The premise of Make That Movie, Australian comedian Sam Campbell’s deeply strange new Channel 4 series, is not easy to describe. A show-within-a-show, it stars its creator as an alternative Sam Campbell: rather than his real-life idiosyncratic standup self, he’s a pompous director whose well of inspiration has run dry. So he invites the public to share their (invariably bonkers) ideas for movies, which he and his dysfunctional crew then develop into real feature films. This all occurs within the framework of a shonky reality programme; each episode concludes with the film’s premiere. Think Changing Rooms, but instead of Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and Handy Andy renovating somebody’s living room, it’s Campbell and co bringing to life a man called Mick’s fantasy about a couple who can’t be snakes at the same time, yet one of them is always a snake.
In other words, the actual Campbell is the one who has been given carte blanche to turn his own invariably bonkers ideas into reality. He claims the production company behind the show were very hands-off – partly because they were so busy working on an animated Ricky Gervais series about cats “so we sort of got left to our own devices”. It helped that Channel 4’s head of comedy, Charlie Perkins – a longtime champion and collaborator of Campbell’s – was also “very trusting. I don’t know if she really got [the concept] when we were first talking about it. When we’d made it, I think she understood it a tiny bit more.”
Even his co-stars didn’t really get it. When comedian Lara Ricote, who plays Campbell’s people-pleasing assistant Jess, first read the script, she was slightly bemused. Yet she too had faith. As a huge fan turned close friend of its creator, Ricote felt she didn’t “need to understand” Make That Movie. “With Sam I trust with my heart that it’s gonna be funny.”
Many comedy fans will feel that it’s high time Campbell got his own television show. Since moving to the UK from his native Australia in the early 2020s, the 34-year-old has established himself as the British comedy circuit’s most thrillingly irreverent voice. His standup – delivered in a style that swings between hammy overacting and childish belligerence – forces observational comedy through an absurdist filter (his contrarian takes cover everything from hand sanitiser and dragonflies to Ferrero Rocher and Bratz dolls). In 2022, this shtick won him the Edinburgh comedy award; his appetite for prank-adjacent subversion meant he returned the next year for an outrageously arrogant victory lap, a single 10-minute performance titled Bulletproof Ten.
A triumphant stint on Taskmaster followed, and soon Campbell was plying his trade as the resident oddball on a slew of panel shows: Would I Lie to You?, 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, QI (an appearance that involved him swapping his usual casual attire for a tweed suit and severe side parting, and asking host Sandi Toksvig if it would technically be possible for him to ride on the back of a whale’s sperm). Then came his most high-profile gig to date: this year’s series of Last One Laughing UK. Battling the likes of Alan Carr, David Mitchell and Bob Mortimer, he was a decidedly leftfield presence: doing unconventional duck impressions; claiming to have dined next to “mole people” during Eat Out to Help Out; and playing a vicar’s pet bird in what must have been the show’s most bizarre set-piece ever. It also proved Campbell’s deadpan manner was more than a mask; it quickly became clear that there was zero chance of anyone getting him to crack (something that necessitated an eventual rule change by the producers – Campbell ultimately lost to David Mitchell by virtue of having made marginally fewer of the other contestants crack up).
In real life, Campbell is still relatively poker-faced, although by no means the disconcertingly weird dude his persona implies. Today he’s video calling from his parents’ house in Tasmania, where he’s taking a break after a stint filming back-to-back episodes of an Australian panel show (he admits to being “zonked” and is concerned about coming across as “a dullard” as a result). Yet while he’s keen to share reading recommendations – he’s currently enjoying Ben Lerner’s much-hyped new novel Transcription – he’s far from an open book himself. When I ask what made him swap Australia for the UK, he says he “can’t quite remember why I moved to England or how it happened”. (Although he will admit to having been a longtime fan of British comedy, citing Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and The Mighty Boosh as formative influences.)
And don’t bother looking for clues in the Campbell he plays in Make That Movie, either; the decision to give the character his own name was “foisted” upon him by producers, he says. “I think he wanted to call himself Coin at one point,” confirms the show’s director, Joe Pelling, who describes Make That Movie’s protagonist as “maybe a version of Sam if he was quite a lot thicker and way more arrogant”. What the pair do have in common is a tendency to go with their gut. For fake Campbell, that means dashed-off scripts and underbaked conceits; for the real one it means not second guessing himself (or deconstructing his process in interviews). “Sam doesn’t really seem like someone who’s prone to super analysing his stuff too much,” says Pelling. “He’s just led instinctively by what’s funny.”
Campbell cast his on-screen crew largely from his friendship circle. Alongside the sweet, energetic Jess, who was partly based on Ricote herself (although Campbell describes his pal as “less of a doormat in real life”), we have fellow Australian comic Aaron Chen as the nerdy yet highly incompetent dogsbody Sebastian, whose presence is tolerated due to the fact his parents are funding the entire enterprise. Exuberant standup Helen Bauer plays against type as grumpy sound engineer Pat, while 86-year-old actor David Hargreaves, who has been working steadily in British TV since the 1960s, completes the gang as cinematographer Winnie. Dressed in matching purple jumpsuits, the team’s aesthetic is part-Ghostbusters, part-Scooby-Doo. Pelling – who is best known for co-creating the cult animated comedy-horror web series Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared – wanted to cultivate a “real-life cartoon feel so that [the show] doesn’t feel bleak and strange”.
As well as the fictional film crew, Make That Movie stars a rotating cast of fictional members of the public, many of whom are roped into acting in the fictional films as a cost-saving exercise by Campbell (the fictional one). These are played by the cream of the British alternative comedy scene: Amy Gledhill, Lenny Rush, Mark Silcox, John Kearns, Freddie Meredith and many more. Meanwhile, the movies themselves – which are mind-bendingly terrible but not in a low-rent way – span multiple styles: from sentimental British drama to sci-fi to a childlike animation about feet. Make That Movie is essentially an anthology show; 00s DIY programmes may have served as a template, but so did Michael Palin’s 1970s series Ripping Yarns.
Another major inspiration was catastrophic film shoots. Both Pelling and Campbell mention a documentary called Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr Moreau, about the chaotic set of the 1996 Val Kilmer movie. The comedy inherent in taking film-making too seriously, especially when disaster strikes (“people arguing dressed in prosthetics”) is at the core of Make That Movie, says Pelling. Campbell recalls putting on a play in Australia in his youth about chess player Garry Kasparov, in which a “friend played [supercomputer] Deep Blue; we painted him blue and took it so seriously”. Approaching obviously “dumb” ideas humourlessly is something Campbell finds “quite funny”.
Much like Campbell’s standup – which both subverts and cleaves to the tropes of observational comedy – underneath Make That Movie is solid comedic logic. “Sam is pretty good at knowing that sometimes you need some character development or a structure that engages the audience in a more straightforward way, so it’s not just one mad thing after another,” says Pelling. There are an awful lot of mad things, though. In one episode, we meet Sebastian’s AI companion Super-Breast, a digital rendering of a hairless naked woman burdened with one giant boob. The image is now seared on my retinas, but Campbell insists he is not in the business of trying to disturb people. “I don’t want anyone to get properly shaken up, but it’s OK if people kind of grimace at Super-Breast.” He considers the alternative. “It’s probably better than the opposite. I hope she doesn’t get a fanbase.”
Were any of Campbell’s movie ideas rejected for being too weird? “There was one that was a spaceship with a thousand babies on it and it would stop at planets and 100 babies would get out. Meanwhile, the other babies were being educated by a computer.” The ones deposited on the final planet “would rule the universe because they had the most education. It didn’t make a lick of sense. Then we had another one about a guy who any time someone touched him physically, he would go back to being a baby with the knowledge that he had accumulated. So he kept starting his life again.” A lot of baby material, then? “Yeah, none of that really remained because people are like: it’s really hard to film with babies – you’re a crackpot.”
Even free of infants hurtling through space, Make That Movie is an acquired taste – and that’s exactly the point. For those with a certain sensibility, this kind of iconoclastically eccentric TV is a much-needed throwback to a time when weird-for-weird’s-sake comedy was all over our screens. Like an old-school indie icon, Campbell’s appeal lies in his rejection of anodyne and conventionally crowd-pleasing comedy, says Ricote. “It’s so nice when you feel like your taste is good – when you feel good about liking what you like – and that happens to me with Sam,” she explains. “I go: Thank goodness I’m one of these people that can laugh at something like this.”
And what kind of reaction is Campbell anticipating from his latest creation? “I would like people to find it interesting,” he says – although he seems to have very low expectations for audience engagement. “I think people mainly watch things on their phone while they’re being attacked now.” I don’t quite know what he’s on about, but the line makes me laugh anyway: as many have already observed, you don’t need to understand Sam Campbell to appreciate him.
Make That Movie starts in the UK on Channel 4, 28 May, 10pm; and in Australia, it’s on HBO Max from 29 May