August Highlights - Updated

29 June 2011

August means different things to different people. To some, it is a chance to relax by shoehorning their way onto a beach, turning a livid shade of crimson and blistering. To others it marks an opportunity to reflect upon chronic, pustular skin conditions (it is, of course, national psoriasis awareness month). To our colonial brethren in the US, it is national goats' cheese month. But rather than spend a month eating a food that tastes like old people's feet, we at Channel 4 would recommend you take the opportunity to watch some of the finest television the Gods of Broadcasting ever saw fit to bestow upon you. Here, then, are the August highlights.

 

Street Summer
Channel 4's Street Summer season will air in August, and will celebrate street art, street dance, rap/spoken word, hip hop and street sport. It will air on Channel 4 with a strong online presence including an ambitious multiplatform performance commission, and will be complemented by programming on T4, More4 and Film4.

Highlights include Street Dance Wars (w/t), a three part documentary series following the annual Street Dance XXL UK Championships. Concrete Circus (w/t) is a 90-minute documentary bringing together the world's hottest names in urban sports, plus their extraordinarily talented, viral filmmakers, and Mike Christie - the director of Jump London.

Idris Elba aka 'DJ Driis' and Jacques Peretti will collaborate on How Hip Hop Changed the World, a two-hour special which will reveal the defining moments of a music and culture that has spanned the last 35 years. There will also be a one-hour documentary examining the evolution of the British rap scene, while another hour-long documentary will look at street art and graffiti, and the conflicts within this artistic arena. Channel 4 will also screen the television premiere of Banksy's Oscar nominated documentary, Exit Through The Gift Shop, as part of the season. Short dance film One Man Walking will be a powerful and stylish collision of Krump, Hip Hop, BB boy and Parkour, set in the night time streets of London.

 

IAAF World Athletics Championships
Channel 4 be exclusively showing all the action, sweat and glory live from the 2011 IAAF World Athletics Championship in Daegu, Korea, in August. Coverage entails almost 60 hours of action of the tournament, including all sessions and a daily highlights programme in prime time. Whether it's Usain 'Lightning' Bolt speeding down the track or triple jumper Phillips Idowu putting a spring in his step, Channel 4 will broadcast the event live and exclusive in a unique and innovative way. From crowd-sourced music accompanying the athletes to fresh and exciting talent hosting from the track and studio, Channel 4 is going to celebrate world-class athletics like never before.

 

Seven Dwarves (w/t)
This summer, Channel 4's brand new observational documentary series follows the lives of seven dwarf actors as they live together and perform in a production of Snow White in Woking. During the Christmas pantomime season all across Britain, people of restricted height - some of whom are employed in ordinary jobs from February to November - take on paying roles in the theatre.  This series gives viewers a rounded insight into the personal and professional lives of the dwarves cast together for Woking's New Victoria Theatre pantomime, and aims to cut across some of the preconceptions that small people often encounter. Seven Dwarves (w/t) films with this intelligent, honest and outgoing group - from celebrating Christmas Day and New Year's Eve to winding down after performances, out with friends and family, and during their regular lives out of panto season. The dwarves also share what life is like as a small person in interviews - all with an infectious sense of humour.

 

Nurses (w/t)
Called ‘the beating heart of our treasured NHS' by Prime Minister David Cameron, nurses are the human face of the health service.  But as their roles are transformed, and public sector cuts begin to bite, nurses are under more pressure than ever. This new five-part series reveals what nurses really think about doing a jobs that most people wouldn't wish on their worst enemies.  Dealing with dirt, death and bad behaviour, nurses also have to juggle long hours with their family lives. Revelatory, warm and often very funny, the series is a human and engaging look at the reality of life on the frontline of the NHS.

 

The Secret of Buildings
We spend 85% of our lives inside but rarely, if ever, consider what impact the design and architecture of these spaces has on us.  Yet the design of our living space can connect and silently shape our identity, self-esteem, relationships, chances at school - even our weight and immune system. Architecture critic Tom Dyckhoff presents a three-part series looking at how architecture affects us at home, work and play, and discovers the secret ways that buildings profoundly affect our behaviour, feelings and identity. Dyckhoff embarks on a mischievous journey inside some of the world's most beautiful architecture and into the buildings in which we live and work.  Abandoning his usual approach of looking at empty buildings, this series sees Dyckhoff immerse himself in the lives of the people who use them everyday. 

 

Shameless
The eighth series of Paul Abbott's multi award-winning drama series Shameless continues this August. As ever, life on the Chatsworth runs anything but smoothly. Starting with a death in the Maguire family, the series sees the return of an old face which rocks Shane and Kelly's marriage, sees Patty become an unlikely campaigner for disabled rights, and a whole load of skeletons come tumbling out of the Powells families' closet. There's also the landmark 100th episode - written by series creator Paul Abbott - which finds Frank in hot water with the police and his fellow residents. All building to the series finale and a big fat Chatsworth wedding for Mimi. Welcome back to the inimitable world of Shameless.

 

Hugh's Fish Fight Update
The BAFTA award winning team behind Hugh's Fish Fight is just finishing filming a follow up episode which will look at how the Fish Fight campaign changed the nation's fish eating habits, and looks set to change European Fishing Policy.  Filmed in Brussels, Selfridges, North Shields and the Houses of Commons, the new Fish Fight episode will TX on Channel 4 in the early Summer. The campaign is now spreading into Europe, and the website www.fishfight.net has now been translated into 11 different European Languages.

 

Stephen Fry's 100 Greatest Gadgets
A three hour special with Stephen Fry choosing and presenting his favourite all-time gadgets. Stephen Fry's 100 Greatest Gadgets follows on from the successful 100 Greatest Toys with Jonathan Ross, which transmitted late last year, attracting an audience of 2.9m/10.3% share. Stephen will talk through and demonstrate his personal favourite choices of devices that have revolutionised our individual and collective lives from hi-tech to historical, from the domestic to the downright dumb - with the rundown ranging from objects as diverse as Curling Tongs to the Corkscrew, the Typewriter to the Trouser Press and the Iron to the ipod.  The show promises an entertaining mix of cutting edge technology, misty-eyed nostalgia and the fascinating insights for which Stephen is renowned.

 

My Funniest Year
A three-part comedy series, My Funniest Year, will feature comedy giants Al Murray The Pub Landlord, Chris Addison and Jack Whitehall.   Performed live in front of a packed Hackney Empire, each show is a combination of stand-up, live guests, bizarre clips and comedy VT's reliving that year's unforgettable events, both public and private. Al Murray reprises his character of The Pub Landlord to take us back to 1997, the year when his wife took the Spice Girls' concept of Girl Power to heart and ran off with a Frenchman. Chris Addison revisits 2001, the year of his 30th Birthday and the launch of TV show Popstars, which delivered us the cringe-worthy Darius Danesh, and Jack Whitehall opts for 2005, the year that fox hunting was banned and he lost his virginity in pub toilet.

 

Celebrity Coach Trip
Celebrity Coach Trip returns this August as ten more famous faces buckle up for a two-week romp around the Mediterranean. Starting on the French Riviera, before heading to the likes of Tuscany, Florence and finally Rome, legendary tour guide Brendan Sheerin will be leading the famous rabble, which includes Michael Barrymore, Brian Belo, Alex Best and Emma B, along this trip of a lifetime. There will be thrills, spills, tears and laughter as the celebrities take on terrifying white water rafting, zip wires and er... mime artistry. Expect jaw-dropping tantrums, backstabbing and arguments aplenty as fragile egos get a knocking at the daily votes, before one celebrity pair are voted winners at the end of the series.

 

Made in Chelsea
C4 is giving viewers a second chance to catch Made In Chelsea (which premiered on E4) -  the hot new reality drama that follows the lives and loves of a group of globetrotting twenty-somethings who live in an affluent pocket of South West London and party on the most elite social circuit in the world. They're immaculately dressed, fiercely ambitious and party hard - but beyond the posh accents, fast cars and glamorous holidays, life isn't all champagne and canapés. Viewers will see the real-life rivalries and relationships that set tongues wagging and phones beeping behind closed doors in some of London's most exclusive postcodes. Every love-in, fall out and bitch fest will be captured on camera and played out post watershed over eight one-hour episodes.

 

True Blood
Mixing romance, suspense, mystery and humour, True Blood tells the ongoing tale of Sookie (Anna Paquin), a waitress with telepathic gifts - and an irresistible attraction to now-174-year-old vampire Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) who went missing at the end of Season 2. Season 3 picks up with Sookie desperately trying to locate her fiancé and ending up in a netherworld of human and undead interlopers, among them the Vampire King of Mississippi, Russell Edgington (Denis O'Hare) and his followers, a pack of vicious werewolves who feed on vampire blood. Love really does suck.