Nick Helm to pilot a sitcom

Nick Helm is to write his first sitcom pilot for Channel 4.

Helm revealed the news in an interview with Giggle Beats today, saying: “I’ve got an idea, I’m going to do it. I’ve been busy with the BBC for such a long time now. But you know what, if I don’t do it now I’m not going to do it. So I’m writing that in February.

“We’re going to write a pilot, show it to Channel Four, and if they want to make it they can make it. And if they don’t want to make it we’ll shop it around. I guess that’s how it works.”

The comedian, who won Best Comedy Breakthrough Artist in the 2014 British Comedy Awards, has a busy year ahead of him.

Helm will direct a short film for the BBC this month – “It’s a season they’ve got coming up for Valentine’s Day” – before series two of Uncle, the BBC Three sitcom he stars in, airs in the UK in early February.

Helm has also written and starred in his own six-part stand-up series for the BBC, Heavy Entertainment, which airs in mid-March.

“It’s sort of kind of like, trying to translate what I do live. Or like one of my Edinburgh shows; trying to translate that onto telly. So we did a pilot, which I thought was fine as a pilot. It was fine. But I didn’t think it translated what I did live. I felt it was like they’d taken me, and put me in a glossy, glitzy… television show,” Helm said.

“And what I wanted to do was do something that wasn’t ‘let’s try and make comedy as big as possible’, like Live At The Apollo or something like that; ‘let’s try and fit it in as big a room as possible, get as big an audience as possible, let’s just do comedy in the broadest way that we can.’

“I didn’t want to do that, I wanted to do it like… let’s do it like my experience of comedy. Which is I do rooms above pubs, and, you know. And a bit dangerous, or whatever, so you know what I mean? Like what a club would be like. Like an Edinburgh crowd.”

You can read the full interview here.