A comic book character created in Dundee is being reimagined for a television comedy show.
Calamity James is one of the stars of Beano, published by DC Thomson in Dundee for 85 years. It is the world’s longest-running weekly comic.
Now the character will feature in a new BBC live action comedy.
The programme has been created for adults who grew up with the magazine, and stars Guilt’s Mark Bonnar and newcomer Dylan Blore.
The show has been produced by Emanata Studios.
It is the film and TV production arm of DC Thomson, which publishes The Courier and Evening Telegraph in Dundee.
It was set up in 2021 to develop the IP from its vast archive.
This ranges from Beano and The Dandy, to adult anthology comics Commando and Starblazer, Britain’s best-selling teen magazine of the 1970s Jackie and girls’ comic Bunty.
This reinterpretation of Calamity James is the creation of Edinburgh-based writer-director Louis Paxton.
He said: “Calamity James has been a wonderful opportunity for me.
“Together with some of Scotland’s best cast and crew, we’ve made an ambitious, heartfelt, and befittingly disastrous short film.”
Calamity James is a 14-minute slapstick adventure about young James, who is cursed with ‘acute misfortune syndrome’. James is on a mission to reconnect with his estranged dad.
It was commissioned for the BBC by Gavin Smith and Navi Lamba as part of the Comedy Shorts strand and co-funded by Screen Scotland,
The short is available now on BBC iPlayer and will be shown on BBC Three in the coming months.
BBC show ‘honouring’ Beano character Calamity James
Emanata Studios is headed by chief creative officer Mark Talbot.
He said: “It’s been fascinating to take a character like James who causes chaos in Beano every week and think, ‘What if he were 20? What would he be like, what would his life as the unluckiest boy in the world have been like, how can we expand him to be a real person?’
He said it was important to “honour” the comic book character.
Mark added: “Marvel and DC do this all the time.
“You see it with characters like Batman – you’ve got the Robert Pattinson Batman but you’ve got Teen Titans as well.
“Ultimately, this is a comedy for adults that honours its comic strip origins.
“Calamity James in the short is still recognisably the character from the comic.
“It sits alongside the comic character, but it is its own separate thing, existing in its own world.”
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