The latest subversive offering from Chris Morris - a new sitcom

It will not be about fooling celebrities into condemning bogus drugs or wickedly satirising overblown television news. This time, the subversive comedy genius and Brass Eye creator Chris Morris has turned his attention to that most ordinary of laughter vehicles: the sitcom.

Being Morris - celebrated by some as the greatest satirist of his generation but condemned by the Daily Mail as "sickening and sordid" - it is hardly likely to be a normal television sitcom. Not from the man who shouted "Christ's fat cock" at Cliff Richard, and last year won a Bafta for a film featuring a talking dog.

As with all of Morris's work, the eagerly awaited six-part series - reported to have the working title Box of Slice and scheduled to appear on Channel 4 next January - has been shrouded in secrecy, with the cast and crew warned not to speak about the project.

"Chris just likes to let the work speak for itself,'' said a spokeswoman for Talkback, the production company. "We can't say any more than he's working on a new series," she added, referring all further queries to Channel 4.

Inevitably, details have leaked. Kevin Lygo, Channel 4's director of programmes, said earlier this week that he had seen two episodes. "It's more traditional than the stuff he has done in the past. It's not exactly a sitcom, but people do sit down in it from time to time,'' he was quoted as saying. But beyond that the channel will not elaborate, and a spokesman said: "Everything is speculation. Even the title and transmission date.''

Nevertheless, the comedy world is rife with rumour and, well, speculation. According to some reports and, apparently official casting descriptions which have appeared on comedy websites, the central character is called Nathan Barley and the programme is set in and around the offices of a fashion and design magazine called Sugar Rape, based in achingly hip Hoxton and Shoreditch in east London. This world is peopled by a group of easily recognisable media types and graphic designers.

Other characters are said to include a sensible receptionist (clearly resembling the Lucy Davis character from The Office), an upper-class girl with a cocaine habit, and a group called the Necks, who perform "electro-techno-dance-clash-rock-shouting songs about living on council estates". The series was shot on location in the early summer.

One contributor to a Chris Morris appreciation website said that it sounded like an "updated Absolutely Fabulous for the Noughties", although Morris's previous work suggests that such a conventional end result is unlikely.

The Barley character, a twentysomething gadget and pornography-obsessed media type, forever working on unspecified "projects", first appeared on the website TVGoHome, which satirises television listings and is the work of Charlie Brooker, a television critic. Brooker is said to have been co-writer on the series.

The question being asked by observers is what can Morris bring to a genre which has been reinvigorated by such critically acclaimed series as Ricky Gervais's The Office and Channel 4's recent Green Wing? Steve Bennett, of the comedy website Chortle.co.uk, said yesterday: "Hopefully, he will be able to move the sitcom into another direction. Sitcoms do well if they have some angle or attitude which don't come out of the book of how to write comedy. I am sure that he will be reinventing it in his own way.''

Morris's spoof Brass Eye documentary on paedophilia in 2001 produced a record number of complaints to the Independent Television Commission.