Zoo Films and Atomic Cartoons to co-produce ‘Bollywood Road’

London’s Zoo Films, producers of the BAFTA nominated Christmas special ‘The Tale of Jack Frost’, and Canada’s Atomic Cartoons, creators and producers of the worldwide hit ‘Atomic Betty’, are to join forces on a new production.
Created by writer/producer Alastair Swinnerton (‘The Tale of Jack Frost’, ‘The Baskervilles’), ‘Bollywood Road’ is an animated song and dance sitcom for all the family set in a (vaguely) fictitious multicultural inner city community. The show centres around a barely functional Anglo-Indian family called the Mumbis - son Achai, a technical genius whose talents should be put to use earning money but which are more often utilised to get free cable TV, daughter Asha, who will be a great Bollywood starlet if her father has anything to do with it, whether she likes it or not, father Paresh, a once famous Bollywood actor turned minicab driver & fanatical stage-father, and mother Nisa, who holds down every job she can fit in to fund her husband's deluded ambitions.
Like any family they go to work, and school, they watch TV, they fight, they survive. But this is where all similarities to normal sitcoms end - for this is Bollywood Road, on the outside a normal London street of terraced houses and shops, but at any moment the walls of the houses, or shops, or restaurants can burst open to reveal a glittering song and dance routine – jungles, Taj Mahal, elephants, the whole works.
‘Bollywood Road’ will be written by an Anglo-Indian team, and voiced by ‘well-known Anglo-Indian actors and comedians’, and is under consideration by BBC Children’s in their current commissioning round.
(GB)