Another sci-fi pilot for the BBC

Johnny Vegas has shot a BBC Three sitcom pilot about UFOs, just months after blasting the channel for axing Ideal.

Filming on A Saucer Full of Secrets in Vegas’s native St Helens wrapped on Wednesday.

According to the local newspaper, the St Helens Reporter, the comedian shot scenes with a cow at Siding Lane Country Park, ‘before realising an alien spacecraft [was] approaching over the treetops. The scene involved a huge mobile platform that projected the alien “landing lights” down onto the park’s grassed area.’

The pilot was a co-production between the BBC in Manchester and Steve Coogan's production company Baby Cow, who made Ideal, The Mighty Boosh and Gavin and Stacey. It was written and directed by the Ideal team of Graham Duff and Ben Wheatley.

Sheila Hancock, Roy Hudd and Daisy Haggard co-star in the pilot, which is named after Pink Floyd's second studio album.

The news comes as the BBC also announced V Sign, another sci-fi comedy pilot about an alien invasion, this one shot in Carrickfergus in Northern Ireland.

Vegas criticised BBC Three for cancelling Ideal in November, after winning best performance in a comedy at the Royal Television Society North West Awards for his role as small-time drugs dealer Moz.

‘Thank you BBC,’ he said. ‘When the numbers have never been higher, you’ve cancelled us.

‘I’m being fired by the man who commissioned Kerry Katona [BBC Three controller Zai Bennett] so I’m proud to do anything else that you’re not involved in.’

Interiors, the radio adaptation of a comic play Vegas wrote with Stewart Lee for the Manchester International Festival in 2007, broadcast on Radio 4 last night.

- by Jay Richardson

Published: 16 Mar 2012