Fame Asylum is a 2006 documentary that followed the progress of a boy band made up of four asylum seekers and aired on Channel 4. The Guardian said it was among the worst ideas in TV history, [1] and the programme was also nominated for a Royal Television Society Award. [2]
It is available to watch on 40D, [3] and has some accompanying learning resources. [4]
The artist who initiated the documentary, Richard DeDomenici, has compiled an archive of material responding to the project, [5] and has written an article about it [6] for Refugee Week, who collaborated on the project.
Channel 4 is a British free-to-air public broadcast television channel owned and operated by the state-owned Channel Four Television Corporation. It is publicly owned but, unlike the BBC, it receives no public funding and is instead funded entirely by its own commercial activities, including publicity. It began its transmission in 1982 and was established to provide a fourth television service in the United Kingdom. At the time, the only other channels were the licence-funded BBC1 and BBC2, and a single commercial broadcasting network ITV.
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Katherine Lucy Bridget Burke is an English actress, comedian, writer, producer, and director. She achieved fame with her appearances on sketch shows such as French and Saunders (1988–1999) and her recurring role as Magda on the BBC sitcom Absolutely Fabulous (1992–2012), as well as her frequent collaborations with fellow comedian Harry Enfield. From 1999 to 2001, she starred as Linda La Hughes on the BBC sitcom Gimme Gimme Gimme, for which she received a British Comedy Award and two BAFTA nominations.
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Peter William Atkins is an English chemist and a Fellow of Lincoln College at the University of Oxford. He retired in 2007. He is a prolific writer of popular chemistry textbooks, including Physical Chemistry, Inorganic Chemistry, and Molecular Quantum Mechanics. Atkins is also the author of a number of popular science books, including Atkins' Molecules, Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science and On Being.
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Peter Dougan Capaldi is a Scottish actor and director. He portrayed the twelfth incarnation of the Doctor in the science fiction series Doctor Who (2013–2017) and Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It (2005–2012), for which he received four British Academy Television Award nominations, winning Best Male Comedy Performance in 2010. When he reprised the role of Tucker in the feature film In the Loop, Capaldi was honoured with several film critic award nominations for Best Supporting Actor.
Planet Earth is a 2006 British television series produced by the BBC Natural History Unit. Five years in the making, it was the most expensive nature documentary series ever commissioned by the BBC and also the first to be filmed in high definition. The series received multiple awards, including four Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, and an award from the Royal Television Society.
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The Glasgow Girls is a group of seven young women in Glasgow, Scotland, who highlighted the poor treatment of asylum seekers whose rights of appeal had been exhausted. In 2005, the group campaigned against dawn raids, raised public awareness, and found support in the Scottish Parliament. Their story has been told in a musical and 2 documentaries.
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Channel 5 is a British free-to-air public broadcast television channel launched in 1997. It is the fifth national terrestrial channel in the United Kingdom and is owned by Channel 5 Broadcasting Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of American media conglomerate Paramount Global, which is grouped under Paramount Networks UK & Australia division.
Callum Macrae is a Scottish filmmaker, writer and journalist currently with Outsider Television, which he had co-founded with Alex Sutherland in 1993.
Chris Rogers is a British broadcast journalist specialising in investigative journalism, and news presenter. He is among the long line up of presenters that began their career presenting BBC Newsround moving on to present and report for Sky News including its BAFTA Award-winning coverage of the 9/11 attacks. He then joined the Channel 4 RI:SE presenting team before heading to ITN's ITV News, and ITV's Tonight documentary series, where he presented and reported for London Today, London Tonight, ITV Evening News and produced and fronted numerous investigations for the News at Ten and the Tonight programme as ITV's Investigative Correspondent. He left ITN in 2009 to present BBC News.
Sophie Morgan is a British television presenter and disability advocate who is paraplegic. She became a presenter after appearing on reality television. In 2021, she was a lead presenter for Channel 4's TV coverage of the Summer Paralympics in Tokyo. She has been voted one of the most influential disabled people in the UK, and has been working on television for almost twenty years.
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Alison Phipps OBE FRSE FRSA FAcSS a University of Glasgow professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies and holds the first UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts. She has been awarded the Minerva Medal of the Royal Philosophical Society and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.