Kathy Burke has shut down rumours of a Gimme Gimme Gimme reboot in typically blunt fashion.
Airing from 1999 to 2001, the BBC sitcom starred Burke and James Dreyfus as two friends and flatmates on the hunt for love in London.
Burke received two Bafta nominations for her performance as the loud-mouthed Linda La Hughes.
On Tuesday (18 July), Burke responded to rumours that the show was the latest sitcom to be given the big screen treatment, as she reshared a fake poster on Twitter.
The mocked-up poster shows Linda riding on a motorbike, with the tagline reading: “The most beautiful woman in the world is back!” alongside the title “Gimme Gimme Gimme: A Movie”.
“Good morning, twits,” Burke wrote. “This is all over my notifications. It’s a fabulous mock up but it’s fake.
“We have no intention whatsoever of reviving the show in any way shape or form so get the f*** over it… and have a lovely day.”
Gimme Gimme Gimme was written by Jonathan Harvey, who suggested in 2015 that the sitcom would never be able to return as it was too “risky”.
“I came up with an idea about four years ago for a new house-share sitcom that I knew was the best thing I’d written comedy-wise since Gimme Gimme Gimme,” he told the Radio Times. “But the BBC turned it down because they thought it was too rude.
“And I said, ‘It’s only as rude as Gimme Gimme Gimme was.’ And they said they’d never commission Gimme Gimme Gimme now because they can’t be that risky. The climate changed. There’s less space to try out something a bit different.”
In recent years, Burke has turned her hand to podcasting and presenting, after announcing last year that she was retiring from acting.
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“When I used to work as an actor, you just talked about your own character,” she said.
“You didn’t really have input on anybody else. I thought, ‘This is so f***ing boring.’ I just found that quite ludicrous, which is one of the reasons I wanted to stop being an actor.”
Burke now hosts the Where There’s A Will, There’s A Wake podcast, in which celebrity guests discuss their dream funeral plans.
In a recent episode featuring Alan Carr, Burke admitted that she’d “gone off” sex – or “hanky-panky” as she called it – a long time ago.
Burke said she has not “been with anyone for years [because] the only point in being with someone… is hanky-panky”.
“I went off hanky-panky a long time ago,” she added. “What’s the f***ing point of having some hairy-a*** geezer in the bed? Do you know what I mean?”
