13/07/2006

BBC Films is teaming up with Kenton Allen, creative head of BBC Comedy Talent and Comedy North, to develop mainstream comedy feature films and identify TV talent that could make the transition to the big screen.

Allen, an Oscar-winning producer behind this year's Academy Award-winning short film Six Shooter, will explore with his Comedy “team” the potential to develop existing brands into feature films, and will also work with a wide variety of writers and writer/performers to develop feature films.

"Many of the comedy talent we work with ultimately want to paint on a bigger canvas, and this relationship with BBC Films means that we can now offer them that opportunity” said Allen. “From initial development in radio and the Internet, through television and on to film, BBC Comedy can offer the best comedy talent the best possible development path for their work. BBC Comedy has a fine tradition of developing iconic comic voices, from Ronnie Barker to Ricky Gervais, and I'm confident that this opportunity will lead to some truly original filmmaking”.

David Thompson, head of BBC Films, said, "Comedy is very much a target area for us at the moment, with several interesting projects in development – the recent successful releases of Debbie Isitt's Confetti [+see also:
trailer
film profile], and Michael Winterbottom's A Cock & Bull Story". Released last May by 20th Century Fox, "Isitt’s film, featuring some of Britain’s finest comedy actors, grossed £2m, while Winterbottom’s screen adaptation of the English literary classic The Life & Opinion of Tristram Shandy, released early 2006, passed the £1m gross".