A BRADFORD comedian has helped bring the tale of an eccentric town to life for a new BBC sitcom.
IcklewickFM is a brand new improvised show from Odsal’s Chris Cantrill (Alma's Not Normal) and Amy Gledhill (House of Games).
The sitcom is set to make its debut on Radio 4 at 11pm on Tuesday, January 23.
The cult double act, known as The Delightful Sausage, play the station’s never-off-air co-hosts in a post-industrial everytown.
From tall men to skateboards, Icklewick’s inhabitants regularly phone up to share their conundrums with the town's highly-dysfunctional community radio station.
“It’s been brilliant,” said Chris, who has fond memories of growing up near Richard Dunn Sports Centre.
“I’ve not had as much of a laugh as making this because it’s not scripted, it’s got a strange quality to it.
“It’s got almost like a breathless quality, it’s minute-to-minute, second-to-second. There’s so much stuff going on.”
The Cumbrian-based series co-creator added: “Doing stand up you do a lot of miles of driving. I often find myself on FM radio, finding signals between places. It’s places that’s got quite a small catchment area, they’re all different radio stations. I live in a small community. We love writing stuff that’s little tiny soap operas.
“We really love local radio. We get to hear lots of it. When you find the strange local stations at one o’clock in the morning there’s some real mad stuff and the opinions of people are just crazy.
“We wanted it to be a regional town, sort of in the middle of nowhere. We wanted the modern challenges that face regional communities really.
“We’ve had the time of our lives.”
Mark Silcox plays Mr Patel, their inept producer, and Colin Hoult is Simon Toke, IcklewickFM's roving reporter who is never where he’s meant to be.
Listeners can expect cameos from the cream of the UK comedy scene including Lucy Beaumont, Steen Raskopoulos, Jen Brister, Alex Lowe, Barbara Nice, Phil Ellis, Shivani Thussu.
Producer Ben Sutton has also hidden secret messages in each episode while you can expect some “mind-blowing guest appearances”.
Chris added: “We’re really proud of this show and are so thankful to the BBC for trusting us to make summat a bit different. We recorded over 24 hours of audio for this series which we’ve had to whittle down to two and a half!”
IcklewickFM was jointly commissioned by BBC TV and Radio to initially develop the format and characters through audio, with the potential for a TV version in future.
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here