Catherine Tate says Netflix cancelled her comedy show without telling her

Catherine Tate has said Netflix cancelled her series Hard Cell, a mockumentary about the fictional inmates and staff at HMP Woldsley, without telling her.

Tate played multiple characters in the six-episode show, which was slammed by critics and had a dismal 20 percent rating on review site Rotten Tomatoes.

Set in a fictionalised female prison, the show was created, co-written and co-directed by Tate and debuted in April 2022, but it failed to set the streaming giant alight and was canned after just six episodes.

Speaking on the BBC Two Breakfast show this week, Tate, 52, said: “They had a change of staff and, as happens when someone who has commissioned the show and then leaves, often they want to start afresh.

“I kind of understand, but it would’ve been nice for them to have told me.”

The show had received many unfavourable reviews, including from the Standard: “Tate’s confused comedy about prison life is criminally bad.”

Tate’s latest offering, Queen Of Oz, which landed on BBC One last month, has also been slammed by both critics and viewers.

Many fans have taken to social media to label the series “painfully unfunny” and a “bad joke”, while a critic at The Guardian even described it as "monstrous".

The official series synopsis reads: “Princess Georgiana (Georgie) [played by Tate] is the ‘spare to the British throne’ but her party girl lifestyle and constant public scandals threaten the monarchy’s future.”

Tate is still best known for playing the comedy character Lauren Cooper, a teenager who represented the UK’s infamous “chav” fixation in 2004 to 2007’s The Catherine Tate Show. Lauren repeatedly saying, “Am I bovvered?” became her catchphrase.

The writer and actress told the BBC’s Headliners podcast last year that she believes that comedians are being too easily “cancelled” and people needed to be able to use common sense about what is serious and when people are “just having a laugh”.

“I think you can’t help but second guess yourself: we are in a climate where it’s like touch paper at the moment,” she said.

“Things can be, and often are, willfully misconstrued. I don’t think there should be a war on jokes, I don’t think there should be a war on comedy – I don’t think there should be a war on culture.

“But most people know the guidelines between common sense and the hypersensitivity that can surround a lot of debate at the moment.

“It’s everyone’s turn at some point to have the mickey taken out of them, and that’s okay.”