ITV has announced a ‘Summer Nights of Comedy’ season, featuring new commissions and the return of established favourites. There will also be a streaming event from this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.
ITVX Presents: Edinburgh Fringe Live will see the ITV platform stream four showcase gigs live from the Festival. Each showcase will feature material from 2024’s best and most exciting comedians, produced by NextUp Comedy, known to comedy fans as a leader in British stand-up streaming.
Changing Ends will return for a second series to follow a young Alan Carr (Oliver Savell) doing his best to survive 1980s Northampton. The sitcom draws from the comedian’s upbringing as the son of a fourth division football manager.
Piglets is a new show centred around the fictional Norbourne Police Training College. The government’s pledge to get 20,000 more bobbies on the beat has meant that it isn’t exactly the best and brightest patrolling Britain’s streets. Enter six aspiring police officers, who the staff at Norbourne are charged with whipping into shape.
The show was involved with ITV’s Comedy Writers Initiative, which works with new writers who are underrepresented in comedy. As such, the creative team behind Piglets worked with Abiola Ogunbiyi, Nusrath Tapadar, Farhan Solo and Alex Bertulis-Fernandes, four new writers who worked in a ‘writers’ room annexe’.
ITV has also acquired Slip, a comedy about a 30-something woman who works on herself the old-fashioned way: navigating multiple parallel universes. Mae Cannon (Zoe Lister-Jones, the series’ writer and creator) tries out versions of her life with different partners as she tries to find her way back to herself.
