Starring X Factor's Diana Vickers

Sky Living has ordered a new sitcom based around a group of promotional girls, who hand out products in the street.

Give Out Girls will mark the TV acting debut of former X Factor contestant Diana Vickers, who plays the youngest member of the group. She told The Sun: ‘I’m so excited about doing my first comedy show. The script is hilarious – I was laughing my head off just reading it.’

Kerry Howard, of BBC Three’s Him & Her and about to star in her own BBC Three pilot, plays the lynchpin of the mob, Marilyn.

And the rest of core casts includes regular sketch performer Miranda Hennessy as an egotistical, passive-aggressive, New Zealand dancer; former Edinburgh best newcomer Cariad Lloyd as a boy-obsessed party girl; and former EastEnders actress Tracy-Ann Oberman as their boss.

Filming starts in Manchester this month, and Sky’s head of comedy Lucy Lumsden, who commissioned the show, praised its ‘brilliantly funny scripts and fabulous cast’.

It has been written by comic Hatty Ashdown and Anthony MacMurray, who previously created The Last Chancers for E4 and wrote on Al Murray’s Multiple Personality Disorder for ITV.

The series is being made by Big Talk Productions, the company behind Rev, Him & Her and new ITV show The Job Lot, alongside Popper Pictures, run by Friday Night Dinner creator Robert Popper.

Big Talk chief executive Kenton Allen said It's terrific to be working with Robert Popper, Tony & Hatty on this really fresh and funny series. Everyone we talk to seems to have spent a period of their life doing this kind of job and with Hatty's hilarious first-hand experiences informing the scripts, the show's authenticity shines through.

‘It is remarkable the ridiculous things nice young people are asked to do in the name of a new type of yoghurt.’

Give Out Girls was originally called Promo Girls and developed for Channel 4, who passed on the project.

Published: 2 May 2013