Marion and Geoff spawns a chat show

Keith Barrat, the hapless cab driver from Marion and Geoff, is to be reinvented as a chat show host.

Rob Brydon's tragi-comic creation will join a burgeoning list of fictional interviewers, ranging from Mrs Merton to The Kumars.

The Keith Barrat Show will even be made by Baby Cow Productions, the company set up by Steve Coogan on the back of his success as another chat show character, Alan Partridge. It is a co-production with Brydon's own company Jones The Film.

The show promises interviews, clips, and audience banter - an interaction with others that marks a departure for Brydon's character. In Marion And Geoff, he delivered only unsuitably optimistic monologues about his lonely life after his separation from his wife, and his two "little smashers".

It is not known how his elevation from chauffeur to chat show host will be explained.

A pilot of the new show is to be recorded for the BBC on January 27.

Free audience tickets are available for the taping, at Television Centre in West London, by calling 020 8870 0111.

Published: 7 Jan 2004