Russell Brand is to retrace beat generation author Jack Kerouac’s footsteps across America for a new BBC show.

The comic will recreate the road trip Kerouac took in his seminal autobiographical novel On The Road, the book that captured the new mood of free thinking among America’s youth in the Fifties, and is written in a stream-of-conscious style.

Now 32-year-old Brand wants to recapture that spirit when he recreates the journey with his Radio 2 co-host Matt Morgan.‘We'll go to places of significance, take long car journeys and, you know, just hang out,’ Brand said.

A film version of On The Road, produced by Francis Ford Coppola, is also in the pipeline, and is set to be released in 2009.