Contestable Pot

After a successful process which led us to greenlight The Honesty Box, we are re-opening the brief for the Contestable Pot as we search for more audacious, audience-driving, genre-bending channel-defining formats.

This is an opportunity to pitch your biggest and most brilliant ideas. The intention is for these ideas to be genuinely audacious, innovative, and feel like you would see it on Channel 4. It’s also important be big enough to pass the ‘poster test’ – are they a big enough proposition to imagine on posters across the country or splashed across the homepage on streaming? And do they have a broad enough appeal that we can be confident that viewers will come (across streaming and linear)?

It is likely that these ideas will be cross-genre, as that’s often the space where genuinely fresh approaches are realised. Certainly, the ideas need to be creatively brilliant, broad and returnable, hugely ambitious in terms of scale, and to have the potential to grow to a large order. We’d like them to have some purpose – but to wear that with a lightness of touch. They could be feel-good or challenging. They could have talent at their heart, or no talent at all. They could be live or pre-recorded. What matters is that they have the potential to be talked about, enjoyed and to become a regular in our schedules.

Ideas should be taken to any Commissioning Editor/Head of Department in the first instance. If your idea is cross-genre, feel free to involve two genres from the outset. We want whatever we commission to be a serious streaming driver, and we imagine the linear slot is (probably) mid-week 9pm. We are flexible on number of episodes but would suggest aiming for between four and six for a first series.

Where to send your ideas

Ideas should be sent to a commissioner in any of our unscripted genres, who will work with their respective Head of Department on editorial development. The process will be overseen by Channel Executive, Art Sejdiu (ASejdiu@Channel4.co.uk).

Timeline

• 31st December 2024: Closing date for initial submissions.
• January 2025: Genre HODs shortlist ideas they like and further develop them (this development will be specific to the idea pitched – some may need proof of concepts/tasters, whilst others may just need more fleshed out treatments for example). As these are big ideas which may need substantial work and interrogation, we are allowing for a long development period.
• May 2025: Final pitches are submitted, and a cross-genre commissioning round will take place with Ian Katz (Chief Content Officer) and Kiran Nataraja (Director of Streaming and Content Strategy).
• 2026: Planned TX.

All ideas for the Contestable Pot will be funded by the GroupM Motion Entertainment.