Kumars head for the US in £6m TV deal

The BBC comedy, The Kumars at No 42, has been sold to the United States, where the Anglo-Asian characters will be replaced by Mexicans.

The television network NBC has paid £6m to copy the formula and title of the Bafta-nominated spoof chat show devised by its host, the actor Sanjeev Bhaskar.

Even the setting for the show has been changed: instead of a mocked-up terrace home in Wembley, north London, guests will be invited to a Los Angeles warehouse.

Jimmy Mulville, the joint managing director of the UK production company Hat Trick, which is to co-produce the show for NBC, said: "We needed to identify the most successful immigrant population in the States. African-Americans are already well assimilated and we needed a socially mobile family. There are 25 million Hispanics in the States so we settled on Mexican-Americans."

Scenes will be filmed in Spanish and Hat Trick, which makes the original BBC2 version of the show, hopes to sell the series to Hispanic stations. There are also plans to sell the series to Germany and replace the Kumars with a Turkish family because of the large number of Turkish immigrants to Germany.