Today on Good Morning Britain, comedian and TV presenter Hugh Dennis joined hosts Charlotte Hawkins and Richard Madeley to talk about his return to the screen with his real-life partner, Claire Skinner, for a Christmas special of Outnumbered.
From 2007 to 2014, a total of five series of the partially improvised comedy depicting the mayhem of family life for Pete (Dennis) and Sue Brockman (Claire Skinner) and their trio of children were broadcast, with a standalone Christmas episode in 2016.
The Beeb announced that it was coming back for another special earlier this month.
Revealing that filming will start in November, Hugh said:
“It’s great that it’s coming back. We are doing this 40 minute special but we don’t really know anything about it. We’ve read in the paper that we’ve got a grandchild but we don’t know whose kid it is!”
On the kids’ roles previously being improvised, he noted that this was done for authenticity, and because they were too young to learn a script when they started.
“Claire and I had a sort of script that we were told to learn but not very well but the kids were all improvised. You’ll never get them to sound like real children unless you let them be real children and the other reason was that when we started, they were so young that they couldn’t read so there was no point in giving them a script.”
Eight years on from the sitcom’s last episode, this will be the first time that Hugh will work alongside his on-screen partner Claire Skinner since they announced their relationship in real-life.
“I’m really looking forward to it. We’re all looking forward to it. It’s going to be strange isn’t it because I don’t think we live together anymore as a family. There’s lots of different stuff to reflect and one of the great things about the show was to reflect life as it actually was.”
Good Morning Britain weekdays from 6am on ITV1 & ITVX
