Good Food Takes Five New Cooking Titles

LONDON: UKTV’s recently rebranded Good Food channel has acquired a string of new content featuring Australian culinary talent, totaling 28 hours.

Acquired from FremantleMedia Enterprises, Bill’s Holiday features chef, restaurateur and food writer Bill Granger as he showcases more than 40 of his trademark fresh and seasonal dishes. Granger also leads a second season of Bill’s Food, another FremantleMedia Enterprises title.

Good Food has further acquired the first two seasons of 4 Ingredients from FremantleMedia Enterprises. Featuring entrepreneurial housewives Kim McCosker and Rachael Bermingham, both seasons are based on the self-published, best-selling 4 Ingredients recipe books, which offer inspiration and advice to those short on time.

A third season of Food Safari, starring award-winning TV presenter and author Maeve O’Meara, comes from SBS Australia. The series follows Maeve as she takes viewers on a culinary adventure across Australia. The competitive series Good Chef, Bad Chef from Short Attention also heads to Good Food. Nutritionist Janella Percell and chef Gary Mehigan go head to head to create recipes true to their own individual beliefs to illustrate the conflict between healthy and indulgent.

All five series will premiere on Good Food throughout the third and fourth quarter of 2009.

Catherine Mackin, UKTV’s director of program acquisitions, said, “We are thrilled to have secured these fantastic new series from Australia for Good Food, many of them on an exclusive basis. It’s really exciting to have discovered a fresh content stream featuring stellar talent that complements our own home grown commissions such as Market Kitchen and Rachel Allen: Bake! alongside popular BBC titles such as MasterChef and The Great British Menu.”

Good Food’s channel head, Richard Kingsbury, added, "Australia, like the U.K., is enjoying a surge of interest in food and as a result has become a great source of new shows and new talent for Good Food. Bill Granger’s sunny personality and beautiful food has always been popular with viewers of Market Kitchen so we were thrilled to be able to premiere his new series. The 4 Ingredients’ girls are such a blast and I’m sure that their no-nonsense style of cooking will have real resonance with time-pressured home cooks.”