Enfield back with BBC after Sky move disappoints

Harry Enfield is to return to BBC1 with a new comedy drama inspired by the Celeb cartoon strip in the satirical magazine Private Eye.

The comedian moved to Sky One two years ago to devise 12 episodes of sketches including a host of new characters such as Cornish Ladies Man, the last of the great West Country lovers.

But the series, Harry Enfield's Brand Spanking New Show, and its new characters, failed to grab the public imagination in the way that Kevin the Teenager and Tim Nice-But-Dim had done.

Now, the comedian is being lined up to star in a comedy drama co-starring Amanda Holden. It is understood he will be cast as an ageing pop star whose wife, played by Holden, is obsessed with fame.

The series is being produced by Tiger Aspect, the company behind Enfield's BBC series, Harry Enfield and Chums, and its movie spin-off, Kevin and Perry Go Large, in which he co-starred with Kathy Burke. Neither the BBC nor Tiger Aspect would discuss the new show yesterday.

It was the desire of Burke and his other main co-star, Paul Whitehouse, to pursue other ventures that encouraged Enfield to take up an offer from Sky which had first been made some time before.

Although he was rumoured to have signed an exclusive £1m deal, he has since denied that figure and said he was never exclusively bound to Sky One.

Enfield said he was conscious of the dangers of experimentation without the colleagues he had come to be associated with, and had turned to satellite where the venture would not be as exposed as any appearances on terrestrial channels.

"I thought that meant starting again and I didn't want to do that on terrestrial because I knew it would be a hotchpotch, a mish-mash," he said at the time.

"People are very conservative, they like what they know. I describe it as basically going to see your favourite group and two of the members aren't there any more and it's all songs off the new album."

The series had lukewarm reviews from critics who were only sporadically impressed by the new creations and it was not a ratings hit for Sky. He is thought unlikely to work again for the network in the near future, although he may do a series for ITV, also based on a comic strip.