BBC3 to show teens the rod
- Published: 18 August 2008 14:00
- Author: Katherine Rushton
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- Last Updated: 18 August 2008 14:24
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Teenagers will get a taste of the strict upbringings typical of Ghanaian, Indian and Jamaican parents in a new factual series at the heart of BBC3's autumn season.
Commissioned from Twenty Twenty by BBC in-house knowledge executive Harry Lansdown, The World's Strictest Parents will place teens with oversees families for 10 days and watch as they deal with the regimented home lives of their foreign peers.
The series sits alongside a one-off doc about UK soldiers fighting in Afghanistan, as part of a strong factual slate.
Jack: A Soldier's Story follows 24-year-old Lance Corporal Jack Mizon, one of the Grenadier Guards in the Helmland Province, for two months late last year. The programme shows an eight-day battle with the Taleban as well as the loss of two of Mizon's close friends – one in a roadside bomb attack and another at the hands of a suicide bomber.
The doc also charts Mizon's return to the UK, where he struggle to readjust to life in the barracks and eventually goes absent without leave and flees the country before returning to the army is disgrace.
BBC3's autumn slate will also major on comedy including the surreal in-house production The Wrong Door, in which movie-style special effects take place in real life.
Ralf Little, Carl Rice and Johnny Vegas will star in Massive, about a new Manchester record label, while Coming of Age, written by 19-year-old Tim Dawson, will deal with the realities of teen life such as "dealing with those pesky, unwanted erections in public places".
The channel has also ordered a new multi-platform series from Hat Trick Productions, about "YouTube heavyweight" Bryony Mathewman's efforts to make a user-generated zombie movie for a Halloween deadline.
Two webisodes of the aptly-titled Bryony Makes A Zombie Movie will air each week, and the series will culminate in a 30-minute TV broadcast chronicling her efforts.
BBC3 controller Danny Cohen said: "The young audiences we target have responded really positively to the changes we've made to BBC3 this year.
"The autumn season is about maintaining this momentum through high-quality home-grown comedy, drama, factual and current affairs."
The channel relaunched in February as the first "truly multiplatform" mainstream channel.
Other programmes in the channel's autumn line up include futuristic Spooks follow up Spooks: Code 9, a new series of Last Man Standing.
