Channel 4 Includes Big Brother 2 In Spring/Summer Line-Up
Channel 4 has revealed its schedule line-up for the Spring and Summer. Last summer’s success story, Big Brother, will be hard to match, and as expected the series is returning with a new set of housemates ready to bare all in the quest for fame and fortune. Among other programmes set to reappear during the season are the much-praised Trigger Happy TV, She’s Gotta Have It, BAFTA-nominated Grand Designs and the return of the cook whose media profile shows no sign of shrinkage, Nigella Lawson, in Nigella Bites II.
From May through to August, one of the channel’s newer acquisitions, the Ashes series cricket coverage will be shown live and as peak time highlights. Channel 4 has won praise from the critics since it took over the sport’s coverage, and is likely to benefit from the England team’s recent good form.
With a solid line in re-commissioned successful series, new products appear a little thin on the ground in the new schedule. Banzai, the spoof Japanese gameshow with interactive gambling is coming across from Channel 4’s digital entertainment channel E4, along with the latest series of Friends, while new comedy is promised by Armando Iannucci (of The Day Today and The Friday Night Armistice) and Los Dos Bros, starring Smack The Pony’s Darren Boyd and Cavan Clerkin.
Broadsheet fodder comes in the form of the first of a series of Beckett productions on film, Waiting for Godot. The strand will include the late Sir John Gielgud in his last role. A series of documentaries will take on the sticky issue of drugs and drugs laws, while another looks at the careers and lives of footballing names Brian Clough, the Charlton brothers and Kevin Keegan.
Channel 4’s top rating programmes during August 2000 included US imports Friends, Frasier and Ally McBeal, Eurotrash and Secrets of the Dead…all squeezing in alongside the growing success of Big Brother.
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