Outnumbered and Derry Girls the musicals?
- Theatre bosses want to turn Outnumbered into the latest sitcom-turned-stage show, following successful adaptations of Fawlty Towers, Only Fools And Horses, Inside No. 9 and Drop The Dead Donkey
- Outnumbered's executive producer, Jimmy Mulville, isn't fully convinced by the idea. But he suggests that fans may not have seen the end of Derry Girls
- Mulville has also spoken at length for the first time about the cancellation of the Father Ted musical, saying: "I feel sad for the fans. Because I can't tell you what a brilliant show it would have been"
Outnumbered executive producer Jimmy Mulville has revealed that he's been approached to turn the hit BBC sitcom into a musical, and that he doesn't believe Derry Girls is finished, while sharing his side of the cancellation of the Father Ted musical.
Mulville, whose company Hat Trick Productions revived another of its sitcoms, Drop The Dead Donkey, for the stage featuring most of the original cast last year, also suggested that Drop The Dead Donkey: The Reawakening, could be coming to London's West End in 2026.
Discussing the recent successful adaptations of Fawlty Towers and Only Fools And Horses for the theatre with fellow producer Peter Fincham on their Insiders: The TV Podcast, Mulville said: "We had something last year where a theatre producer rang up and said: 'Oh, could you do a stage version of Outnumbered?"
The semi-improvised sitcom about the Brockman family, which, like Drop The Dead Donkey, is written by Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton, returned after eight years for a special on BBC One at Christmas, with Claire Skinner and Hugh Dennis' Sue and Pete now grandparents and their children, Jake, Ben and Karen, played by Tyger Drew-Honey, Daniel Roche and Ramona Marquez, now adults.
Mulville pointed out to the unnamed producer that "all the kids have grown up now and it'd be quite difficult I think". But Fincham reasoned that you could recast the roles, observing that "John Cleese isn't in [the stage] Fawlty Towers".
Agreeing, Mulville added that Drop The Dead Donkey's live appeal may be attributable to the fact that "the audience who watched it in the nineties are now of an age where they all go to the theatre".
Elsewhere in the pair's extended conversation about intellectual property, Fincham asked his colleague and commercial rival if he could perhaps foresee a Derry Girls musical in the future?
Mulville remarked of the Channel 4 sitcom, which starred Saoirse-Monica Jackson, Jamie-Lee O'Donnell, Nicola Coughlan, Louisa Harland, Dylan Llewellyn, Siobhán McSweeney and Tommy Tiernan, and which ended in 2022 after three series: "Well, I think there's a whole Derry Girls universe she's created, Lisa McGee ... has created such an iconic show that you're right, maybe in years to come, there will be a kind of moment there".
However, the day after Pope Leo XIV was elected, most of the pair's conversation about sitcom adaptations concerned the mothballing of the Father Ted musical, which had been set to focus on Fathers Ted, Jack and Dougal travelling to Rome, with one of them becoming pontiff.
Written by Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, creators of the beloved Channel 4 sitcom starring Dermot Morgan, Ardal O'Hanlon, Frank Kelly and Pauline McLynn, and featuring songs by Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy and music by composer Paul Woodfull, what Mulville called "the most extraordinary saga" ended with Linehan's unwillingness to accept £200,000 from Hat Trick to have his name removed from the project because of his involvement in gender-war arguments online.
The payment had been offered to avoid turning the show into box office poison, with Linehan effectively cancelled because of his vehement campaigning against trans rights. The show's financial backers felt there was no chance of the musical's success if the writer's name remained attached.
"If you'd told me that this musical will be scuppered by this issue I would have thought you'd been drinking" Mulville recalled. "We discovered that Graham had decided to take issue with some things that were coming from the trans community that he didn't agree with, and he decided to disagree with them on Twitter, as it was then called.
"And of course, as you know, that can degenerate quite quickly into people just shouting at each other. And I think that some of the things that he was talking about were worthy of discussion, as it was on the other side. But the debate became so toxic. And as we know, people have had death threats and all kinds of things because of this issue.
"So I tried to speak to him and say 'can we maybe just calm this down and maybe come off Twitter? And if you want to write something about it, [write it in] a book or write an essay or a piece in a newspaper but this kind of barking at each other ...'
"And he got very upset and I realised that he'd fallen into that trap of wanting to prove that he was right to a group of people who were never going to think that he's right. The end of the story is that he got cancelled by Twitter [though he was subsequently reinstated when it was bought by Elon Musk and the platform's name changed to X] and the theatre community.
"It came back to us very reluctantly. We realised we couldn't find a theatre and we wouldn't be able to find investors because ... he hadn't become 'Graham Linehan, great writer of Father Ted'. He'd become 'Graham Linehan, who's transphobic'.
"Now, I don't think he is. I'm with Voltaire on this. I may disapprove of what you say but I'll defend to the death your right to say it. And the fact is, he's paid a terrible price, Graham. His personal life has fallen apart. He can't get a job. He literally has been, in that awful word, 'cancelled'."
Mulville recalled Linehan's personal denunciations of him, adding that, "along the way, to be honest with you, the relations between him and the rest of us have fallen apart. So even if the trans issue went away, now I don't think we would do the musical, which is such a shame. Because the truth is that most people who love Father Ted don't have strong opinions about this issue, which Graham so died on the hill for. But the theatre community does have very, very strong ideas about these issues and he kind of got it wrong."
Confirming that the writers share rights to the musical with Hat Trick, Mulville explained that there was no way the production could go forward without Linehan's involvement or blessing, recalling a meeting with the Irishman and his agent in which Linehan became "quite abusive".
Mulville remembered the writer subsequently taking to YouTube and accusing him of being "an English producer trying to harm an Irish artist and all that stuff ... Even if he drops dead, he said, it's in his will, we can't do the musical. So I feel sad for the fans. Because I can't tell you what a brilliant show it would have been.
"I don't wish Graham any ill ... It was the way he expressed his views which people found very difficult to deal with.
"But boy, did he pay an enormous price. I know how much he loved Father Ted and it was his vision for how this story would end and it would have done really well. Would have done well here, would have done well in New York ... I just came back from Australia, it's full of Irish people. I mean, it could have been a huge hit for everybody."