The Cut (British TV series)
BBC television soap opera

The Cut is a BBC television teen drama, first broadcast in September 2009. The series was developed by Geoffrey Goodwin and Holby City writer, Al Smith in collaboration with KateModern producer Pete Gibbons and Hollyoaks director, Sarah Walker. The Cut is broadcast in 25-minute episodes on BBC Two, with each episode being broadcast in daily five-minute chunks on the website throughout the week before. The BBC describe it as reflecting the way many young people want to consume content which a critic has more cynically interpreted as for those with even the shortest of attention spans.
The first series was broadcast from September to December 2009. The second series was broadcast from April through to August 2010, and the third series started two months later, and ran from October to December 2010. In March 2011, it was officially announced that The Cut had been cancelled and would not return for a fourth series.
Series
A second season and open auditions for two parts were announced in February 2010. The second series started filming in mid-March 2010 and airing started on 24 April, with the website airing it in five-minute chunks through the previous week.
On 8 July 2010, it was announced on the blog that a third series has been commissioned.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Cut (British TV series)” is bBC television soap opera. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through British, series and television, not as a finished interpretation.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4051028. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2009, 2010 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Cut (British TV series)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.