Channel 4 is to launch a new weekly series of polemical authored programmes featuring politicians, journalists and high-profile individuals discussing important topical current affairs subjects.
Jane Moore and Martin Bell are just some of the journalists who will be presenting the programmes.
The Insider will sit alongside the channel’s other two current affairs strands, Dispatches and Unreported World. According to the programme’s commissioning editor, Mark Roberts, The Insider hopes to offer the channel ‘fresh voices, fresh perspectives and stories that don’t hit the mainstream because some of thinking is just a bit too new and bright”.
Roberts told Press Gazette: ‘If citizen journalism is the ability of normal men and women in the street to express their views, what we have here is a heightened form of that. It is people who understand, probably better than anyone else the subject matter that they are discussing. ‘Britain isn’t short of people pontificating from the point of not knowing very much and all of a sudden what I think we are going to do is to provide a platform to people to argue vehemently from a position of extraordinary knowledge and real experience.’There are currently 10 programmes in production, with the debut episode featuring Zubair Mulla, a teetotal Muslim accident and emergency doctor, discussing how Britain can tackle its binge-drinking culture.
In other episodes, The Sun’s Jane Moore will offer a perspective on the size-zero issue, and former BBC journalist and MP Martin Bell, who according to C4 has extraordinary empathy with Britiain’s military, will examine the treatment of soldiers.
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