Friday Night Dinner is returning to Channel 4 for a fifth series, which will start shooting early next year.

The critically-acclaimed sitcom has only been off the air since last August, so this isn’t any sort of shock announcement, but it’s a welcome one anyway. Stars Tamsin Greig, Paul Ritter, Simon Bird, Tom Rosenthal and Mark Heap will all return.

Robert Popper, series writer and producer, joked: “I’m thrilled to be making a fifth series, and to be taking the show in a completely new, and radical direction. Friday Night Dinner five will be shot entirely in black and white, with the family now living and working on a barge in the North Sea. In addition, all actors will have their voices pitch-shited three octaves higher, with the exception of Mark Wahlberg, whose voice remains the same.”

In the new episodes, the family get a devisive hot tub, Dad becomes obsessed with his ventriloquist dummy and Jim goes on the date from hell. Business as usual in the Goodman house, then.

“I’m looking forward to six more weeks of eating squirrel, ingesting so much salt that I develop chronically high blood pressure, and humouring an oddball who seems to be pathologically afraid of his own dog,” said Bird. “I can’t wait to reunite with my old friends Tamsin Greig, Paul Ritter and Mark Heap. And Tom Rosenthal will be on set also.”

Rosenthall added: “During contract negotiations Friday Night Dinner writer Robert Popper pitched me an hilarious storyline of Jonny Goodman going travelling to North Korea and being run over by a tank so I asked for less money and now I’m here launching series five. I can promise you it was not the PR people who told me to say that it will be Fridayer and Nighter and Dinnerer than ever.”