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Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc have gone from Bake Off to bumping people off in their first ever sitcom Hitmen

Our 52-page guide has Jaci Stephen’s Soap Watch, your Movie Planner and a preview of Mel and Sue’s hilarious new sitcom

Jamie and Fran are work partners and best friends, with a relationship going back over 30 years. They gossip, bicker and play charades when business is slow. They’re also trained assassins.

But the biggest surprise in Sky’s new black comedy Hitmen is that the deadly duo are played by former Bake Off presenters Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins.

They can also boast a friendship of more than 30 years but that, insists Sue, is where the similarities between them and Jamie and Fran end. ‘We’ve never killed anyone for money,’ she jokes, ‘although I have got quite good at handling guns. It’s weird. I can take apart and put together a 9mm pistol in under seven seconds.’

Sue got plenty of practice with a weapon filming Hitmen. All six episodes involve her character Fran and sidekick Jamie attempting to carry out the deadly instructions of their mysterious boss Mr K. In episode one the killersfor-hire have a corrupt lawyer, played by Jason Watkins, trussed up in the back of their van awaiting orders from their boss. Should they free him or shoot him?

Other jobs for Jamie and Fran involve an embezzling accountant, a nightclub bouncer who’s become a little too friendly with Mr K’s fiancée and a sleazy DJ who’s been tampering with Mr K’s supply of recreational drugs.

Sue says it’s vital the assassins’ victims are dodgy characters with whom audiences won’t sympathise. ‘We had a hard line on the fact that all the people our characters kill are mob-related – people who deserve what’s coming to them,’ she says. ‘We wouldn’t want viewers to empathise with the targets or else the deaths would be uncomfortable and not funny.’

Some of the killings don’t go to plan – for instance, there’s a big twist just before Fran prepares to pull the trigger in episode one. ‘But the competence of Jamie and Fran as killers is never in doubt,’ says Mel. ‘They know what they’re doing, which is why Mr K has placed his trust in them. Even so, there’s a little bit of assassin-envy going on. They have rivals in the world of contract killings. Another dou

ble act, Liz and Charles, are just that little bit better at what they do than Jamie and Fran.’

As well as fronting Bake Off together, Mel and Sue have also cohosted talk shows such as Channel 4’s Late Lunch. But this is their first stab at doing a sitcom together. ‘We’ve been close to doing a couple of sitcoms in the past but this one seemed perfect for us because we were allowed to tinker and busk with Joe Parham and Joe Markham’s script, and draw on our own established relationship and friendship,’ says Mel. ‘Hopefully there’ll be a real flavour of a proper friendship in Hitmen because that’s really what this show is about.’