The Delightful Sausage have shared further details of their upcoming Radio 4 sitcom, Icklewick FM, including its supporting cast of Colin Hoult, Lucy Beaumont, Jen Brister, Phil Ellis, Barbara Nice and Mark Silcox, just as the award-nominated pair, Amy Gledhill and Chris Cantrill, concurrently release their second special today, Nowt But Sea.

Also featuring Ed Night, Steen Raskopoulos and Shivani Thussu, the six 30-minute episodes of Icklewick FM will air from 23rd January and include a couple of currently under wraps, crossover appearances from beloved, established characters from the world of British comedy and a bona fide television legend.

A co-commission from radio and TV bosses for the BBC, with the aim of potentially transferring to television in the future, the series is about a fictional, dysfunctional northern radio station. One of the first to feature on the BBC's upcoming podcast feed, Jokes, the comedy is also heavily improvised, with the Sausage currently in the process of editing 22 hours of audio down to three hours.

"Not Yorkshire specifically, we basically wanted Icklewick to be a post-industrial, shit Everytown" Cantrill explained to British Comedy Guide. "That place where if you looking at a map you can see it out of the corner of your eye but if you look for it specifically, you can't find it."

Throughout their careers as The Delightful Sausage, Gledhill and Cantrill have "basically played the same characters in the same world" he continues. "I really like that because it lets us build up these big backstories, the textures of their lives that we can play with. It's always been Amy and me against the world."

However, as radio talkshow hosts at the heart of the community, "we've got slightly different lives going on" he adds. "Chris has a wife in this. He's in a monogamous relationship but his wife is in a polyamorous one. He's decided he's just going to wait for her and has developed too many hobbies.

"Amy is a young girl about town. She lives in a static caravan behind the refinery plant that's gradually sinking. And the caravan gets more and more full of people that she's putting up because she's such a good person."

Produced by Benjamin Sutton (Olga Koch: OK Computer) of Daddy's Superyacht (Sunil Patel: An Idiot's Guide To Cryptocurrency), his counterpart within the sitcom's world is Silcox, boss of Icklewick FM and also the local taxi service, a "mentor that we look up to, whose wisdom we take at face value but which doesn't make any sense whatsoever."

Echoing Hoult's real-life diagnosis, his character, the station's roving reporter, "is absolutely riddled with ADHD.

"Every time we come to him for more information about a breaking news story, he's never where he's meant to be. He's always wrapped up in something that's slightly chaotic."

Beaumont plays a mother concerned about the moral decay of the town who uses her parenthood "like a weapon"; Brister is a Cressida Dick-like police commissioner; Ellis is the beleaguered coach of the local football team, Icklewick FC, aka The Bangers, "a group of very violent men he struggles to wrangle" and Thussu is the mayor's absurdly youthful and inexperienced spokesperson.

Barbara Nice creator Janice Connolly meanwhile, is Pat, a regular caller whose calls can end up taking over an entire show; Night is the swaggering son of a local nightclub owner. And Raskopoulos is Amy's cousin who just shows up, "and despite Steen's incredibly strong Australian accent, claims to be from America."

An evolution of The Delightful Sausage's Tiredness Kills podcast, commissioned after a successful pilot last Christmas, Cantrill describes the episodes as "tightly scripted" in terms of the storylines, but allowing their supporting cast plenty of scope to improvise around that framework.

"It's quite broad but I don't think it's alienating" he suggests. "It's snappy and it moves. It's grubby and a bit murky."

The news emerges as The Delightful Sausage have just finished the first series of their Radio 4 sketch show Big Little Questions, in which Gledhill, Cantrill, Sunil Patel and Richard David-Caine try to answer the questions of curious children, and on the day they launch Nowt But Sea on YouTube, which cheekily contains "Easter egg" trails for Icklewick FM.

Edinburgh Comedy Award-nominated when they performed it at the Fringe in 2022, Nowt But Sea, set on the private island of dubious celebrity agent Cedric L'Shay (played by Paul Dunphy), was shot at Manchester's Cultplex in November last year, directed by Big Little Questions' Hannah Moulder and produced by John Stansfield for A Lovely Time Productions.

Cantrill describes the recording as "technically a step up" from their previous special, Ginster's Paradise, "with proper cameras, proper sound", as they deploy these Delightful Sausage specials as calling cards for recording other comics' shows.

Indeed, A Lovely Time are filming Tom Lawrinson's Edinburgh debut from this year, Hubba Hubba, at Cultplex on Sunday, with Cantrill praising the darkly whimsical stand-up's "weird delivery, moving between happy and angry in the same sentence. There's a nice hub of people around Manchester doing stuff and it's exciting to be around."

Nowt But Sea is available on YouTube now: