Sam Campbell, the subversive Australian comedian, has achieved significant recognition through his appearances on popular shows like Taskmaster and Last One Laughing. He is now set to headline his own distinctively peculiar sitcom, promising viewers an experience filled with unusual animations, including a character named Super-Breast.
The premise of Make That Movie, Campbell’s new series on Channel 4, is rather unconventional. It functions as a show-within-a-show, featuring the comedian as an alternate version of himself. Instead of embodying his characteristic idiosyncratic stand-up persona, he portrays a pretentious director suffering from a creative block. To overcome this, he solicts bizarre movie ideas from the public, which he and his quirky team then transform into actual feature films. This entire process unfolds within the context of a somewhat amateurish reality program, with each episode culminating in the film’s premiere.
Imagine a home renovation show, but instead of interior designers revamping a living space, Campbell and his colleagues bring to life a man named Mick’s peculiar fantasy: a couple who are perpetually on the verge of transforming into snakes, yet one of them is invariably in serpentine form. Essentially, the real Sam Campbell has been granted the freedom to manifest his own eccentric concepts into reality.
Campbell suggests that the production company behind the series adopted a largely hands-off approach. This was partly attributed to their extensive involvement in an animated series about cats created by Ricky Gervais, which meant his project was “sort of left to our own devices.” He also credits Charlie Perkins, Channel 4’s head of comedy and a long-time supporter and collaborator of Campbell’s, for her trust. Campbell acknowledges that Perkins may not have fully grasped the concept initially, but gained a clearer understanding once the series was completed.