CHANNEL 4 has taken ANOTHER popular daytime show off air amid major cuts.
The network has made a series of big decisions lately, axing SAS: Who Dares Wins and reality show Murder Island, while the future of Rise and Fall hangs in the balance.
Now, it has been revealed that Kirstie Allsopp's popular daytime series, Kirstie's Handmade Christmas, is being rested for a year.
The decision to take the show off air for 12 months comes as Channel 4 strives to cut costs amid an ad marketing slump of between 10 and 20 per cent.
Deadline reports that Channel 4's content chief Ian Katz phoned Kirstie, 51, last week to tell her the news personally.
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The star told the outlet: "I know it’s not personal. We all take a hit on different things at different points in time.
"Hopefully, the ad market will improve and we’ll be back again.”
Handmade Christmas first aired in 2014 and while a 2023 series hadn't officially been greenlit by Channel 4, early preparations were reportedly underway.
Kirstie added to Deadline that around 30 people on production would lose work as a result of the decision to rest the show.
She said: "I am very upset for anybody — not just my colleagues, not just the lovely people that I work with — but anybody in the industry who is struggling for work. I know there are quite a few."
It was previously revealed that Channel 4 was cancelling shows at the eleventh hour, as well as asking suppliers to rethink budgets mid-shoot and pushing projects back until next year in a bid to deal with the costs.
Khalid Hayat, Channel 4’s Director of Strategy, told a committee of lawmakers on Tuesday: "Our priority throughout this period is to preserve shows as much as we can, to minimise any disruption or cancellations to commissioning and any decisions that we make are about ensuring the sustainability and delivering the sustainability of Channel 4’s remit delivery."
