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Channel 4 has disclosed details of its Christmas programming schedule. Highlights include celebrity cook Jamie Oliver revealing his Christmas foodie tips, a double portion of festive themed Great British Bake Off, and Kirstie being Crafty.
There will be special episodes of ‘Jamie’s Best Christmas Ever’ and ‘Jamie & Jimmy’s Friday Night Feast’.
In ‘The Great Christmas Bake Off’’, ‘The Great British Bake Off’ team will be back for their traditional Christmas get-together. Joining them for the celebrations will be past contestants Tom and Yan from 2017 and Briony and Terry from 2018, competing in festive themed challenges for the title of Christmas Star Baker. They will round off Christmas with rock band Status Quo, performing their smash hit ‘Rockin All Over The World’.
In ‘The Great Festive Bake Off’’, the team will welcome brand new bakers in the form of the cast of sitcom ‘Derry Girls’. Baking some New Year inspired bakes, and competing for the coveted Star Baker title, will be Saoirse-Monica Jackson, Nicola Coughlan, Jamie-Lee O’Donnell, Dylan Llewellyn and Siobhan McSweeney. Together they will see in the New Year with the London Community Gospel Choir.
Meanwhile, over the past decade, TV presenter – and keen crafter – Kirstie Allsopp has featured over 500 festive makes in ‘Kirstie’s Handmade Christmas’. In the show’s tenth year she has over 120, including many even she’s never seen before, and some fresh takes on old favourites. Kirstie has collated a cornucopia of crafts into one 60-minute peak episode. Plus, across three festive weeks on daytime, a host of contestants will compete to be crowned winner of one of 15 craft competitions. She will also take a sneak peek into the workshops of some of the nation’s most creative makers and crafters.
‘Buy It Now for Christmas’, hosted by Rylan Clark-Neal, will see the show supersized and in a new peak-time slot for Christmas. In this four-part series, people from across the UK who have invented products are invited to the Buy It Now studio to pitch to an audience of real shoppers and, in the ultimate focus group, get live feedback on their products and the chance to get a big order from a well-known retailer: Amazon Launchpad, Lakeland and JML. The inventors all have one goal – to get their products onto high street shelves or with huge online retailers in time for Christmas. The products featured that could all make potential Christmas presents include kitchenware, an invention for the perfect night’s sleep and eco-friendly toys.
In a one-off 60-minute special ‘Inside the Toy Factory at Christmas’ will lift the lid on three toy, crafts and games manufacturers and go behind the scenes of one of the world’s most famous toy stores. Visiting Crayola in Pennsylvania, the home of Steiff teddy bears in Germany, and the world of Top Trumps in the UK, the film will also allow viewers to gain access to FAO Schwarz, New York’s biggest and most famous toy store; before a reveal of its first UK store: a new addition to Selfridges’ flagship branch on London’s Oxford Street. At each location, viewers will meet the creatives behind these globally-renowned products, take a look at the upcoming innovations that these brands hope will keep them ahead of their rivals, and meet the staff working on the factory floors in which these products are created.
‘Food Unwrapped: Christmas Survival Guide‘ is a 60-minute show in which presenter Jimmy Doherty will investigate whether we should be splashing out on expensive champagne (or could we try a shortcut with some white wine and a SodaStream) and will discover the lengths that chocolate companies go to when putting together their sharing tubs (it turns out the Purple One may be the nation’s favourite but even the coffee cream is in there for a reason). Fellow presenter Kate Quilton will be in the Alps, finding out if an after-dinner port or brandy really can help settle the stomach after a heavy Christmas dinner. And Helen Lawal will explore the differences between the many types of turkeys in the supermarket, and puts two different birds to the test to see which one we should be buying. New presenter Briony Williams will explore whether we can save time and get away with putting vegetables straight into the oven without peeling them.
Kirstie Allsopp, presenter of ‘Kirstie’s Handmade Christmas’
