More details have been revealed about the new show that comedian Tom Allen will be fronting for Channel 4 later this year.
In Tom Allen Goes To Town the stand-up will be travelling around the UK – as a Bromley boy it’s small town Britain he particularly loves. In this new special commissioned by Channel 4, Tom champions one of those unsung places: Wakefield, West Yorkshire.
Spending a week in Wakey – a city, not a town - Tom stays with a local family while seeing the sights and meeting some of Wakefield’s extraordinary characters, before putting on an end of week show to celebrate everything and everyone he’s encountered. Along the way, he takes in one of the world’s biggest rhubarb crops, explores Wakefield’s beautiful cathedral, visits one of the only drive-in fish and chip shops in the world and buys a round of Wakefield’s famous steak pies.
Allen is shaping up to be one of the faces of Channel 4. He is also set to delve into the advertising archives in a new four-part series called Tom Allen: Ad Man, celebrating 65 years of the nation’s best-loved and most outrageous TV adverts.
Tom Allen Goes To Town was one of a raft of programmes announced as part of Channel 4's autumn schedule that also includes the first C4 series of Taskmaster following its acquisition from Dave.
Update December 2020: After this programme was announced a number of people suggested that it sounded like comedian Mark Steel's Radio 4 series Mark Steel's In Town. Steel himself tweeted: "Some folk have noticed there's a TV show being made called Tom Allen Goes to Town, and gone ‘Do what? That’s Mark’s show’. But it’s being sorted, and don’t be rude to @tomallencomedy as he’s one of the loveliest people ever, and once he promised to teach me how to be gay."
After trailers started airing for this pilot over Christmas people started commenting again about the similarity and Steel tweeted: "So there's a show coming on Channel 4 called Goes to Town, made by @rumpusmedia in which a comic visits an 'unsung' town, then performs a show about it, in that town. In other news, I'm launching a panel show called '8 out of Ten Dogs', and an anagram show called 'Counterdown'."
