Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine to make a US version

Axed BBC sitcom Puppy Love is to return – but in the States.

Joanna Scanlan has revealed that she and co-writer and co-star Vicki Pepperdine are adapting their BBC Four dog training comedy for America. It will be the pair’s second series to transfer Stateside after the success of their hospital ward comedy Getting On.

Scanlan and Pepperdine worked as script advisers and executive producers on all three series of HBO’s version, after starring alongside Jo Brand in the original. But the pair are writing the Puppy Love remake themselves.

The British version, cancelled after one series in 2014, was set in the Wirral Peninsula, but the American adaptation will be relocated to the mountainous state of Colorado.

‘The biggest difference is that you’re not just dealing with badgers or foxes, you’re dealing with bears and mountain lions,’ Scanlan said on BBC One’s Saturday Kitchen,

‘That’s your context … domestic pets are prey to these creatures. The whole scale of it, like everything in America, is very much bigger.’

Another difference,she observed, is that ‘Americans are much more verbal than we are, and they’re much more, generally, easier, more willing to say what they really think about things.

‘Because of course, a lot of our comedy in the UK – and certainly that was true of Getting On and Puppy Love – is when people are too polite to say what they really think about things. And in America that isn’t the vibe, people will more or less say what they think most of the time.’

Puppy Love launched on BBC Four with a reasonable 320,000 viewers but the corporation declined a second series in favour of finding new comedies.

The ‘sit!-com’ was produced in-house at the BBC in association with Woof Productions, whose directors include Scanlan and David Baddiel, an executive producer on Puppy Love.

Scanlan recently shot the British-American sci-fi rom-com How To Talk To Girls At Parties with Nicole Kidman and Matt Lucas.

She also disclosed on Saturday Kitchen that she has a role in the upcoming romcom sequel, Bridget Jones’s Baby, which Renee Zellweger is currently filming in the UK.

- by Jay Richardson

Published: 10 Jan 2016