Channel 5 has announced Wild, a standalone Play for Today film set in the Scottish Highlands, with Daniel Mays leading a cast that turns a routine camping trip into a survival ordeal. The project keeps the strand moving after last year’s first batch of films, and it arrives with a sharper edge than a standard relationship drama.
Lou, Dev and Alistair
Three old friends — Lou, Dev and Alistair — head out on their annual camping trip, with the early stretch built around banter, nostalgic stories and amateur vlogging. Mays plays Lou, Amit Shah plays Dev and Joel Fry plays Alistair, giving Channel 5 a lead trio that can carry the shift from easy familiarity to pressure-cooker survival.
The plot turns when the three men get lost in the Highlands. Long-held secrets surface, food rations run low and tensions rise, which gives the film a tighter dramatic engine than the usual open-country survival setup.
Paul Testar on the new line-up
Paul Testar, commissioning editor for 5, said the response to the first Play for Today films last year was “hugely encouraging” and that the new line-up “builds brilliantly on that success.” He also said, “We’ve brought together an incredible cast - from some of the UK’s most respected screen talent to exciting new voices, reflecting both the ambition and the diversity of the strand. I couldn’t be more excited to see these stories brought to life.”
That framing matters because Wild is not arriving as a one-off experiment. It sits alongside recent Play for Today titles Big Winners and Never Too Late, so Channel 5 is clearly treating the strand as a recurring home for compact dramas rather than a single seasonal event.
Daniel Mays’ Channel 5 run
Mays brings a familiar TV credit list into the project: Sergeant Danny Waldron in the third series of Line of Duty, Marcus Ward in White Lines and Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay in Des. He is also due in Believe Me, which premieres on ITV1 and ITVX on Sunday 10th May, while Channel 5 has said Wild will air later this year.
Channel 5 has not set a release date for Wild, but the combination of a three-man cast, a stripped-back setup and a survival plot suggests the film is being positioned as a contained drama with room for character friction rather than spectacle. For viewers, the practical takeaway is simple: the film is on the way, the cast is set, and the broadcaster is still building out Play for Today as a destination for standalone stories.
