Friday Night Dinner

When William Fenton (Heap) dies, his wife Debbie (French) doesn’t spend a lot of time grieving. She’s too busy thinking about the life insurance payout. There’s just one problem: William isn’t actually dead.

After a clerical error sees William declared deceased, the couple cook up a scheme. All he needs to do is camp out in the loft for a few months until the payout arrives, and both will be set for life. Their son Harry has to deal with the pair, who he comes to realise aren’t much more emotionally developed than his toddlers.   

New ITV sitcom Piglets ramps up the gag count and restores the silliness to comedy. Belly laughs, not navel gazing, are its stock in trade. “That’s all we really want to do, make people laugh – we’re not out to change the world,” says Victoria Pile of Smack the Pony and Green Wing fame, who co-writes, directs and produces.

I Hate You sees two twenty-somethings, Charlie (Sex Education’s Tanya Reynolds) and Becca (Melissa Saint), navigate their complicated friendship in today’s complicated world.

The pair have the definition of a love-hate relationship, one minute revelling in their in-jokes, the next bickering deep into the night.

Perhaps because the two are opposites. Charlie’s an anxious misanthrope whose room is ‘shittery’, while Becca is a little too confident and impulsive, but whose room is spotless.

Channel 4 have announced a slate of new commissions including a period thriller, gender-based documentary and a four-part series with Grayson Perry, as well as the return of laugh-out-loud comedy Friday Night Dinner.

Genderquake

Channel 4 has commissioned Genderquake (w/t), a 90 minute one-off programme to look at gender-fluidity in the UK. Gender-fluidity has made its way into public consciousness and the programme will explore why this is happening.