Grayson Perry: Rites of Passage - Season 1

Season 1
In a brand new four-part series for Channel 4, Grayson Perry will explore the landmark events in all of our lives – birth, coming of age, marriage and death - and try to reinvent them for our modern secular age. He'll be travelling the world for inspiration, spending time with communities in the Amazon, Indonesia and Japan to see how they treat these great moments. Back home Grayson will collaborate with British families to devise ceremonies that will mark a genuine milestone in their lives.
Grayson believes in the power of ritual to help us make sense of our lives, and thinks we are in danger of losing our way when it comes to marking those important moments today. Religions all have their rituals - weddings, funerals, christenings - but the UK is now one of the most secular countries in the world, so they don't always resonate with everyone. At their worst, they can feel empty and impersonal. And in a modern Britain of divorce, blended families and gay marriage, the traditional ceremonies don't always fit with the way we actually live our lives.
In this series, Grayson will work with people who are going through those universal experiences, and try find out what they need and want from the ceremonies they're about to go through. Then he'll turn his unique artist-anthropologist's eye on the ways in which other cultures mark the same moments, travelling around the world to see what we can learn from them. The final result will involve a ceremony that Grayson will help the families to design, as well as ritual art objects that Grayson will make. In its international sweep, and its focus on the universal experiences we all go through, this will be Grayson Perry's most ambitious series yet.

Episodes

Death
In this first episode, Grayson confronts death. In modern, increasingly secular Britain, are we in danger of forgetting how to mark and commemorate the deaths of the people we love? In search of an alternative, he travels to the Indonesian island of Sulawesi to meet the Toraja people, whose ideas about death are very different.

Marriage
Grayson Perry continues his exploration of the importance of ritual in our lives. Grayson visits Japan, where he attends a spectacular Shinto wedding. He's awe-struck by the ceremony's beauty, precision and attention to detail. And in Japan he finds a modern, high-tech society that nevertheless keeps its reverence for its ritual traditions: a combination that he believes we can learn from. Back in the UK, Grayson meets Ben and Sarika, a couple from very different backgrounds who are planning two weddings. Sarika belongs to the Hare Krishna faith, so her side of the family are staging a traditional religious ceremony. But the couple are also planning a civil ceremony the following day. Ben's from a non-religious background, and they're struggling to devise an occasion that expresses his cultural heritage. So Grayson helps them to come up with a secular ceremony with some of the magic and sense of occasion of the religious one.

Birth
Grayson Perry continues his exploration of the importance of ritual in our lives. Bringing a child into the world is surely one of the most consequential things we can do, but how should we celebrate this life-changing moment? Grayson Perry begins his exploration of rituals for birth on the Indonesian island of Bali, where, in local tradition, a new-born child is seen as not fully part of our human world until it is 105 days old. Until that time, it's considered the height of misfortune if it should ever touch the ground. So, for its every waking moment it is constantly held by its parents and their family and friends. It's the ultimate expression of the adage that it takes a village to raise a child. When the baby reaches its 105th day, the family stage an elaborate ceremony where the child is allowed to touch the earth for the first time. Grayson experiences this beautiful ritual, and believes that we can all learn something from it.

Coming of Age
In this closing episode, the rite of passage Grayson Perry explores is one with meaning and importance we often struggle to comprehend in modern Britain: coming of age. Grayson travels to the most remote place he's ever visited - deep into the Amazonian rainforest in western Brazil - to spend time with the Tikuna people, the region's largest indigenous group. He witnesses a coming of age ritual for teenage girls. Having been kept in seclusion from the rest of the community, and given instruction by the elder women of the village, Tikuna girls undergo an elaborate ceremony to mark their becoming an adult. It's a sometimes shocking event which challenges many of our ideas about how best to help young people make the difficult transition from child to adult. Back in the UK, Grayson meets a group of teenage girls from the Lewisham Young Women's Hub in south London.
Recently Updated Shows

Murder Most Puzzling
When a strange murder takes place in the sleepy market town of Bakerbury. The local police are baffled by a crossword puzzle left on the body.
With their case going nowhere, they turn reluctantly to Cora Felton, a recent arrival in Bakerbury; whose fame as the eponymous Puzzle Lady suggests she can help DCI Hooper and the Bakerbury police solve its first murder case. But the eccentric Cora isn't who she claims to be, and as she throws herself into a murder case that has the town's residents baffled, she starts to gather allies and enemies in equal measure.

Cops
COPS follows police officers, constables, and sheriff's deputies during patrols and various police activities by embedding camera crews with their units. The show's formula adheres to a classic cinéma vérité ethos. With no narration or scripted dialog, it depends entirely on the commentary of the officers and on the actions of the people with whom they come into contact.

Highway Thru Hell
Highway Thru Hell focuses on a team of drivers who work for Jamie Davis, along with several other heavy recovery operations fighting to keep the roads open in some of the most dangerous working conditions ever seen on TV. The Coquihalla and nearby highways through BC's Cascade Mountains have some of the most difficult and fast changing road conditions anywhere. When it's snowing hard up top on the summit of ‘The Coq', 1200 metres below its pounding rain in The Fraser Valley. Add to that, Canada's busiest trucking route to the West Coast, Highway 1 (Trans Canada Hwy), and you have the ‘Bermuda Triangle' of trucking. Police and highway maintenance crews depend on Highway Thru Hell's heavy rescue operators to respond at a moment's notice in the worst conditions. In between the winter storms, the teams ‘off road' skills are put to the test. The rugged terrain near Hope, British Columbia dishes out some of the most unique and challenging recovery jobs over steep cliffs, down deep ravines and even in bodies of water. Highway Thru Hell is ultimately a series about man versus Mother Nature and the toughest men in the towing business being pushed to their breaking point. The stakes are high - lives, the economy and thousands of jobs depend on the highways staying open, and the last line of defense is Heavy Rescue.

Yellowjackets
Yellowjackets follows a girls' high school soccer team. In 1975, the Dearborn High Yellowjackets became the first team in state history to qualify for the Girls' U.S. Soccer Championship Series in Manchester, NH. They never got the chance to compete. Equal parts survival epic, horror story and pitch black coming of age, Yellowjackets tells the story of the (un)lucky survivors of a plane crash deep in the Ontario wilderness, chronicling their descent from a friendly, cooperative team to warring, cannibalistic clans. At the same time, it follows the lives they've attempted to piece back together nearly twenty-five years later, proving that the past is never really past and what began out in the wilderness is far from over.