Football crazy

The pampered world of professional footballers is played for laughs in a new comedy from the writers of The Inbetweeners

- TESS LAMACRAFT, SEAN MARLAND, RICHARD MCCLURE

NEW COMEDY

The First Team

Thursday, BBC2 HD, 9.30pm

Iain Morris and Damon Beesley haven’t written a TV series together since their hit E4 show The Inbetweeners ended a decade ago, but now the pair are finally teaming up again to bring us a wacky new football comedy.

Their six-part sitcom, The First Team, is set in a high-profile professional football club where most of the players have more money than sense. It’s an idea that first came to Morris when he got chatting to a Premier League player on a transatlantic flight a few years ago.

‘We wanted the next TV show we wrote together to be the right one,’ he explains. ‘I’m a huge football fan and talking to this player about his day-to-day existence was fascinating. It revealed all sorts of things I never knew and had never even considered about life in the game.’