Sex tops C4 education slate

Channel 4 is putting sex and relationships centre stage in its upcoming education slate.

Brighton-based Lambent Productions is making Lifeproof, in which a different teenager each week will ask a group of friends to solve a personal dilemma.

Each subject will film a video diary and invite each friend to film their own advice on anything from deciding to ask someone out or getting their boyfriend to wear a condom.

The 10 x 30 minute series will be stripped across two weeks in a weekday morning slot from 17 November.

"You get a maturity of response from teenagers talking to their peers," said C4 education commissioner Matt Locke. "With this chain of video diaries, it shows just how powerful this advice can be."

Unlike the bulk of C4's education commissions, Lifeproof will initially be solely at TV project.

However, it is designed to complement websites that will support peaktime factual commissions The Sex Education Show and Embarrassing Teenage Bodies.

C4 launched Sexperience to coincide with the TV broadcast of Cheetah Television's The Sex Education Show earlier this month.

The site invites people to ask and answer their sex-related questions and features 350 short videos on the subject, including individuals relating their own advice and experiences and "no-nonsense" sex education lessons.

The site, developed by Mint Digital, has attracted around 3 million page views in its first three weeks, with users posting 3,000 comments and questions a week.

Maverick TV's site for Embarrassing Teenage Bodies, due next month, will feature eight new videos on the theme of 'Am I Normal?'.

Animated series KNTV will also look at sex when it returns for a third series.

Also on C4 Education's autumn schedule is the first of three 10 x 30 series of Year Dot, the TV part of a year-long interactive project following fifteen 16-to 20-year-olds as they record blogs and video diaries to document their lives. The first series will end with the participants meeting each other for the first time.

Another long-term project, Battlefront, also makes its debut with the first of two five-part series. Raw TV's series will follow 20 teenagers campaigning on issues ranging from knife crime to cutting down on the global problem caused by throwing away foam coffee cups. The project is already live on a site produced by digital indie Airlock.

Rounding off the slate is The Family: Teen Stories, Firefly's spin-off of the primetime show, a 5 x 30 series on the impact of drug abuse on families to support a primetime Dispatches from True Vision and Rockcorps, a one-hour documentary from CC Lab following young people who volunteer to do charity work in exchange for tickets to big rock concerts.

"In a culture where teens are seen as a threat to society, we wanted to prove that they are incredibly mature and to reflect the complexity of navigating the first steps in the reset of their lives," said Locke.