BBC re-heats Matt Berry’s Toast

Toast of Tinseltown will transport the action from London to Hollywood

UK pubcaster BBC1 has commissioned a six-part revival of Channel 4 comedy Toast of London, under the working title Toast of Tinseltown.

Written and created by Matt Berry (The IT Crowd, What We Do in the Shadows) and Arthur Mathews, Toast of Tinseltown will see Berry reprise the role of Steven Toast as he moves to Hollywood and attempts to become a movie star.

The 6×30’ series will be produced by Objective Fiction in association with Wiip, with Ben Farrell, Paul Lee, David Flynn, Berry and Mathews exec producing.

Toast of London was originally commissioned by UK commercially funded public broadcaster C4 and ran for three seasons between 2013 and 2015.

Shane Allen, who greenlit the series at C4 before he became controller of BBC comedy commissioning, said: “This sitcom is one of the stand-out comedy gems of the last decade. His name belongs in the pantheon of celebrated British comedy character buffoons – Partridge, Brent and Toast.”

In related news, the UK government has confirmed that the BBC’s TV licence fee will rise this year in line with inflation.

The government, which is responsible for setting the level of the licence fee, announced in 2016 it would rise in line with inflation for five years from April 1, 2017.

This means the annual cost will increase from £157.50 (US$218.02) to £159 on 1 April 2021. The annual cost of a licence fee for black and white televisions will rise from £53 to £53.50.

The BBC said in a statement: “Our programmes and services have been at heart of UK life for almost a century and never more so than in such an unprecedented year.

“Each week, 91% of UK adults come to the BBC, with an average of five million people using our services every single minute of the day and night across TV, radio and online.”

The licence fee has become a bone of contention in the UK, with responsibility for funding free licences for the over-75s passed from the government to the pubcaster. Plans to decriminalise non-payment of the licence were recently dropped by the ruling Conservative Party.

In other BBC news, BBC2 and VoD platform BBC iPlayer have acquired season one of The Terror, a horror anthology series, from AMC Studios International.

The 10×60’ first season is a fictionalised account of Captain Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition to the Arctic. Its cast includes Jared Harris (The Crown, Mad Men), Tobias Menzies (Outlander, Game of Thrones), Ciarán Hinds (Game of Thrones, Rome), Paul Ready (Cuffs, Utopia), Adam Nagaitis (Houdini and Doyle, Suffragette), Nive Nielsen (The New World) and Ian Hart (Neverland).

The show is exec produced by Hollywood Director Ridley Scott (Gladiator, Prometheus) through his Scott Free Productions.