Television Magazine October 2020

Page 22

Amazon Prime

From left: Emma D’Arcy, Nick Frost and Samson Kayo in Truth Seekers

Ghostbusters for the online era

T

o those who know him, it is very on-brand that Nick Frost’s new sitcom is a paranormal romp, relentlessly firing out jokes while two ghost hunters uncover spooky goings-on in their house-to-house investigations. A mild obsession with the extraordinary is in Frost’s creative DNA. His preoccupations, along with those of his best friend, Simon Pegg, were evident in his Spaced days: the cult Channel 4 series often made passing reference to zombies and conspiracy theories. “When we used to live together, we spent some evenings going out ghost hunting,” Frost remembers. “We’d get in his car and we’d find an old Saxon church somewhere in Essex, and spend the evening creeping around the cemetery. “One time, when we lived in

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Nick Frost reveals how he helped create Amazon Prime’s new supernatural sitcom Truth Seekers. Shilpa Ganatra gets goosebumps Highgate, there was a forest at the back of the house that we’d never really walked around. After an afternoon of heavy drinking, we decided to break through the trees. We found a pristine 1940s train platform, with the lights on and a waiting room. “At that point, we were so freaked out: we thought we’d uncovered a supernatural train platform in the forest.

We found out later that it was part of [a line to Alexandra Palace] that they shut [in 1970], but that feeling of being exhilarated and terrified and letting your mind wander never left us.” Frost is speaking from the offices of Stolen Picture, the production company set up by him and Pegg after a run of successful movies together that included zombie movie Shaun of the Dead and off-beat cop comedy Hot Fuzz. His new sitcom, Truth Seekers, is Stolen Picture’s first project for television. The eight-parter revolves around widower Gus, played by Frost, who is a YouTube paranormal investigator and, by day, a broadband installer at Smyle – tag line: “Connecting worlds”. Through his job, he meets new recruit Elton (Samson Kayo, familiar to fans of Famalam and Timewasters). As they make visits to eerie houses, they stumble upon paranormal activity that


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