BBC One Reveals New Commissions

Charlotte Moore, Controller of BBC One, has announced a number of new documentary commissions for the channel.

From Roger Graef comes 'Brett: A Life With No Arms'. Brett Nielsen is a sports car enthusiast, record producer, musician, entrepreneur, a loving single father to two kids, with three ex-wives and in love again. He also has no arms because of Thalidomide, taken by his mother in the early Sixties to counteract the effects of morning sickness.

Filmmaker Graef's first-ever documentary, One Of Them Is Brett, was made 50 years ago. It was a portrait of Brett as a spirited four-year old – riding a bicycle, feeding himself, fighting his brothers with his feet. His parents, Barbara and Peter Nielsen, moved from Australia to Britain to get him prosthetic arms, which Brett immediately rejected. And it stayed that way. Fifty years later, Graef tracked down Brett in Australia. This follow-up film is about Brett's life leading up to their reunion.

Following his mother's death, Brett plans to move his 84-year-old father, Peter, from Sydney to live with him. He is also releasing a new CD of his songs, and making music videos.

In Cancer (working title), a three-part observational and rigged-camera series, KEO Films will explore the world of cancer through the lives of people living with it. With unprecedented access to hospitals and patients around the country, the series will take an intimate look at what it means to live with cancer today: from the moment of diagnosis , the minutiae of life shared between strangers on a chemotherapy unit, to the moments of family life where cancer is ever-present. Filming across one year, the patients' stories will play out in their own timeframe.

By capturing the experiences of people living with cancer, both in hospital and at home, the series will celebrate the endurance of the human spirit when faced with a life-altering diagnosis.

All Change At Longleat sees a new couple take over one of the country's aristocratic estates. As the owner, Lord Bath, winds down his involvement, his eldest son has moved in downstairs, along with his new wife, Emma, who will be Britain's first black marchioness.

Built in 1580, the stately home of Longleat has been in the same aristocratic family for 14 generations, but challenges lie ahead, as Lord and Lady Bath take on a staff of hundreds, two villages and a safari park, along with the enormous, but fragile, Elizabethan stately home filled with priceless antiquities.

This series is an intimate upstairs-downstairs portrait of an aristocratic family at a time of transition, and the colourful characters that work for and serve them.

Elsewhere, Black Cab White Cab will tell the story of two Burnley taxi cab companies, white and Asian, narrated through the experiences of the drivers and their customers. The film looks at cultural segregation in Britain using Burnley as the extreme microcosm. It will follow a whites-only-run cab company, and Kings, the oldest cab firm in Burnley, run by Ali Khan.

The film hears from both white and Asian communities and examine how the town has become divided by ethnicity.

Charlotte Moore says: "From singles to series, these documentaries have gained extraordinarily intimate access to four distinctive worlds that will move, provoke and challenge the BBC One audience.

"From Brett's inspiring story of triumph over adversity to capturing what it means to live with cancer today, from exploring racial tensions in Burnley through the eyes of two cab companies to a window into the world of Britain's new aristocracy in Longleat."

www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre

(JP)