Animated series from Men Behaving Badly creator

Men Behaving Badly creator Simon Nye has written an animated sitcom about an obsessive football fan for ITV.

The Wild World Of Warren stars Spy’s Darren Boyd as an keen follower of Brainsford United, ‘the most important thing in my life … apart from my family, of course’.

Morgana Robinson voices his daughter Charlie, with Morwenna Banks as his son Harrison. Eleanor Lawrence plays his long-suffering Dutch wife Ingrid, whom Warren met during a European tie with PSV Eindhoven.

Nye wrote three of the half hour sitcom’s six episodes, with stand-up Dominic Holland and TV Burp and Brass Eye writer David Quantick contributing the other three. The show is expected to air on ITV4 in September.

Also in the cast are sitcom regular Georgie Glen as Warren’s mother and stand-up Tony Law as her boyfriend. Former EastEnders actor Nitin Ganatra plays his best friend and co-worker in a kitchen showroom.

Director Tim Searle, head of production house Baby Cow Animation, said: ‘Warren is 37 and a half and crazy about football. But really he could be crazy about fly fishing, motorbikes or anything. It’s what happens to blokes in middle-age – they’ve got families they love but they need these passions to divert them from the horror of their lives.’

Brainsford United are ‘lower end of a fictitious Premiership or possibly the Championship. They’re not a stellar club by any means, though they’re not rubbish. They give him just enough reason to keep believing.’

The Wild World of Warren is a co-production between Baby Cow Animation and Canadian animators Smiley Guy Studios. Baby Cow has two other animations featuring high-profile comedy talent on air this Christmas. The Cow That Almost Missed Christmas, went out on BBC One on Wednesday and included Johnny Vegas, Isy Suttie and Miriam Margolyes in the cast; while Uncle Wormsley’s Christmas has Steve Coogan, Julian Barratt, Julia Davis and John Thomson and will air on Sky Atlantic on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

- by Jay Richardson

Published: 21 Dec 2012