Hell For Leatherhead

A twenty-six episode series set shortly after the U.S. terrorist attacks of 2001. (Episode 1 attached. Please contact for more) Chelsey Bridge is one of America’s biggest TV stars. A forty-something closet gay drag-act and host of the ratings-topping Saturday night game show ‘Put A Sock In It’. Chelsey (Real name Jeff Tattershall) was born in England, but was taken to America as a baby in the early seventies after his mother had an affair with an American serviceman stationed in the Cumbrian town where Chelsey was born. Chelsey’s mother convinced her husband, Les - A rising northern comic and magician - that Chelsey was the product of her affair in order to escape to a new life in America when her serviceman boyfriend is posted back home. Because of the affair, Les wants nothing more to do with her or Chelsey and so all are happy with the arrangement. As Chelsey grows up he believes he has lived in America all his life with his English mother and American father, although he does have a finely tuned English sense of humour and English reference points, which he attributes to his mother. When in his teens, the man Chelsey believes to be his father leaves for another… (another man!) This devastates Chelsey, but does go some way in explaining his own sexual confusions. It was only on his mother’s deathbed that Chelsey, then in his mid-thirties, finally learns the truth. He was in fact born in England and his real biological father was an English comic and magician. Fast-forward to 2002 and to the height of Chelsey’s success in America. He has an ex-wife and two young kids, but is still very much in the closet. He is doing so well that, fearful of alienating his more traditional and perhaps slightly homophobic fans by coming out, he decides to employ an occasional ‘escort’ to act as his new wife whilst secretly dating Zero, his Jewish agent. A chance accident however involving Chelsey, his kids, a lost baseball and an American operated Al Qaeda terrorist cell changes his life forever. Under the guise of a much-publicised suicide - for the good of himself, his family and the country - he is put into maximum security witness protection in the UK and thus swaps potential hell for Leatherhead. What follows is Chelsey’s reluctant attempts to leave behind the luxurious trappings of American closet-gay celebrity to disguise and re-invent himself as something of a British man’s-man. When this proves too much to bear, he decides to risk his own security and go AWOL from those protecting him and head north in search of the real father he never knew he had. This accompanied by the hot pursuit of the FBI, MI5, Al Qaeda and Chelsey’s No.1 obsessive American fan, who believes she has concrete proof he’s still alive…