggard as stressed parents, Breeders ran for four series on Sky One and Sky Comedy between 2020 and 2023.
Nesbitt, who played Adam in Cold Feet, starring alongside John Thomson, Helen Baxendale, Robert Bathurst, Hermione Norris and Fay Ripley in the ITV relationship comedy, has become a familiar British primetime drama fixture but has recently taken time off from acting to raise his young daughter.
He returned to television earlier this year in Netflix's latest adaptation of a Harlan Coben thriller, Missing You, and in 2023, starred alongside Timothy Spall in the Sky Max festive film comedy The Heist Before Christmas.
If commissioned though, Close would be his first television comedy series since Cold Feet's ninth and currently final series in 2020.
Last week Thomson, who played Adam's best friend Pete in the show, attracted headlines for saying he wanted to revive the long-running hit series by writing a Christmas special.
Nesbitt, who sang with Manville at the 2013 British Independent Film Awards, told the Daily Mail in 2022 that he would love to make a "funny musical romcom" with the in-demand stage and screen actor, whose comedy roles include Stefan Golaszewski's Bafta-winning Mum on BBC Two and a 2014 episode of Jenny Eclair's Little Lifetimes for Radio 4.
"We're about the same age and I've always wanted to work with her" the Northern Irishman explained.