Josh Widdicombe and Nish Kumar to star in Hold the Front Page sitcom

Josh Widdicombe and Nish Kumar are to star in 'Hold the Front Page'.

The 39-year-old comedian will team up with fellow star Nish, 36, to play a pair of local newspaper journalists in the Sky Max sitcom for a full series, following a successful pilot last year.

Josh told British Comedy Guide: "Recording the pilot was so much fun, I love working with Nish. And now we're filming the full series this summer. I'm really excited about doing it because I'm so pleased with how the pilot came out. People really responded to it!"

The pilot saw the pair of comedians team up to play sports journalists who write a series of articles for the West Sussex Gazette, which claims to be Britain's oldest newspaper.

At the time, Director and editor-in-chief Gary Shipton said: "Trusted local news has never been more important. We believe this will really raise the profile of both local newspapers and the power of 'local' in a post-pandemic world and we are hugely grateful to Josh, Nish and CPL for asking us to be involved."

Before turning to comedy, Josh worked as a sports journalist for The Guardian and Nish was the host of BBC satire news show 'The Mash Report' until it was cancelled in order to in order "to make room for new comedy shows".

It returned on Dave last year under new name 'Late Night Mash', but Nish quit the show just weeks after it was rebooted.

Josh is set to return to his presenting role on comedy panel show 'Hypothetical' alongside James Acaster, and admitted shooting the fourth series has felt a lot more "free" after COVID restrictions were lifted.

He said: "There were small audience restrictions compared to the previous series. We kept the long table because we liked it, it just made us feel like big men. The series before it was almost impossible. You couldn't go within two metres of anyone, understandably. There's definitely more freedom. And booking it was so easy because everyone wanted to work, they'd all had eighteen months off.

"So you've got loads of great people excited to be back in a TV studio. It was brilliant."