Media Story - Channel 4
Next month, the new series of Channel 4's Celebrity Wife Swap will show what happened when Vanessa Feltz visited Paul Daniels' extremely cream Thames-side mansion. Never since Oscar Madison moved into Felix Unger's apartment has there been an odder couple. She asks questions; he doesn't. She likes clubbing; he prefers an early night. He loves magic tricks; she couldn't give a rat's ass about them. Just one problem: on Channel 4's preview DVD there is a terrible screeching noise. It sounds just like someone - the director, possibly - scraping a barrel.
I've got used to that noise recently. I heard it when Channel 4 scheduled a so-called "wank week", a season of masturbation-themed programmes, and last month - if this isn't the wrong verb - pulled it. I heard it last month when the presenter of Channel 4's You Are What You Eat, Gillian McKeith, a self-styled straight-talking nutritionist better known as the Awful Poo Lady, dropped her "doctor" title from an ad campaign after a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority. I heard it when Richard and Judy were sucked into the interactive TV scandal, facing allegations that viewers were encouraged to keep calling at £1 a time, even though contestants for the You Say We Pay competition had already been chosen. And only last week I heard it on Ten Years Younger, when Nicky Hambleton-Jones yanked yet another putatively plug-ugly shopper off the streets of Britain for face-time with a surgeon's knife.
There was, one might think, more scraping earlier this month with The Great Global Warming Swindle, by director Martin Durkin. Among those queueing up to attack the show was one of the scientists whose views the show purported to represent. Carl Wunsch, professor of physical oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claimed his remarks had been distorted and that the results were "as close to pure propaganda as anything since world war two". "This seems like a deliberate attempt to exploit someone who is on the other side of the issue," he said. Wunsch is reportedly considering a complaint to the broadcasting regulator Ofcom.
Durkin, whose 1997 Channel 4 series Against Nature, which compared environmentalists to Nazis, was damned by the Independent Television Commission for selective editing, has defended his use of Wunsch's interview. The journalist Maggie Brown, whose history of Channel 4 will be published in September, believes the programme was "legitimate ... You can read the consensus view everywhere. Why not have your brain cells challenged?" But such views seem to be in the minority. "The channel has lost its soul," says Anthony Smith, one of Channel 4's founders. "So when it does something like this, it looks like opportunism."
What is Channel 4 for? Has it really lost its soul? When Sir Jeremy Isaacs, the station's first chief executive from 1981 to 1987, mused on these questions last December, he too heard scraping noises. He wrote in Prospect magazine: "[A] series explaining Islam, for example, is entrusted to Peaches Geldof. There's an obsession with adolescent transgression and sex. Gordon Ramsay is hired to make a series called The F Word; Designer Vaginas is followed by the World's Biggest Penis." Isaacs suggested that the quiet seriousness that his channel offered in the 1980s - admittedly among the programming that got Channel 4 branded Channel Swore and kept Tory MPs in vein-popping, headline-friendly fury throughout the decade - has mostly disappeared.
Isaacs yearned for Channel 4 to offer a science programme, a book programme, something on Europe - the very things his baby provided in its glory days. Thank heaven Channel 4 News was still on form, Isaacs suggested, that the foreign affairs doc strand Dispatches was still ring-fenced from makeover and reality shows, and that The Sopranos and The West Wing were on.
When it started on November 2 1982, Channel 4 was conceived of as a public-service broadcaster, commercially self-funded yet publicly owned, originally by the Independent Broadcasting Authority. Where, one might be forgiven for asking, did it all go wrong? "It's just lost its way," says Anthony Smith. "It has a parliamentary remit to supply different kinds of programming. It doesn't try to do that. All it does is try to compete with other channels. Sometimes it does things that are very good, but mostly its programmes are without purpose, moral or otherwise."
This apparent dearth of moral purpose emerges at the very moment that Channel 4 needs to seem publicly valuable, more than just another media outlet competing in a multi-channel, multi-platform age. Channel 4 is awaiting the results of a financial review by Ofcom, in which it has been lobbying for a public subsidy of £100m to fund its digital ambitions.
At the Edinburgh TV festival last year, ITV's departing chief executive, Charles Allen, rubbished this lobbying: "Channel 4 is behaving like a 25-year-old still living at home, dipping into Mum's purse, even when it's got a fat pay cheque in its back pocket." Allen excoriated Channel 4 for being dominated in the afternoon by "quizshow, gameshow, chatshow, cartoon, soap" and in the evening by "reality, lifestyle, US acquisitions, and shock docs".
Even Jeremy Isaacs wondered if it wasn't time for his baby to stand on its own feet. He looked at Channel 4's books and noticed something strange. The core channel had made £80m profit, while its other ventures - cable channels E4 and More4, investments in new media, possible expansion into radio - were loss-making. He wrote: "It is odd that the core public-service channel should fund losses in other ventures." Perhaps more than odd: it seems symptomatic of the abandonment of Channel 4's original ethos.
One reason for that strange balance sheet is Big Brother. It's undeniably popular - 8.8 million viewers watched Jade Goody's eviction in January - but how does it fit into Channel 4's public-service remit? I heard barrel-scraping again when Peter Bazalgette, chief creative officer of Big Brother makers Endemol, attempted to justify the recent racism row with reference to the 2003 Broadcasting Act, which sets out Channel 4's remit. He noted that the act stipulated that Channel 4 should demonstrate "innovation", appeal to "a culturally diverse society", include "programmes of educative value" and "exhibit a distinctive character". He wrote: "This year's Celebrity Big Brother may have proved uncomfortable viewing. But isn't that exactly what those who framed the act had in mind?"
Bazalgette makes a compelling point. But why stop at Celebrity Big Brother? Why not give more morons a platform and then justify their appearance in reference to the channel's innovative or educative roles? Why not give the BNP a prime-time show? Why not have more racists on telly just to show how racist British society is?
One might be forgiven for thinking this was Channel 4 policy. In January, Shipwrecked featured a white contestant who praised slavery and attacked black, gay and fat people. Channel 4's director of television, Kevin Lygo, defended the show thus: "If we start going through the schedules and pulling out programmes that might or might not be offensive, where does that leave us?" Again, this is a good point: causing offence is not always contemptible. It can awaken viewers from bien-pensant slumbers and stimulate debate. Perhaps, if one is being charitable, that is what happened with CBB.
But there is a problem with this thesis. Channel 4's motives in broadcasting offensive material hardly seemed to be innovative or educative; rather, it seemed overwhelmingly thrilled that an ailing format burst unexpectedly into rude health. You can sense this thrill when you read Lygo's quoted remarks in Broadcast magazine after the CBB row exploded. "Let's put this in perspective," Lygo said. "This was in danger of being the most boring BB that we'd had in many years - maybe ever - and we were thinking, 'Oh dear, what can we do?' And then suddenly from the cooking of a chicken going wrong this argument erupted which was taken on by the media and erupted into this extraordinary story." (The chicken, incidentally, was what catalysed Jade Goody's tirade against the woman she called "Shilpa Poppadom".) The intention was not to make innovative or educative TV; rather, the racism row provoked a furore that clever people like Peter Bazalgette could later spin into a dubious narrative whereby Channel 4 was fulfilling precisely those parts of its remit.
Celebrity Big Brother's producers even mobilised the most disreputable feature of its January debacle to lure future contestants. Presenter Davina McCall urged viewers to apply for a new series, saying: "You too can be abused and humiliated on national television!" Abuse and humiliation - so much more ratings-friendly than innovation or education. In such a climate, viewers would be justified in no longer trusting Channel 4 to be anything but opportunistic.
None of these barrel-scrapings would matter if Channel 4 were privatised. If it were ITV, nobody would think it their business that standards seemed to have gone into a tailspin. Nobody would care that Deal or No Deal was the sacred heart of the current schedule.
But Channel 4 is not a privatised broadcaster. - yet. It's more important than that. It is owned and operated by the Channel 4 Television Corporation, whose board is appointed by Ofcom in agreement with the culture secretary. So important is Channel 4 that its chief executive Andy Duncan has been, for nearly a year, stressing to Ofcom the need for public money so it can meet the challenges of the digital age and continue its job of "maximising public value in the 'now' media". In "now" media, you see, TV programmes occupy "just one shelf in a massive cash-and-carry content warehouse".
Some critics of Channel 4 are fearful that it will not receive such a subsidy and that a future prime minister might privatise the channel altogether, thus freeing it from its public broadcasting obligations. Indeed, Phil Redmond, creator of Brookside, suggests this would be a good thing: "The original Channel 4 concept is something we probably don't need now. As a commercial organisation I think Channel 4 has a bright future - it can go off and start finding niche ideas, the new Big Brother and, dare I say it, programming that challenges, rather than merely feeds, the intellect."
The original Channel 4 concept, framed by the 1980 Broadcasting Act, was "to encourage innovation and experiment in the form and content of programmes to cater for interests that ITV did not to provide overall a distinctive service". Channel 4 began broadcasting at 4.45pm on November 2 1982 with Countdown. Even my colleague Nancy Banks-Smith, reviewing the channel's opening night, conceded that Channel 4 was distinctive. Under the headline "Trendy enough to make the teeth peel", Nancy inquired: "Are you sexually liberated, socially aware and politically concerned? Do you wear legwarmers? No? Then take your sticky hands off my nice new, shiny channel."
Many viewers were happy to relinquish their grip. In its wobbly first years, Channel 4 had a tiny audience share of 4.4% (hence the jibe that it was Channel 4%). By the mid-80s that had risen above 10%, partly because the station took over horse-racing broadcasts from ITV, but also because it was rarely out of the Daily Mail's crosshairs. Isaacs called these media rumpuses "stormovers" (as in "Channel 4 was last night embroiled in a storm over its gay/sexually explicit/treasonable/sick [delete as necessary] new show").
There seemed to be merit in such controversial programming. When, for example, there was a fuss about two schoolgirls discussing lesbianism in Veronica 4 Rose, it served as a prelude to other shows that foregrounded homosexuality - a modest gay magazine called Out on Tuesday followed, and then TV's first sapphic snog in Brookside. For Andy Duncan, these shows prove how Channel 4 was a socio-televisual catalyst: they brought homosexuality into the mainstream and nowadays, he reckoned, no makeover show is complete without a same-sex couple. Which, perhaps, is progress.
Sexually liberated legwarmer-wearers stayed up after midnight to watch not only the After Dark discussion programme (in which, memorably, Oliver Reed mauled feminist Kate Millett during a bibulous debate about male violence), but also the so-called Red Triangle series, in which broadcasts (largely of fruity foreign films featuring cannibalism, torture and sexual assaults) were preceded by a warning saying: "Special Discretion Required". Lest we distort the story, Channel 4 still challenges with programmes that make many squirm: when, for example, Gunther von Hagens performed an autopsy on Channel 4 in 2002, it recalled the days when innovative, offensive, morally debatable TV was the station's forte.
It's easy to misremember Channel 4 as consisting of a string of pearls that has been replaced by tat. Once there was The Comic Strip Presents, Father Ted, The Tube, A Very British Coup, Queer As Folk, Ali G, Traffik, not to mention some of the movies for which its cinematic arm, Film Four, was responsible. There were cunning imports such as Friends and Sex and the City, though whether the millions shelled out on them was justified in terms of the station's remit is another matter.
But there are few things more unfair than cherry-picking from 25 years of schedules and contrasting those fruits with today's duds and disgraces. For there were many duds before (Max Headroom, Ibiza Uncovered, Rise, The Girlie Show and more besides).
And there are, Maggie Brown argues, great Channel 4 programmes today. She cites Michael Winterbottom's The Road to Guantanamo, Longford (tracing the peer's relationship with Myra Hindley), Death of a President (imagining the assassination of George Bush), A Very Social Secretary (featuring David Blunkett's dalliance with Kimberley Quinn), and the new teen drama Skins. She doesn't even mention Paul Abbott's Shameless, nor the fact that Chris Morris is soon to (fingers crossed) cause widespread offence with a new Brass Eye about suicide bombers.
In any case, duds are tolerable so long as they are part of a vision that stresses innovation. This, however, is what some fear has disappeared. "If they had kept their faith with their experimental R&D role, they would have kept the faith with everything else," says Anthony Smith. " But they're not looking for talent at the end of Morecambe pier or looking for school leavers making videos the way they have never been made before. They have put themselves in a position where they can't afford to fail - and so they do."
I requested interviews with Andy Duncan and Kevin Lygo to discuss these issues, but neither was available. Duncan, though, argued in his New Statesman media lecture last summer that Channel 4 remains innovative, particularly in the heartland of its public service brief - education - where he argued his channel was as ground-breaking as the Open University had been in the 60s. "This is not just through television but through websites that develop practical and intellectual skills and off-air activities that stretch the educational value of on-screen material."
One problem may be that Channel 4 now regards itself as a brand. In his lecture, Duncan suggested that brand value made the station singular. It wasn't weighed down with institutional baggage like the BBC; it was younger and cooler than ITV, and not part of a global media conglomerate. He said: "Our unique public/private status - with neither shareholders or governments to please - gives us precious freedom to go where others can't or won't."
But do they? Channel 4 no longer makes programmes for minorities, because it wants to bring audiences together rather than segment them. "Location Location Location," Duncan said, "should appeal as much to the black viewer as to anyone else." Or indeed as little.
Channel 4 certainly has to reconfigure itself for new times. Legwarmers are not the last word; 2007 is not 1982. Channel 4 has far more than three competitors. Among those reconfigurations, the most crucial is that Channel 4 no longer believes in the paternalistic Reithian ethos whereby programme-makers give viewers what they presume is good for them. The station's former chief executive, Michael Jackson, called such Reithian telly a "redundant piece of voodoo" - a view Duncan himself endorsed in his lecture.
But something like that discredited voodoo, bizarrely, is still at the heart of what Channel 4 does. Isaacs pointed out that Jamie Oliver's shows for the station have often explicitly told viewers what is good for them. The same is true of Property Ladder, You Are What You Eat and How Clean Is Your House, the lifestyle shows that for many define Channel 4 today. The problem seems to be this: all of these didactic shows have a very narrow perspective on what is good for their viewers. They are Reith Lite: presumptuous without being especially educative or innovative.
And yet, maybe Channel 4's recent wobbles and its replacement of Reithian paternalism with a different kind of public broadcasting are understandable in a dizzying new media world. It is, after all, a world filled with scary things like cash-and-carry content warehouses, on-demand media, SkyPlus, podcasts and Nicky Hambleton-Jones.
It's all very confusing, no doubt, but one thing is certain: if Vanessa Feltz and Paul Daniels arguing in the magician's marital bed is the solution, Channel 4 doesn't understand the problem.
They care about tv ratings rather than the people suffering on shows, such a big brother.
I've got used to that noise recently. I heard it when Channel 4 scheduled a so-called "wank week", a season of masturbation-themed programmes, and last month - if this isn't the wrong verb - pulled it. I heard it last month when the presenter of Channel 4's You Are What You Eat, Gillian McKeith, a self-styled straight-talking nutritionist better known as the Awful Poo Lady, dropped her "doctor" title from an ad campaign after a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority. I heard it when Richard and Judy were sucked into the interactive TV scandal, facing allegations that viewers were encouraged to keep calling at £1 a time, even though contestants for the You Say We Pay competition had already been chosen. And only last week I heard it on Ten Years Younger, when Nicky Hambleton-Jones yanked yet another putatively plug-ugly shopper off the streets of Britain for face-time with a surgeon's knife.
There was, one might think, more scraping earlier this month with The Great Global Warming Swindle, by director Martin Durkin. Among those queueing up to attack the show was one of the scientists whose views the show purported to represent. Carl Wunsch, professor of physical oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claimed his remarks had been distorted and that the results were "as close to pure propaganda as anything since world war two". "This seems like a deliberate attempt to exploit someone who is on the other side of the issue," he said. Wunsch is reportedly considering a complaint to the broadcasting regulator Ofcom.
Durkin, whose 1997 Channel 4 series Against Nature, which compared environmentalists to Nazis, was damned by the Independent Television Commission for selective editing, has defended his use of Wunsch's interview. The journalist Maggie Brown, whose history of Channel 4 will be published in September, believes the programme was "legitimate ... You can read the consensus view everywhere. Why not have your brain cells challenged?" But such views seem to be in the minority. "The channel has lost its soul," says Anthony Smith, one of Channel 4's founders. "So when it does something like this, it looks like opportunism."
What is Channel 4 for? Has it really lost its soul? When Sir Jeremy Isaacs, the station's first chief executive from 1981 to 1987, mused on these questions last December, he too heard scraping noises. He wrote in Prospect magazine: "[A] series explaining Islam, for example, is entrusted to Peaches Geldof. There's an obsession with adolescent transgression and sex. Gordon Ramsay is hired to make a series called The F Word; Designer Vaginas is followed by the World's Biggest Penis." Isaacs suggested that the quiet seriousness that his channel offered in the 1980s - admittedly among the programming that got Channel 4 branded Channel Swore and kept Tory MPs in vein-popping, headline-friendly fury throughout the decade - has mostly disappeared.
Isaacs yearned for Channel 4 to offer a science programme, a book programme, something on Europe - the very things his baby provided in its glory days. Thank heaven Channel 4 News was still on form, Isaacs suggested, that the foreign affairs doc strand Dispatches was still ring-fenced from makeover and reality shows, and that The Sopranos and The West Wing were on.
When it started on November 2 1982, Channel 4 was conceived of as a public-service broadcaster, commercially self-funded yet publicly owned, originally by the Independent Broadcasting Authority. Where, one might be forgiven for asking, did it all go wrong? "It's just lost its way," says Anthony Smith. "It has a parliamentary remit to supply different kinds of programming. It doesn't try to do that. All it does is try to compete with other channels. Sometimes it does things that are very good, but mostly its programmes are without purpose, moral or otherwise."
This apparent dearth of moral purpose emerges at the very moment that Channel 4 needs to seem publicly valuable, more than just another media outlet competing in a multi-channel, multi-platform age. Channel 4 is awaiting the results of a financial review by Ofcom, in which it has been lobbying for a public subsidy of £100m to fund its digital ambitions.
At the Edinburgh TV festival last year, ITV's departing chief executive, Charles Allen, rubbished this lobbying: "Channel 4 is behaving like a 25-year-old still living at home, dipping into Mum's purse, even when it's got a fat pay cheque in its back pocket." Allen excoriated Channel 4 for being dominated in the afternoon by "quizshow, gameshow, chatshow, cartoon, soap" and in the evening by "reality, lifestyle, US acquisitions, and shock docs".
Even Jeremy Isaacs wondered if it wasn't time for his baby to stand on its own feet. He looked at Channel 4's books and noticed something strange. The core channel had made £80m profit, while its other ventures - cable channels E4 and More4, investments in new media, possible expansion into radio - were loss-making. He wrote: "It is odd that the core public-service channel should fund losses in other ventures." Perhaps more than odd: it seems symptomatic of the abandonment of Channel 4's original ethos.
One reason for that strange balance sheet is Big Brother. It's undeniably popular - 8.8 million viewers watched Jade Goody's eviction in January - but how does it fit into Channel 4's public-service remit? I heard barrel-scraping again when Peter Bazalgette, chief creative officer of Big Brother makers Endemol, attempted to justify the recent racism row with reference to the 2003 Broadcasting Act, which sets out Channel 4's remit. He noted that the act stipulated that Channel 4 should demonstrate "innovation", appeal to "a culturally diverse society", include "programmes of educative value" and "exhibit a distinctive character". He wrote: "This year's Celebrity Big Brother may have proved uncomfortable viewing. But isn't that exactly what those who framed the act had in mind?"
Bazalgette makes a compelling point. But why stop at Celebrity Big Brother? Why not give more morons a platform and then justify their appearance in reference to the channel's innovative or educative roles? Why not give the BNP a prime-time show? Why not have more racists on telly just to show how racist British society is?
One might be forgiven for thinking this was Channel 4 policy. In January, Shipwrecked featured a white contestant who praised slavery and attacked black, gay and fat people. Channel 4's director of television, Kevin Lygo, defended the show thus: "If we start going through the schedules and pulling out programmes that might or might not be offensive, where does that leave us?" Again, this is a good point: causing offence is not always contemptible. It can awaken viewers from bien-pensant slumbers and stimulate debate. Perhaps, if one is being charitable, that is what happened with CBB.
But there is a problem with this thesis. Channel 4's motives in broadcasting offensive material hardly seemed to be innovative or educative; rather, it seemed overwhelmingly thrilled that an ailing format burst unexpectedly into rude health. You can sense this thrill when you read Lygo's quoted remarks in Broadcast magazine after the CBB row exploded. "Let's put this in perspective," Lygo said. "This was in danger of being the most boring BB that we'd had in many years - maybe ever - and we were thinking, 'Oh dear, what can we do?' And then suddenly from the cooking of a chicken going wrong this argument erupted which was taken on by the media and erupted into this extraordinary story." (The chicken, incidentally, was what catalysed Jade Goody's tirade against the woman she called "Shilpa Poppadom".) The intention was not to make innovative or educative TV; rather, the racism row provoked a furore that clever people like Peter Bazalgette could later spin into a dubious narrative whereby Channel 4 was fulfilling precisely those parts of its remit.
Celebrity Big Brother's producers even mobilised the most disreputable feature of its January debacle to lure future contestants. Presenter Davina McCall urged viewers to apply for a new series, saying: "You too can be abused and humiliated on national television!" Abuse and humiliation - so much more ratings-friendly than innovation or education. In such a climate, viewers would be justified in no longer trusting Channel 4 to be anything but opportunistic.
None of these barrel-scrapings would matter if Channel 4 were privatised. If it were ITV, nobody would think it their business that standards seemed to have gone into a tailspin. Nobody would care that Deal or No Deal was the sacred heart of the current schedule.
But Channel 4 is not a privatised broadcaster. - yet. It's more important than that. It is owned and operated by the Channel 4 Television Corporation, whose board is appointed by Ofcom in agreement with the culture secretary. So important is Channel 4 that its chief executive Andy Duncan has been, for nearly a year, stressing to Ofcom the need for public money so it can meet the challenges of the digital age and continue its job of "maximising public value in the 'now' media". In "now" media, you see, TV programmes occupy "just one shelf in a massive cash-and-carry content warehouse".
Some critics of Channel 4 are fearful that it will not receive such a subsidy and that a future prime minister might privatise the channel altogether, thus freeing it from its public broadcasting obligations. Indeed, Phil Redmond, creator of Brookside, suggests this would be a good thing: "The original Channel 4 concept is something we probably don't need now. As a commercial organisation I think Channel 4 has a bright future - it can go off and start finding niche ideas, the new Big Brother and, dare I say it, programming that challenges, rather than merely feeds, the intellect."
The original Channel 4 concept, framed by the 1980 Broadcasting Act, was "to encourage innovation and experiment in the form and content of programmes to cater for interests that ITV did not to provide overall a distinctive service". Channel 4 began broadcasting at 4.45pm on November 2 1982 with Countdown. Even my colleague Nancy Banks-Smith, reviewing the channel's opening night, conceded that Channel 4 was distinctive. Under the headline "Trendy enough to make the teeth peel", Nancy inquired: "Are you sexually liberated, socially aware and politically concerned? Do you wear legwarmers? No? Then take your sticky hands off my nice new, shiny channel."
Many viewers were happy to relinquish their grip. In its wobbly first years, Channel 4 had a tiny audience share of 4.4% (hence the jibe that it was Channel 4%). By the mid-80s that had risen above 10%, partly because the station took over horse-racing broadcasts from ITV, but also because it was rarely out of the Daily Mail's crosshairs. Isaacs called these media rumpuses "stormovers" (as in "Channel 4 was last night embroiled in a storm over its gay/sexually explicit/treasonable/sick [delete as necessary] new show").
There seemed to be merit in such controversial programming. When, for example, there was a fuss about two schoolgirls discussing lesbianism in Veronica 4 Rose, it served as a prelude to other shows that foregrounded homosexuality - a modest gay magazine called Out on Tuesday followed, and then TV's first sapphic snog in Brookside. For Andy Duncan, these shows prove how Channel 4 was a socio-televisual catalyst: they brought homosexuality into the mainstream and nowadays, he reckoned, no makeover show is complete without a same-sex couple. Which, perhaps, is progress.
Sexually liberated legwarmer-wearers stayed up after midnight to watch not only the After Dark discussion programme (in which, memorably, Oliver Reed mauled feminist Kate Millett during a bibulous debate about male violence), but also the so-called Red Triangle series, in which broadcasts (largely of fruity foreign films featuring cannibalism, torture and sexual assaults) were preceded by a warning saying: "Special Discretion Required". Lest we distort the story, Channel 4 still challenges with programmes that make many squirm: when, for example, Gunther von Hagens performed an autopsy on Channel 4 in 2002, it recalled the days when innovative, offensive, morally debatable TV was the station's forte.
It's easy to misremember Channel 4 as consisting of a string of pearls that has been replaced by tat. Once there was The Comic Strip Presents, Father Ted, The Tube, A Very British Coup, Queer As Folk, Ali G, Traffik, not to mention some of the movies for which its cinematic arm, Film Four, was responsible. There were cunning imports such as Friends and Sex and the City, though whether the millions shelled out on them was justified in terms of the station's remit is another matter.
But there are few things more unfair than cherry-picking from 25 years of schedules and contrasting those fruits with today's duds and disgraces. For there were many duds before (Max Headroom, Ibiza Uncovered, Rise, The Girlie Show and more besides).
And there are, Maggie Brown argues, great Channel 4 programmes today. She cites Michael Winterbottom's The Road to Guantanamo, Longford (tracing the peer's relationship with Myra Hindley), Death of a President (imagining the assassination of George Bush), A Very Social Secretary (featuring David Blunkett's dalliance with Kimberley Quinn), and the new teen drama Skins. She doesn't even mention Paul Abbott's Shameless, nor the fact that Chris Morris is soon to (fingers crossed) cause widespread offence with a new Brass Eye about suicide bombers.
In any case, duds are tolerable so long as they are part of a vision that stresses innovation. This, however, is what some fear has disappeared. "If they had kept their faith with their experimental R&D role, they would have kept the faith with everything else," says Anthony Smith. " But they're not looking for talent at the end of Morecambe pier or looking for school leavers making videos the way they have never been made before. They have put themselves in a position where they can't afford to fail - and so they do."
I requested interviews with Andy Duncan and Kevin Lygo to discuss these issues, but neither was available. Duncan, though, argued in his New Statesman media lecture last summer that Channel 4 remains innovative, particularly in the heartland of its public service brief - education - where he argued his channel was as ground-breaking as the Open University had been in the 60s. "This is not just through television but through websites that develop practical and intellectual skills and off-air activities that stretch the educational value of on-screen material."
One problem may be that Channel 4 now regards itself as a brand. In his lecture, Duncan suggested that brand value made the station singular. It wasn't weighed down with institutional baggage like the BBC; it was younger and cooler than ITV, and not part of a global media conglomerate. He said: "Our unique public/private status - with neither shareholders or governments to please - gives us precious freedom to go where others can't or won't."
But do they? Channel 4 no longer makes programmes for minorities, because it wants to bring audiences together rather than segment them. "Location Location Location," Duncan said, "should appeal as much to the black viewer as to anyone else." Or indeed as little.
Channel 4 certainly has to reconfigure itself for new times. Legwarmers are not the last word; 2007 is not 1982. Channel 4 has far more than three competitors. Among those reconfigurations, the most crucial is that Channel 4 no longer believes in the paternalistic Reithian ethos whereby programme-makers give viewers what they presume is good for them. The station's former chief executive, Michael Jackson, called such Reithian telly a "redundant piece of voodoo" - a view Duncan himself endorsed in his lecture.
But something like that discredited voodoo, bizarrely, is still at the heart of what Channel 4 does. Isaacs pointed out that Jamie Oliver's shows for the station have often explicitly told viewers what is good for them. The same is true of Property Ladder, You Are What You Eat and How Clean Is Your House, the lifestyle shows that for many define Channel 4 today. The problem seems to be this: all of these didactic shows have a very narrow perspective on what is good for their viewers. They are Reith Lite: presumptuous without being especially educative or innovative.
And yet, maybe Channel 4's recent wobbles and its replacement of Reithian paternalism with a different kind of public broadcasting are understandable in a dizzying new media world. It is, after all, a world filled with scary things like cash-and-carry content warehouses, on-demand media, SkyPlus, podcasts and Nicky Hambleton-Jones.
It's all very confusing, no doubt, but one thing is certain: if Vanessa Feltz and Paul Daniels arguing in the magician's marital bed is the solution, Channel 4 doesn't understand the problem.
They care about tv ratings rather than the people suffering on shows, such a big brother.
posted by Sawan at 1:50 PM
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