The music in No Big Deal was written by the man who wrote the script. Andrew Dickinson composed the original score for the new British sitcom, performing and recording it with the musician Andy Pike, and the pilot episode went out in London on 14 September. It is free to watch on YouTube here.
A score written alongside the script
Dickinson worked as an angel investor and investment manager before he wrote the comedy, and he says the songs and the storylines came out of the same period of his working life.
“I wrote No Big Deal during my time as an angel investor and investment manager. Every storyline began with a real incident that has been exaggerated and expanded for comic effect. I also wrote all of the original music used throughout the series, which was performed and recorded with the help of my good friend and outstanding musician Andy Pike.”
Venture capital played for laughs
The series is set at Janus, an investment firm chasing the next billion-pound business idea and usually getting it wrong. Its floor is shared by four badly matched colleagues. Derek Tudor has genuine investing talent, undone by an inability to keep a single thought to himself and by a habit of doing the unpredictable thing. Lydia de Mabro runs the place in all but title, a board seat having come her way on the back of the only investment Janus ever got right. John Stevens brings goodwill and almost no relevant qualification to a business funded by money he inherited, and Perry Kent, a banker of long experience, regards the firm mainly as a route to a US Green Card.
The pitches that reach the boardroom are the running gag. They include fart-proof underwear, clinical toilets and questionable items of sex furniture, and every promising investment ends in comic disaster.
Planned shot by shot
Production fell to ModeLabs.ai, a UK AI studio. On the strength of that arrangement, a script written by a human and an episode produced entirely using AI, the pilot is believed to be the first sitcom of its kind anywhere. Dickinson is clear that the technology did not do the work on its own.
“Making the Pilot wasn’t simply a case of pressing a button. Every shot, camera movement, performance, line reading, location and visual detail had to be carefully planned, refined and recreated through an iterative creative process between the writing and production teams. Even while we were making it, the script was rewritten more than 65 times.”
Dan Hawthorne of ModeLabs.ai said the production method was never intended to be the joke.
“No Big Deal is brilliantly written and genuinely funny. AI isn’t the punchline – it’s simply the production technology that made an ambitious independent comedy possible.”
His verdict on the finished episode is short.
“I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve created together. I still laugh at these characters, and I hope audiences will too.”
There is nothing to pay and nothing to subscribe to. Episode one is up on YouTube here.
Updates go out through YouTube, with the show also on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X and Reddit.
Heart
Haha
Love
Wow
Yay
Sad
Poop
Angry
