Scarborough Fiction

I launched this blog back in April with an article about the BBC comedy Scarborough . One of the main characters in that series was played by Steve Edge who also plays one of the main characters in All at Sea , another comedy set in Scarborough. They were both made by the BBC, with Scarborough airing less than four years after the final episode of All at Sea , and Steve Edge was in both. The main difference between the two shows is that one is aimed at adults and the other is aimed at kids.  I discovered All at Sea by chance in 2013. I think I had seen it in the TV listings and managed to watch a few episodes. This was the first time in years that I had seen a comedy set in Scarborough on TV, the previous instances being an episode of an ITV sitcom that I will write about next year (it will be worth the wait, I hope) and the film Little Voice which I wrote about recently. I wasn't in the habit of watching kids TV in 2013, but I made an exception for something set in Scarborough....

  I used to think that a comedy series being filmed in Scarborough was very unlikely. I didn't think anyone would even suggest it. That's why, in 2012, I wrote my own sitcom script. It had the title Hawaiianesque and was set in a surf shop in Scarborough - I was picturing Cool Classics Surf Shop on Museum Terrace as I wrote it. In 2017, I wrote another script; Coasters was also set in Scarborough. The main characters worked in a gift shop and there were lots of outdoor scenes and some crime-based drama. Other than a few nice comments on the second script from an independent production company, nothing happened with those scripts.  It would take a writer with a lot of experience to get a prime time Scarborough sitcom on our screens. Derren Litten had huge success with the ITV comedy, Benidorm . It ran for ten series and attracted millions of viewers - according to the Wikipedia entry , series 4 and 5 attracted an average of over 7 million across all episodes. It made sense fo...