Channel 4’s Deputy Director of Programmes and Head of Popular Factual, Kelly Webb-Lamb, has announced her decision to leave the broadcaster later this year.
As Deputy Director of Programmes, she oversaw the popular factual commissioning departments responsible for over 1000 hours of programming every year including The Great British Bake Off, Gogglebox, Hunted, The Circle, The British Tribe Next Door; Old People’s Home For 4 Year Olds; Joe Lycett’s Got Your Back; Kathy Burke’s All Woman and The Restaurant that Makes Mistakes.
She will remain in post full time until the summer and then on a part time basis into the autumn to deliver of the upcoming The Black Takeover project as well as overseeing the channel’s search for new formats that will be funded from a contestable pot.
Kelly Webb Lamb said; “Channel 4 is a very special place; quite possibly the most special place in the industry. There’s nowhere I’ve worked where your staff-pass says freedom, creativity and risk quite as loudly. It is therefore very hard to leave. But after five years and a whole load of change, the channel is now in a really strong place creatively, and I am super proud of what we’ve achieved. So it’s a good time for me to take the leap and say goodbye – new adventures are beckoning. I will miss my colleagues painfully much – even though I haven’t seen most of them in person for almost a year – they are the best commissioning team you could ever hope for. But I’ll be around for a good while yet. On Zoom, at least…”
Director of Programmes Ian Katz said: “Kelly has played a huge part in shaping Channel 4 over the last five years and been a wise, generous and creatively inspiring partner for the last three. She is one of the most formidable people I’ve ever worked with, as mischievous as she is ferociously clever and passionate about what Channel 4 can and should be. She has a remarkable ability to make any show better, whatever the genre, and many of our most successful shows, from Old Age Home for 4 Year Olds to the Circle, bear her creative fingerprints. We’ll all miss her hugely but I’m enormously grateful for everything she has done for the channel, and delighted that she’s agreed to stick around till the summer to complete perhaps her most ambitious project yet, the Black Takeover of the schedule.”
Jon Creamer
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