Sky’s the Limit

Happy news came on Friday that Sky Arts strand Playhouse Presents is ending its run with an all-female half hour comedy.

Psychobitches, ordered from Tiger Aspect, sees history’s most famous women psychoanalysed by Funnies favourite Rebecca Front. Front is also known in real life for her involvement in mental health issues having been part of a campaign to de-stigmatise mental illness via Twitter in which she admitted to having panic attacks.

Opposite her therapist role is Catherine Tate playing Eva Braun and Edith Piaf, Sharon Horgan as Jane Austen and Fieda Kahlo, and Katy Brand as Joan of arc and George Eliot. Also starring: Sheila Reid as Mother Theresa, Sam Spiro as Mary Whitehouse and Judy Garland, Selina Griffiths as Beatrix Potter, and Andy Nyman as Abraham’s wife, Sarah.

Just how the director, League of Gentleman‘s Jeremy Dyson, is going to fit so many neuroses into one episode is yet to be seen, but it sounds deliciously bonkers all the same. Like a cross between Star Stories and Horrible Histories, lets hope it adds to the nation’s growing taste for filtering historical fact through laugh-out-loud farce. And what better way to revise for an upcoming GCSE than watching Tate discuss abandonment issues in a dodgy German accent?

Says Ben Cavey, executive producer at Tiger Aspect. “The team of writers – Jeremy Dyson, Laurence Rickard, Simon Carlyle and Morwenna Banks, Bert Tyler-Moore and George Jeffrie- have created a brilliantly unique and original way of interpreting the sketch genre. And with the brilliant Pippa Brown at the helm as producer, this is a truly exciting collection of talent that Tiger Aspect are extremely pleased to have brought together.”