19 Jun 2012 01:54:21
Caitlin Moran, the award-winning Times columnist and author of the bestselling book How to Be a Woman, has written the pilot for a Channel 4 sitcom about an overweight 16-year-old looking for a boyfriend.
The Big Object focuses on the lives of three characters, two sisters and a mother, but no casting decisions have been made.
Shane Allen, Channel 4's head of comedy, said the comedy's title "was chosen to be deliberately ambiguous", and is a reference to the main character's hunt for a boyfriend, but also to her size.
Allen said the pilot would go ahead after rewrites. Moran signed a separate deal last year with Channel 4 subsidiary Film4 to write a movie adaptation of her book, which has to date sold 500,000 copies.
If the pilot – which is expected to be broadcast before the film version of How to Be a Woman is released – proves successful, a six-part series could follow.
Channel 4 won the film rights after a fierce bidding war last summer against Eric Fellner's Working Title.
Allen said that Moran's original idea for the comedy was to make it a period piece, but he had asked for it to be altered to bring it up to date and distinguish it from the book, which opens in Wolverhampton in 1988.
This is similar to the crucial change Allen ordered for the hit comedy The Inbetweeners, which started with a pilot set in the 1980s but was switched to the present day, reaping TV success and last summer's money-spinning film.
Both Moran's TV comedy and the film are being made by independent producer Big Talk. The TV pilot is being executive produced by Caroline Leddy, who was closely involved with The Inbetweeners, and whose credits include Friday Night Dinner, Smack the Pony and Brass Eye. The film is being produced by Nira Park, the Big Talk founder and joint chief executive.
Kenton Allen, the Big Talk joint chief executive, said: "Happily [Moran] brought them to us. The two things are distinct and separate, the comedy is more advanced than the movie, and it is different. We are waiting for Channel 4 to green-light production of the comedy."
