Sam Campbell Gets Own Surreal Channel 4 Sitcom
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- Make That Movie is a Channel 4 show-within-a-show in which Sam Campbell plays a pompous director who invites the public to pitch bonkers movie ideas, with each episode culminating in the premiere of a feature film built from the winning submission.
- Campbell, 34, won the Edinburgh comedy award in 2022 and returned the following year for what the source calls an "outrageously arrogant victory lap" — a single 10-minute set titled Bulletproof Ten.
- Campbell appeared on this year's Last One Laughing UK alongside Alan Carr, David Mitchell and Bob Mortimer; he lost to Mitchell only after producers changed the rules, because his deadpan manner made him effectively impossible to crack.
- Director Joe Pelling, co-creator of the cult web series Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, dressed the cast in matching purple jumpsuits to cultivate a "real-life cartoon feel," drawing inspiration from the documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr Moreau.
- The cast includes Lara Ricote as Campbell's people-pleasing assistant Jess, fellow Australian Aaron Chen as nerdy dogsbody Sebastian, Helen Bauer as grumpy sound engineer Pat, and 86-year-old David Hargreaves as cinematographer Winnie, with rotating cameos from Amy Gledhill, Lenny Rush, Mark Silcox and John Kearns.
- Rejected concepts included a spaceship carrying 1,000 babies that deposit educated infants on successive planets, and a man who reverts to a baby whenever touched — dropped, Campbell says, because "it's really hard to film with babies — you're a crackpot."
- Channel 4 head of comedy Charlie Perkins, a longtime Campbell champion, was "very trusting" on the project; Campbell says Perkins "didn't really get [the concept] when we were first talking about it" and only understood "a tiny bit more" after it was made.
Why it matters: Campbell, who until now has been largely confined to the standup circuit and panel-show cameos, now commands a primetime Channel 4 vehicle built entirely around his sensibility — a notable bet by Perkins's comedy department on a performer whose appeal is explicitly framed as a throwback to weird-for-weird's-sake British TV, and whose on-screen character was reportedly supposed to be called 'Coin' before producers foisted his real name on him.
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