Please wait...
Please wait...

C5 moves into social housing season

Channel 5 in the UK has greenlit a season of factual programming on the country’s social housing issues, led by a doc from ITN Productions about the Grenfell Tower fire.

Guy Davies

The season will begin at the end of this month with Grenfell Tower: Minute by Minute (1×60’), which will look at how a routine fridge freezer fire in a high-rise block of flats in West London quickly turned into an inferno which killed 78 people.

C5 has also acquired Social Housing, Social Cleansing which is produced by filmmaker Paul Sng and Velvet Joy Productions. The feature doc looks at the regeneration and gentrification of Britain’s council estates over the past 30 years and the people who lost homes as a result.

Somewhere Called Home – Housing Yorkshire (3×60’) is an obs doc greenlit by C5’s commissioning editor for factual Guy Davies from Blast Films. The series will follow the staff and tenants behind one of Yorkshire’s biggest and most proactive housing associations.

Another Davies commission is On The Estate with Michael Portillo (working title) from Transparent Television, a feature doc for the channel’s Modern Britain strand in which the former politician charts how social housing transformed the country over the decades.

Commissioning editor Daniel Pearl said: “The awful tragedy at Grenfell Tower was a once in a generation event. It truly shocked the nation and prompted a much-needed debate around the quality and quantity of social housing in this country.”

Davies added: “This season pulls together strong views and strong storytelling to explore how and why social housing has risen to the top of the national agenda. Grenfell was arguably the moment that Britain truly woke up to the issue, and this cluster of programmes identify the arguments and explore both the challenges faced by society and the decisions our leaders need to consider.”

Please wait...