‘The Curse’: Channel 4 Sets February Premiere For ’80s Crime-Comedy Caper
Channel 4 has set a February premiere date for their brand-new crime-comedy ‘The Curse‘, written by the combined multi-BAFTA award-winning partnership of Tom Davis and director James De Frond (‘Murder in Successville’, ‘King Gary’), along with Steve Stamp, Allan Mustafa, Hugo Chegwin (‘People Just Do Nothing’).
Set in London in the early 1980s, ‘The Curse’ follows a gang of hopeless small-time crooks embroiled in one of the biggest heists in history. Albert Fantoni (Allan Mustafa) and his wife Natasha (Emer Kenny) run a greasy spoon café and are down on their luck. Their lives change when, one evening, Albert and his old mates Phil Pocket (Hugo Chegwin), a wannabe gangster, and washed-up ex-boxer Mick Neville (Tom Davis) meet Natasha’s brother, Sidney (Steve Stamp), at the pub. Sidney has a new job at a warehouse that handles cash shipments. Security is almost non-existent – he could easily let the boys help themselves to as much as £50,000. But what they find is gold bullion worth more than £30 million. They take it and make their escape. But the gold will curse them for the rest of their lives.
The comedy is a fictionalized tale loosely inspired by an infamous robbery from the early ’80s, where six men raided a depot near one of London’s airports thinking they’d walk away with £50,000 in cash, only to stumble across seven thousand bars of gold, with a street value of tens of millions!
The series stars Allan Mustafa as Albert Fantoni, Steve Stamp as Sidney Wilson, Hugo Chegwin as Phil ‘The Captain’ Pocket and Tom Davis as Big Mick Neville, a group of hapless small-time criminals who become embroiled in the plot. They are normal working-class men who just dabble in low-level crime to make ends meet during the recession hit decade. But the naïve gang royally bite off more than they can chew with the heist and subsequently are stuck with the impossible task of coming up with a plot to rid themselves of the loot before they get nicked or even worse, end up dead…
Emer Kenny (‘Pramface’, ‘Beaver Falls’) plays Natasha, wife of criminal Albert, who narrates the tale. The series also stars Ferdinando (‘The Letter for the King’) as Crazy Clive Cornell, a “proper” gangster that the gang become involved with during the heist, Ambreen Razia (‘This Way Up’) as Detective Thread, Geoff Bell (‘His Dark Materials’) as Detective Saunders and Michael Smiley (‘Luther’) as Ronnie Gatlin.
The Curse was commissioned for Channel 4 by Fiona McDermott, Head of Comedy and Jack Bayles, Commissioning Editor for Comedy. Written and Executive Produced by James de Frond, Tom Davis, Allan Mustafa, Steve Stamp, Hugo Chegwin. Producer is Richard Webb (‘King Gary’). The series is directed by James de Frond and is a Shiny Button production, a Banijay UK company.
‘The Curse‘ premieres Sunday, 6th February 2022 at 10pm on Channel 4.
