C4i Completes Deals for Programming in Asian Territories

LONDON, July 16: Digital
Rights Group-owned C4i has signed several deals with broadcasters in Asian
territories for more than 120 hours of programming across several genres.

Deals include Fox
International Channels’ FX in Southeast Asia acquiring seasons one through five
of the award-winning situational comedy Peep Show. From Objective
Productions, Peep Show, which
was recently named as the best situation comedy at the 2008 BAFTA Television
Awards, follows roommates Jeremy (Robert Webb) and Mark (David Mitchell) as
they cope with life.

AETN All Asia Networks
bought a package of real-life stories for its Crime & Investigation
Network, including Gecko Productions’ The Girl in a Box, which chronicles an abduction, and Blast! Films’ The
Fake Trade, which reveals in two
episodes how counterfeiting has become increasingly more common.

EBS in South Korea and Public TV Service Foundation (PTS) in Taiwan have
acquired Undercover in Tibet, an hour-long documentary from True Vision
that sees a Tibetan exile return home to uncover what life is like under
Chinese rule. PTS also landed another investigation from True Vision for
Channel 4 and HBO called China’s Stolen Children, where the team behind the
Emmy Award-winning The Dying Rooms documents the effects of
China’s one child policy.

True Vision also acquired more than 60 hours of programming for its
branded channels in Thailand. The deal includes the popular archaeology show Time
Team from Videotext Limited; How Young Can I Get from Renegade
Pictures, which follows Nicky Taylor as she examines how far she will go to
rediscover her youth; Newlywed, Nearly Dead?, a 13-episode
series from Proper Television encouraging newlyweds to reveal each other’s
annoying habits; and Keo Films’ Medicine Men Go Wild, four episodes
featuring the Von Tulleken twins as they try to prove whether Western medicine
is better than traditional practices.

The Asian Food Channel has bought several titles, including two shows
from Keo Films that highlight Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s commitment to
seasonal, ethically produced food. The three episodes of Hugh’s Chicken Run follow the
launch of Fearnley-Whittingstall’s free-range campaign, while River Cottage
Treatment, also three-episodes long, features him persuading a group of junk-food
addicts to start cooking healthy meals.

Astro in Malaysia acquired two feature-length documentaries from Pioneer
Productions—The Living Body and Animals in the Womb—in
addition to the International Emmy Award-winning Brat Camp from Twenty
Twenty Television, which presents zero tolerance for youth’s bad behavior.

Nicola Richards, the program sales executive who brokered the deals,
said: “This is a substantial number of acquisitions, for both new and catalogue
C4i titles and with new and existing clients. The volume of hours acquired and
the variety of titles is a fantastic indication of the strong ongoing
international appeal of our programming.”

—By Jackie Stewart