Sharon Horgan is reuniting with her Pulling co-writer Dennis Kelly for the first time in a decade to create a pilot for a Channel 4 series about the horrific dinner parties we wish we could escape.
Called The Circuit, the show will star Adeel Akhtar from Chris Morris’s Four Lions, and Irish actress Eva Birthistle (who starred in Brooklyn) as a recently relocated couple moving to a new area where “people oscillate somewhere between highly strung and psychopathic”.
The pilot will see Akhtar and Birthistle take up a dinner invitation from Game of Thrones’ Tobias Menzies, and Victoria Hamilton, who has recently appeared in another Channel 4 comedy, Toast.
Channel 4 head of comedy Phil Clarke said: “The pitch for The Circuit was irresistible. The premise – that everyone hates going to dinner parties but goes anyway – is a great starting place for a comedy.
“Plus, the prospect of a script from Sharon Horgan and Dennis Kelly, writing together again for the first time since Pulling, was incredibly exciting.”
Horgan has recently had another hit, writing and and starring in Catastrophe, while Kelly wrote Utopia, the critically acclaimed Channel 4 drama that ran for two seasons.
The Circuit is being made by Merman, the company Horgan set up with producer Clelia Mountford, with Mountford producing and both Horgan and Kelly working as executive producers. The pilot is not expected to appear until next year at the earliest.
Kelly and Horgan said: “It has taken just 10 short years for us to agree to work together again. It was a mistake.”
