Programmes 2010

In a series which celebrates Britain’s love affair with baking, the search is on for the country's top home baker. Ten passionate bakers travel the country and each week undertake three challenges in a different discipline, after which the least successful leave the bake-off.

Our lives are over-run with experts handing out advice on everything from food to fashion.
But what happens when you take two experts from the same field, who fundamentally disagree with each other's practices, and challenge them to test their theories against each other?

Meet Ben, 12, Mollie, 11, Andrew, 17, Jozsef, 11, Alexander, 16, Jonathan, 12, Claire, 19, Lea, 13 and Alex, 20. These nine young people are all autistic. With the support of their families and two professional theatre directors who have never properly encountered autistic individuals before, they will attempt the apparently impossible feat of producing a stage production at the Hammersmith Lyric theatre.

Almost 2 and a half million people are unemployed in Britain today. Four famous volunteers are going to four unemployment black spots across the country to discover what it's like to be jobless. Larry Lamb, Meg Matthews, Emma Parker Bowles and Diarmuid Gavin grapple with the reality of living on £10 a day and looking for a job when there aren’t any.

Five WAGs leave their pampered lives behind to experience a side to South Africa their partners, competing in the World Cup, will never see. They will live and work in the country’s most deprived neighbourhoods with orphans, the homeless, prostitutes and women and children with Aids, they’ll witness the reality of life for many young people in a country with the second highest murder rate in the world and where 11 per cent of the population is HIV positive.

Four MPs spend eight days and nights on four of the toughest council estates in the country. What happens when those who have the power to make a difference finally confront the harsh reality of the Britain they’ve helped create?

What do you do if you really want a girl but just keep on giving brith to boys? Keep trying, like the Bowens have, for 21 years? Forty-three year old Wendy Bowen has eight boys but is still desperate for a daughter. Her biological clock ticking has turned into an obsession.

Around one in three British young people will lose their virginity before their sixteenth birthday. These programmes offer a frank and uncensored young person's view of one of Britain's most controversial dilemmas, as they and their families negotiate the minefield that is underage sex.