New furry puppet comedy coming to BBC Three

A snap-shot of We Are Mongrels, from Broadcast

British digital TV channel BBC Three has commissioned an adult puppet series featuring anthropomorphic animals.

We Are Mongrels, a series of 8 x 30 minute episodes, follows the exploits of a country fox who decides to discover "the real wild life" in the city. He travels to the Isle of Dogs and meets up with a range of different characters including a "sexy" Afghan hound whom he falls in love with, a street cat, and a sarcastic pigeon from Blackburn.

The series is the creation of Adam Miller, who is one of the directors on Taking the Flak, the currently broadcast BBC Two comedy drama set in an African war zone, and the ITV2 sketch series Katy Brand’s Big Ass Show. Miller will also act as the director of We Are Mongrels. Stephen McCrumb will be executive producer. McCrumb has previously worked on long-running BBC Three sitcom Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps and more recently Coming of Age.

McCrumb told Broadcast magazine that he and Miller had:

[...] a shared love of puppets and the desire to do something ambitious in British comedy, outside of live action

It has a lot of cutaways and flashbacks and it's fast-moving - more like an animation with puppets than a traditional sitcom. It gives you the licence to do things you can’t with live action. We pitched it as Avenue Q meets Family Guy: it’s playfully adult like Family Guy, but it's not crude in a Two Pints way.

The series will be broadcast next year and will be written by Jon Brown, who has written for ITV2 sitcom No Heroics, BBC Three sketch show Scallywagga and BBC One family sitcom After You’re Gone; and also with Daniel Peak who has also worked on Two Pints.

In a unbroadcast pilot for the show, the voice of the fox was played by Rufus Hound, Lucy Montgomery played the pigeon and Katy Brand played the pigeon. While it is hoped that the actors will return to play their roles, it has not yet been confirmed if they will.