Lauren and the scumbags

Sam Campbell described the casting on his new Channel 4 sitcom to Chortle on Wednesday. Here is the quote:

“We had a very amazing casting director called Lauren and also a bunch of scumbags from the comedy circuit managed to weasel their way in.”

The show premieres on Channel 4 on Thursday 28 May at 10pm with a double episode straight after Taskmaster, six in the run. The neat thing about that quote is the implied division of labour. Lauren the casting director, per the same interview, presumably brought in David Hargreaves. He plays the older cinematographer Winnie, the only cast member Campbell says he had not met before they started. The other four leads are people he has gigged with, written with, or both.

Watch a Sam Campbell hour at the Soho Theatre. Then spend the rest of the week at any decent London new-act room, and you can guess what that means in practice. Helen Bauer is Pat the sound engineer, Lara Ricote is Jess the runner, and Aaron Chen is Sebastian the intimacy coordinator. The wider cast pulls in Babak Ganjei and Katie Norris. The whole bench is circuit talent – comics who, if you booked the rooms they all play, would fill out a single WhatsApp group between them.

Episode 1 has live snakes

The premise, from the Channel 4 press pack: a hotshot director (Campbell, playing what he calls “a pretty exaggerated version of myself”) drives around the country and finds an ordinary person with a film idea. His crew then has 72 hours to make it. Episode 1, “Snake Switch”, has a punter called Mick Hall pitching a film that involves untrained actors and live snakes. Episode 2 sends care home residents into an anti-scam sci-fi. Episode 4, “Yooglet”, is a football fan’s magical-creature pitch that runs into IP problems with whatever the original character was meant to be. Episode 6 has Campbell’s director shooting a morale-boost film during an actual cave rescue. Joe Pelling directs, Blink Industries produces, BBC Studios handles global sales.

What’s worth flagging for working comics: the credit list isn’t a curio. Olly Cambridge is on as Story Producer, and there’s a “Story by” credit for Paddy Young alongside Campbell and Pelling. Both have circuit pedigree. The press pack also nods at a Guest Stars sleeve Channel 4 is holding back until closer to broadcast. Reasonable bet that’s where the rest of the weasels live, the credits Campbell wouldn’t name on the record because they land halfway through episode three.

Thursday at ten, after Taskmaster

The slot tells you what Channel 4 thinks of the show. Thursday 10pm immediately after Taskmaster is not a sit-and-see slot, and a double-episode launch on 28 May is a confidence pick. That’s a different commissioning posture from the panel-show comfort food the BBC has been leaning on, which I wrote about a couple of weeks back when Mock The Week got rolled out for a TLC summer special. And it sits oddly alongside Sky’s bigger SNL UK season-two order. It costs less than either and looks much more like a writer-led thing.

HBO Max picked up the international rights and slots its US drop on Friday 29 May, per Variety’s announcement on the international package. A small caveat: the press pack’s headline date is the broader “May 2026”. The Thursday 28 May UK date is from Channel 4’s own page and Chortle’s report. (For comparison, telly debuts have been doing more for working comics this year than the awards run did. See Bob Mortimer’s double Bafta haul for who that’s actually paying.)

Down the press-pack credit list

The bit that interests me about the show, separately from whether it’s funny on the night, is the same shift you’ve been seeing on a handful of Channel 4 commissions all year. The four leads are working stand-ups recognisable mostly from their live work first and their telly work second; Aaron Chen, for instance, has been a regular on the Australian festival circuit that gave us the Sydney best-of-fest gong Reuben Kaye and Frankie McNair shared this month. Casting these four is cheap in a literal budget sense and useful in a writers’-room one, because none of them needs a tone meeting to play a Sam Campbell line.

Helen Bauer told the press pack she “loved it from the moment I read it. It was so different” – which, translated from press-pack-speak, is probably the politest version of “the script is recognisably mental” an actor is allowed to file. Campbell’s own framing in the Chortle interview is in keeping:

“I promise I am not nearly as villainous and have not done a lick of human trafficking.”

He says the make-up department had to lay it on thick. There’s also a line about a future episode “where they make a movie for an airplane pilot’s last ever flight” that didn’t get made, and that he still wants to do. You only float that pitch in print when you’ve either already been quietly told there’s a series two, or you’re cheerful enough about series one to fly the kite anyway.

A second series, if it comes, sits with Blink rather than landing back through Channel 4 commissioning – the production company tends to staff up off its own job board, which is where to look if you care. And the guest credits at the end of the double bill on 28 May are probably where the scumbags Campbell wouldn’t name on Wednesday show up, halfway through episode three with a single line and a face you last saw eating a Tesco meal deal in the Bill Murray green room.

Sources