BBC announce details for the 2014 Salford Comedy Festival
The BBC have announced details for a free, three-day comedy festival in Greater Manchester.
Supported by BBC Comedy Commissioning in collaboration with BBC North, the Salford Comedy Festival will take place from Monday 17 until Wednesday 19 March at MediaCityUK.
Across the three days there will be a number of events open to comedy fans and writers, including comedy masterclasses and the returning Salford Sitcom Showcase.
On Monday 17 March, the BBC will record The Neighbourhood, a pilot from My Family writers James Hendrie and Ian Brown.
The show tells the story of jaded ex-copper Ed Halliwell, who spends more time meddling with his neighbours’ lives than he devotes to his wife and kids.
The following day, BBC Writersroom will be running a series of free, hour-long comedy masterclasses.
At 11am, Henry R Swindell (Development Producer, BBC Writersroom) will provide a broad talk on writing great comedy alongside a guest comedy writer.
At 1pm there will be a masterclass on online comedy for the YouTube generation, as Will Saunders (Executive Producer, BBC Comedy) and Jon Aird (Producer, BBC Comedy) share tips on what makes great short form comedy
The BBC Writersroom Comedy Cuts follows at 3pm, as local actors perform extracts of scripts by comedy writers who have been discovered and developed through BBC writers room.
And at 7.45pm the University of Salford present stand up, sketch and trailers from the university’s Performance Comedy Pathway Graduates.
Tom Wrigglesworth will also be recording an episode of his BBC Radio 4 series, Tom Wrigglesworth’s Hang Ups, while Justin Moorhouse stars in Welcome Home, his “warm-hearted sitcom about what happens when you get divorced but can’t afford to move out.”
The festival closes on Wednesday 19 March with the BBC’s final sitcom pilot, Tools.
Executive produced by Ash Atalla (Cuckoo, The Office, The IT Crowd) and written by Claire Downes, Ian Jarvis and Stuart Lane (The Job Lot), Tools is a single-camera sitcom set in a Homezone DIY superstore.
Writers say it’s “a world immediately recognisable to anyone who’s traipsed around the canyon aisles of a DIY store, looking for the one size of screw that’s never in stock.”
And a blurb for the show reads: “We join mid-life crisis manager Greg and his enthusiastic, well meaning but often frustrating team as they try to shepherd the customers through a bank holiday weekend, and some of the most important decisions of their adult lives – whether to paint the walls ivory, champagne or off white.”
Tickets for individual events at the Salford Comedy Festival are free but must be booked via the BBC Writersroom. Click for more information and tickets.
