Izzard to star in feelgood CBBC Christmas drama
[from Broadcast.co.uk]
CBBC has ordered a flagship Christmas family drama starring Eddie Izzard as a mysterious man with the ability to “recover the lost”.
LA-based feature film specialist Impact Film & Television will make 90-minute The Lost Christmas, in which Izzard plays the “strange, enigmatic” Anthony.
He wakes up in a Manchester street on Christmas Eve not knowing where he is or what he is there to do, and the drama follows him for 24 hours as he “transforms the lives of five ordinary people whose lives have been shattered by decisions of their past”.
The characters he helps include a young boy who lost his parents in a car crash, a couple who lost their child, and a man, played by Jason Flemyng, who has lost the book he used to read to his daughter.
John Hay, who wrote the 90-minute Christmas drama with Dave Logar, will also direct through Impact.
Hay told Broadcast: “Eddie and I always wanted to do something that happens in a single day, and we both love Christmas films. It’s going to be a very emotional piece and he [Izzard] is not going to do ‘funny Eddie’. It is structured like Crash, in that a string of apparently unconnected episodes piece together at the end, and has the feelgood factor of It’s A Wonderful Life.”
He added there was a “twist around the sense of self sacrifice”, in the vein of an Oscar Wilde fairytale.
The Lost Christmas was commissioned by outgoing CBBC controller Anne Gilchrist and BBC1 controller Jay Hunt. It is lined up for TX in CBBC’s BBC1 slot in 2011 or 2012. The executive producers are Connal Orton for Impact and Sue Nott for CBBC.
Impact Film & Television’s credits include the Resident Evil films and Event Horizon.
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