Channel 4 rings in the changes

Channel 4 is ringing the changes in 2008 with a winter season that encompasses a more diverse mix of new and original programmes in the heart of its peak time schedule at 9pm.

The winter season will showcase three campaigning factual seasons, including one designed to raise public awareness about how our food is produced. Other highlights include: Stephen Hawking presenting a major science series; a new extended run for a revitalised Cutting Edge; three bold new contemporary one-off films; an unusual Channel 4 take on costume drama; and a new entertainment vehicle for fast rising comedian, Alan Carr.

The new look to Channel 4’s winter schedule is the result of a new commissioning policy, announced this autumn, which aims to create greater variety in the channel’s output at 9pm. The policy has entailed moving Celebrity Big Brother from its regular January slot on Channel 4 to E4 in 2008, and ending several of the channel’s longer-running returning factual formats.

Kicking off the year in January, Channel 4’s three colossi of the kitchen join forces in a fortnight-long campaigning season, mainly scheduled at 9pm, which asks the British public to think before they eat.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall challenges the supermarkets to rethink their methods in Hugh’s Chicken Run; Jamie Oliver reveals the ruthless machinations of the food-industry in Jamie’s Fowl Dinners; and, in Cook-a-Long-a-Gordon LIVE, Gordon Ramsay goes live to unite the nation in a countrywide cooking experience. The season also extends to three further special one-off programmes and two related editions of flagship current affairs strand, Dispatches.

In 2005, Channel 4 launched The Big Art Project and kicked off a unique, nationwide collaboration between artists and the public to create new public art across the country. The successes and setbacks of this two-year long project are recorded in this new four-part series which features Antony Gormley, Tracey Emin and Anish Kapoor among artists looking at the role art plays in our lives.

Channel 4’s Iraq Season is a week of programmes to mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion, which analyses the legacy of the military intervention and includes special editions of Dispatches and acclaimed foreign affairs series Unreported World. The 9pm centrepiece of the season is Battle for Haditha, a drama by award-winning filmmaker, Nick Broomfield, which deconstructs the anarchy and bloodshed that followed the bombing of a US Marine convoy.

New drama singles this winter also include the darkly comic Poppy Shakespeare, based on Clare Allan’s best-selling novel about life on a psychiatric hospital day ward and starring Naomie Harris (White Teeth) and BAFTA winner Anna Maxwell Martin (Becoming Jane, Bleak House). Fallout, adapted by Roy Williams from his acclaimed stage play, charts the escalation in youth gun and knife crime in the UK and stars Lennie James (Buried, Jericho) as Joe, a policeman returning to the estate he grew up on, to investigate the murder of a black teenager.

Set in 18th-century Covent Garden, City of Vice, also scheduled at 9pm, is a new five-part drama series that brings to life the vice-ridden world of Georgian London. Ian McDiarmid and Iain Glen lead a stellar cast as Henry and John Fielding, the brothers and magistrates of London who are credited with creating the modern police force.

Science also features at 9pm on Channel 4 this winter. In a landmark two-part series, Stephen Hawking: Master of the Universe, the world famous physicist invites viewers to join him on a mind-expanding tour of the cosmos 20 years on from publication of A Brief History of Time. New four-parter, Medicine Men, follows two young doctors, also identical twins, as they visit four traditional tribal cultures to find out what they can teach modern medicine.

Other documentaries at 9pm include a new extended run for Cutting Edge and In the Shadow of the Moon, a Channel 4-funded film recently released cinematically to international acclaim, which tells the stories of the surviving crew members from every Apollo mission in their own words. The Woman Who Stopped Traffic follows trouble shooter Kris Murrin in her endeavours to make us less reliant on travel by car.

Winter sees the launch of a first solo series for award-winning Channel 4 comedian Alan Carr when he hosts Alan Carr’s Celebrity Ding Dong, his new Friday night studio-based show in which famous faces square up to the public. In The Friday Night Christmas and New Year Project, Alan is also reunited with presenting partner Justin Lee Collins for two raucous seasonal spectaculars. A previously announced £3 million boost to the channel’s 2008 comedy and entertainment budget means the channel will show more comedy than ever this year – brand new commissions for later in 2008 include Plus One, and The Kevin Bishop Show, both piloted as part of the channel’s Comedy Showcase this autumn.

Three brand new US comedies make their debut Channel 4 outing this year. In Reaper, premiering on E4, full-time underachiever Sam must come to terms with a devilish deal his parents made before he was born – when they sold his soul to Satan. Later in the year, in Big Bang Theory, a precocious pair of ubergeeks are forced out of the laboratory and into the real world when a free-spirited neighbour enters their lives, while in Back To You, comedy legend Kelsey Grammer plays disgraced broadcaster Chuck Darling, forced back onto the regional airwaves after an embarrassing ejection from the national spotlight.

Over on E4 this winter, celebrities turn the tables in Big Brother Celebrity Hijack when they take over Big Brother’s role. Blockbuster drama series, Skins, which instantly became the must-watch drama for UK teenagers when it launched earlier this year, returns for a second run.