Factual highlights, Christmas 2013

27 November 2013

Liberty of London
TX: Monday 2 December, Channel 4
Liberty of London is a new three-part series documenting behind the scenes at Liberty, one of London’s oldest department stores, which has been drawing shoppers for over a hundred and thirty years with its eccentric and eclectic designs.

Liberty of London follows the store,  housed in an iconic half-timber building made from old battle ships, as it gears up for Christmas; a crucial shopping season for retailers – and one that is make or break for Liberty.

Each year over five million people come through the doors at Liberty. From the regulars who’ve been coming for decades and know the shop assistants by name to the tourists, casually rubbing shoulders with a-list actors and celebrities all shopping in Liberty’s narrow corridors and intimate rooms.

Serving them is Liberty’s 400 strong staff. Straight talking New Yorker Ed Burstell is the stores’ MD, steering the store away from the brink of financial ruin a decade ago, formidable Maxine Groucutt the head of visual identity who with her team wants to make the store look beautiful, and who work on Christmas for six months of the year. Alongside is the buying team who must source products and make the creative vision become a reality.

Within the historic building are extraordinary everyday stories, the longest-serving member of staff, Shukla, has been selling at Liberty for forty years. Now 70, she has seen fashions change and the stores’ popularity wax and wane. All the while the maintenance men and teams of cleaners keep the old building running.

From the arrival of 40,000 Christmas baubles in the heat of July and culminating in Liberty in full festive swing, this documentary series tells the everyday extraordinary stories of life within one of London’s oldest department stores. With unprecedented access to the store, its staff and its customers, Liberty of London follows the race to get the Christmas shop opened on time, via fashion weeks in London and Paris, VIP customer and celebrity visits as well as the daily rituals at the heart of the store.

The series starts with the arrival of Christmas stock in the middle of a heat-wave and meets some of the store’s most interesting customers, including a wealthy VIP who sees Liberty as his local corner shop.

 

Educating Yorkshire at Christmas
TX: Thursday 19 December, Channel 4
This Christmas Channel 4 goes back to school with the critically-adored series Educating Yorkshire. Cameras are returning to the corridors of Thornhill Community Academy to catch up with some of the best-loved characters from the series. They're a year older and a whole range of things have changed for the students: trouble-makers have turned around their reputations; love is in the air; and new challenges are faced at school and college.

Many of the old Year 11s who couldn't wait to escape are now missing Thornhill more than they would ever have imagined. For Musharaf, who spent his school days crippled by a stammer, the final few months of school and life beyond its walls have brought him a new-found confidence, which continues to grow. While the students' lives are ever changing, Mr Mitchell and his team are still on a mission to make Thornhill a first-choice school while keeping the teenagers' behaviour in check.

 

 

Food Unwrapped Christmas Special
TX: Monday 23 December, Channel 4
Jimmy Doherty, Kate Quilton and Matt Tebbut present the food and science series that travels the world to lift the lid on what's really in the food we eat at Christmas

 

 

Bear’s Wild Weekend with Stephen Fry
TX: Christmas Day, Wednesday 25 December, Channel 4
Adventurer Bear Grylls returns with another intense and exhilarating Wild Weekend, taking Stephen Fry on a once-in-a-lifetime expedition to one of the most spectacular mountain ranges in Europe. In Bear’s Wild Weekend with Stephen Fry, the actor and comedian will be pushed to his limits with a series of incredible challenges set by Bear. Over the course of two days high in the Italian Dolomites, Stephen will be travelling on the skids of a helicopter, climbing down a terrifying 500-foot waterfall sleeping in a First World War trench and abseiling down a towering cliff face.

 

 

Speed with Guy Martin
TX: Sunday 29 December, Channel 4
Motorcycle racer and lorry mechanic Guy Martin loves pushing the boundaries of speed in search of a buzz. He claims that nothing can match the adrenaline rush he gets when racing on public roads around the Isle of Man TT course at 200mph. So now he’s setting out to see if he can find anything that can give him the same kicks.

This four part series follows Guy as he sets out to create four speed based challenges in which he will explore the boundaries of physics and learn about the science of speed. Whether it’s slip-streaming a racing driver to ride a bicycle at over 100mph using pedal power, or seeing if he can ride a motorbike across a lake, Guy will seek to find out what makes things go fast by getting his hands dirty in a range of unique engineering projects. Along the way celebrities well known in the world of speed help him in his challenges.

In the opening episode Guy recruits an unlikely team made up of a truck racer, an Olympic gold medallist Laura Trott, a bicycle builder and a design engineer more used to working on next-generation military aircraft, to attempt, with the aid of slipstreaming, to break the British record for outright speed on a bicycle - an incredible 110mph.