“It’s a totally different beast,” she insists.
The Big Family Cooking Showdown, which is presented by Hussain and Zoe Ball, pits 16 families against each other in weekly culinary crusades, judged by chefs Rosemary Schrager and Bruno Locatelli.
“It’s about family cooking and different cultures. There’s baking involved depending on who wants to bake,” she explains.
The ten-part series is due to launch in the autumn.
Ranganathan has been nominated alongside Ant and Dec, and The Last Leg boys in the Entertainment Performance category of this year’s RTS Programme Awards.
“I finally feel like I’ve got the validation I need to continue,” he says, when I meet him at his agent’s office in a hard-to-find Clerkenwell backstreet.
“It’s nice to be nominated alongside them, but I hope I win” he laughs. “And I’m not going to be humble about it if I do win either. I’m going to make sure I visit everyone and really go on about it.”
What does he make of his fellow nominees, I ask.
The eight-part series follows the story of landowner Anne Lister who returns from years of travel to re-establish her faded ancestral home Shibden Hall, Halifax.
Society dictates that she should re-open her coal mines and marry well, yet the charming and single-minded Anne has no intention of marrying a man and instead seeks a wealthy female suitor.
Shibden Hall is a love story based on historical facts, taken from the diary entries of Anne Lister which contained the intimate details of her life.
Channel 4 has reaffirmed its commitment to diversity in its new ‘Diversity Charter 360° - Two Years on.’
The charter, which builds on the channel’s work over the past years, outlines four key areas for the broadcaster in 2017.
The ‘Four New Frontiers’ for 2017 aim to increase diversity of programme directors by providing opportunities to 40 directors from under-represented groups, including BAME, female and disabled people, as well as actively enhance the careers of 10 high-potential BAME individuals to improve representation as senior levels.
The three new films will explore the damaging and destructive effects of murder, sex trafficking and opiate dependency in American cities.
Louis Theroux said: “I immerse myself in some of the most dysfunctional and disturbing aspects of American society. They combine hard-hitting actuality with intimate interviews.
“I remember on the day of the [Trump] election thinking there is not a news organisation, or periodical that won’t be covering this on the front page.”
The RTS Network Presenter of the Year nominee has spent the year hot-footing it across America in pursuit of the new president.
“I didn’t call it for Trump,” she confesses. “I started in Texas following Ted Cruz. I went down to Florida, I followed Marco Rubio. I knew each of the candidates before we got to Trump.”
Robinson, a presenter on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, argued for “impartiality as a legal requirement for television news”. Without it, as in the US where “right wingers watch Fox News and liberals watch MSNBC”, he continued, “there are no shared facts. Good public policy decision-making requires shared facts.”
“What Facebook does, and what separate news channels for different opinions do, is give people the possibility to have their own facts,” added Robinson, a former political editor at both ITV News and the BBC.
“I love this business” beams Harry Gration. “I’ve been to nine Olympic Games. I’ve been all around the world to cover BBC Sport.”
Gration is one of the old campaigners, with almost 40 years of broadcasting under his belt.
“I never really envisaged that I’d end up presenting a television programme as I do every night. It happened as a dream and it has turned into a reality.”
The RTS award win is Gration’s second in the category, having won first in 2015. “It’s beyond expectation to be honest. You tend to get these once in a lifetime.”
Stewart White is a regular at the RTS Television Journalism Awards having won the Regional Presenter of the Year in 2013, 2014 and 2016.
He is nominated once again for his work presenting BBC Look East. “It’s nice that the viewers who watch Look East know that it’s a well-regarded programme” he reflects.
The key to the success of the programme, he believes, is knowing the audience. “We cover stories which really matter to people who live in the region.”
The corporation is launching a new English-language channel in the nation.
From September 2018, BBC Scotland will broadcast nightly from 7pm, and will contain its own hour-long nightly news programme at 9pm (15 minutes at 7pm weekends) which will be edited and presented from Scotland.
The BBC is investing £19m in the channel and in surrounding digital developments, and will oversee the creation of around 80 new journalist posts. Together with existing funding, that will give the channel an initial budget of around £30m.
