Press site weekly round-up, 22nd May 2012

22 May 2012

While we at Channel 4 might complain when the weather's atrocious, we secretly love it when it's miserable. Sure, we try and curry favour by pretending to pine for summer, but for us, the ideal would be an eternal winter of wind and rain, with 60 million people cooped up on their sofas, under blankets, eating Ritz biscuits straight from the box and watching Come Dine with Me.

So it's something of an unpleasant shock to discover that summer seems to have broken over the British Isles this week. To make matters worse, we appear not to have won a single award over the last seven days. This is hugely embarrassing, even taking into account the fact that there weren't any awards going on for us to win. I have therefore taken the extraordinary decision to award myself a prestigious Golden Loaf award for Best Consumption of a Sandwich, for the chicken, bacon, lettuce and mayo on ciabatta that I had on March 17th this year. I'd like to thank my family, my friends, the pig and the chicken who laid down their lives to provide me with sustenance, the baker who... [oh shut up - Ed]

 

News
There's been plenty of other good news this week emanating from Channel 4. We signed up everyone's favourite Danish leprechaun, Sandi Toksvig, to present daytime quiz show 1001 Things You Should Know. Meanwhile, Film4 announced a fabby new competition encouraging aspiring film makers to recreate great moments from Film4's 30-year history.

We also announced that the iTunes Festival was coming back to Channel 4, featuring live performances from Jack White, One Direction and many more. And those clever current affairs types produced a release for this week's Dispatches, although as the programme has now gone out, you probably don't need to know about that.

 

New commissions:
Just one this week. And, as it's a recommission of a late night series of short arts films, you might not be all that, you know, er, thrilled about it. But the first run of Random Acts was genuinely extraordinary, featuring work by Ghostpoet; Rankin, Irvine Welsh, Pepstar, The Chapman Brothers and Ai Wei-Wei. The second run is scheduled to feature new work by Andy Warhol, Monet, Van Gogh and Dali. (This might be a lie).

 

Press packs:
We stuck up a press pack for a new series, The House the 50s Built, starting in week 23. The pack includes all sorts of wonderful information, and an interview with quite the most rock'n'roll engineer you could wish to meet.

 

Programme information:
As always, there's some of that.

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Right. Bye then.