Special Needs Hotel, Meet The Psychopaths and other shows set to appear on Channel 5 in the near future

The two three-part series are but a handful of new shows commissioned by the broadcaster

Ever desperate to wrestle the docudrama crown from its Benefit Street competitors Channel 4, Channel 5 has announced a host of new shows today, including the sensationally titled Special Needs Hotel and Meet the Psycopaths.

Three-part series Special Needs Hotel will centre around the working life of Foxes, a residence which employs staff with a range of different disabilities as a form of training.

It follows both new students joining the hotel for the first time, and those moving on from the training programme to take their skills elsewhere.

Meet the Psychopaths will also be a three-part series. It aims to explore what defines psychopathy, including in-depth analysis by scientists into some of the world’s most infamous personalities.

The first episode, aptly named "Psycho Killers", will looking to the minds and cases of serial murderers past and present, including that of Joanna Dennehy, the first woman told by a judge to die in jail after she murdered three men.

"When Psychos Rule the World" will assess historical "super-fuctional" psychopaths throughout the ages, like Hitler, General Gaddafi and… Former US President Richard Nixon.

Programme three will be “The Psycho Next Door”, and will look into people with “degrees of psychopathy”, who tend to end up in positions of power or stress like law, politics, sport and neurosurgery.

Other shows set to be broadcast by the channel include Alex Polizzi-hosted Secret Italy – a four-part travel exploration of the country’s rich cultural heritage – Britain's Biggest Primary School, Underground Britain and Saving Babies.

Britain's Bloodiest Dynasty rounds off the new commission. It will explore the historical family the Plantagenets, in a story Channel 5 commissioner Simon Raikes calls "more shocking, more brutal and more astonishing than anything you'll find in Game of Thrones".

"The Plantagenets are like the Tudors on steroids," he said. "Their story is so shocking and brutal, the characters so ruthless and flawed, their impact on the history of this country so profound it's hard to believe they weren't dreamed up by Hollywood. But they weren't."

Details of when the programmes will air will be released in due course.