Sky Arts will look to extend its partnerships with cultural organisations beyond the Victoria and Albert museum and Tate Liverpool with a new £3m fund for TV projects.
The new initiative, Sky Arts Amplify, will make available up to £1m a year over the next three years for joint pitches between arts organisations and TV production companies.
Intended to “bring the vibrancy and breadth of the arts to life on screen in innovative, new ways”, it follows an earlier scheme, Sky Arts Ignition, which launched in 2011 and led to partnerships with the V&A and Tate in Liverpool.
It echoes a BBC drive announced earlier this year to collaborate with arts organisations including the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Academy.
Sky Arts director, Phil Edgar-Jones, said: “We don’t just want to make TV about the arts – we want to make artistic TV. Sky Arts Amplify is about bringing the best people in their fields together to do this in bold, fearless ways.”
The broadcaster announced details of the new project late on Tuesday, along with its Christmas line-up of programmes which will see Kiefer Sutherland and Stephen Fry star in Marked, a festive edition of its Playhouse Presents … strand.
Other new shows include Adam Buxton Loves … Christmas, in which the comedian and presenter will examine the meaning of Christmas from his garden shed, and The Great Culture Quiz.
Sky Arts will also host Christmas Windows Live, a series of real-time, live performances broadcast from a shop window in London’s Westfield Stratford shopping centre.
The channel has bought its first Norwegian comedy, Dag, about a marriage counsellor who doesn’t appear to believe in marriage, and Swedish drama 30 Degrees in February.
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