Matt Berry turns detective for C4

Channel 4 is lining up sitcoms starring Toast of London’s Matt Berry and W1A’s Rufus Jones and has promoted Roisin Conaty’s GameFace to the main channel following a £10m budget boost to comedy.

Berry is to play a detective in The Year of the Rabbit, a 6 x 30-minute comedy from Veep writers Kevin Cecil and Andy Riley dubbed ‘The Sweeney in Victorian England’ by C4 head of comedy Fiona McDermott.

The sitcom reunites Berry with Toast producer Objective Fiction. It co-stars Freddie Fox (Cucumber) as his partner and Susan Wokoma (Chewing Gum, Crazyhead) as the chief of police’s adoptive daughter, as they investigate local murders and rub shoulders with street gangs, crooked politicians and Bulgarian princes.

The series will air in 2019 and will be exec produced by All3Media-backed label Objective’s Ben Farrell and Toby Stevens, with Hannah Mackay acting as producer.

The indie also makes GameFace, created by and starring Conaty, which became E4’s biggest original comedy launch in four years when it aired last year, averaging 355,000 (1.9%).

C4 will air series two, which will continue internationally on Hulu.

Meanwhile, Jones has created and stars in Home, a 6 x 30-minute comedy developed out of a short-form C4 Blap.

It follows Syrian refugee Sami and his adoptive family, headed up by dad Peter (Jones), as they head on a family holiday to France, with surprising consequences.

It was also commissioned by McDermott, along with commissioning executive Tanya Qureshi, and will be exec produced by Detectorist indie Channel X’s Alan Marke and Jim Reid, with Jantaculum’s Andy Tandy as producer.

McDermott added: “Home got us with its heart and conviction to tell an important story about family, strangers, identity and the fragile ties that both bind us and pull us apart.”

The Year of the Rabbit and Home are the second and third sitcom series to be announced since Ian Katz took over as director of programmes, following the greenlight of Sharon Horgan’s indie Merman Productions’ Happy AF (w/t) as a six-part series. 

Katz’s initial slate, which was revealed last month, also included a Merman pilot, the satirical news show Next Week’s News.