Ellie & Natasia creators refit BBC sketch show after 3-year gap

Ellie White and Natasia Demetriou are returning Ellie & Natasia for a second BBC series in 2026 after a three-year gap, according to a Guardian interview published Oct. 18.

The shift is personal as well as professional: both performers now have two children each, compared with none when they first built their mother characters in a 2019 pilot.

Those recurring characters, previously used in lifestyle-vlog spoofs and the 2022 first series, return as car-based food influencers reviewing supermarket white bread. The change moves the joke from domestic performance into the language of everyday social-media content.

White told the Guardian that parenthood had changed her response to the women they once exaggerated. “I now feel quite a lot of empathy for these women,” she said. “Well, I always felt empathy – I do with all our characters – but I especially am now like: it is actually quite hard.”

Demetriou said the domestic fixation they once sent up has become more familiar. She described the pleasure of finding her preferred cleaning product discounted in Waitrose or Tesco: “Get three just in case – put them in the cupboard.”

The second series was shaped by timing as much as taste. White and Demetriou told the Guardian they found out they were pregnant again in September, shortly after writing began, creating pressure to finish scripts and filming before childbirth. White later went into labour during the edit.

The pregnancies appear inside some sketches and are hidden in others. The returning Internet Nails strand now includes pregnancy treatments, while other scenes use clothing or furniture to keep the performers’ pregnancies from taking over the premise.

White said the pair did not want the new run defined by that production circumstance. “We didn’t want it to be ‘the pregnant show’,” she said. Demetriou added: “We just wanted it to not be a distraction.”

The Guardian interview also places the series within the longer development of the duo’s act. White, 37, and Demetriou, 42, met through Jamie Demetriou, Natasia’s brother, after he and White performed in a comedy troupe at Bristol university.

Their early stage work fed into characters including the Sexy American Girls and the Internet Nails duo, whose pursuit of glamour later echoed parts of Stath Lets Flats, the Channel 4 comedy created by Jamie Demetriou.

For the BBC series, the pair have moved away from some direct music parody. Demetriou said they could not find a strong idea this time, while White said the loss of shared national reference points had made the form harder, describing herself as culturally “trapped in 2011.”

Instead, the new material leans further into social-media formats including “day in the life” videos, visual podcasts and livestream culture. White said the sketches aim to resemble ordinary online clips closely enough that viewers might wonder whether they are real.

That approach has limits. Demetriou said the size of the internet can make parody feel pre-empted by reality, and White said they dropped an idea about southern fashion content creators after finding a real-life version online.

The interview also revisits the pair’s cameo on Last One Laughing UK, where they appeared as intimacy coordinators and failed to make the remaining contestants laugh. “I’m not kidding when I say it was the most nervous I’ve ever been in my entire life,” White said. “It was sort of like your worst nightmare.”