A channel of low-rent whims

CHANNEL 4 is unique among the world's television companies in that it is obliged to watch its competitors in order to be utterly different from them. When first set up, it was charged by Parliament to appeal to "tastes and interests" not catered for by other channels, to encourage innovation and experiment in the form and content of programmes and to acquire "a distinctive character of its own". The first chief executive began his letter of application for the job by announcing nine priorities, of which the first was "to encourage innovation across the whole range of programmes". The others included providing a platform for the widest possible range of opinion and making programmes of special appeal to particular audiences.

Under its three successive head men (Isaacs, Grade and Jackson), the channel has always been a success, but is it any longer the right kind of success?

The answer is that Channel 4 is floundering. Look at the schedules and find me one programme that contributes towards a "distinctive" character. Of course, there is a scattering of good stuff but where are the programmes for uncatered "tastes and interests"?

Big Brother is the only innovation, dubious and unoriginal though that project was in its purposes and values.

Fifteen years ago, Channel 4 was on the air for 15 hours a day, compared with 24 today. Yet, on 11 September 1985 there were three hours of the SDP's Annual Conference, an old railwayman looking back, an episode of a TV history of the world, a programme narrated by James Earl Jones about institutionalised injustice, a repeat of a Pinter play, an episode from the amazing film Berlin Alexander- platz, a discussion about an upcoming RSC production of Cyrano de Bergerac by the director and the star and an interview with Doris Lessing by Hermione Lee. And there was still room for Racing from Doncaster and much else.

All one hears nowadays from young would-be producers is a tale of endless stonewalling from commissioning editors whose eyes are transfixed not even by the BBC's programmes but by those of Channel 5, which has become Channel 4's most serious rival, apparently.

One commissioning editor, Alan Hayling, has used, perhaps unconsciously, a telling phrase when he said in early 1999 that he was "looking for intelligent tabloid stuff". A year later, perhaps these schedules are the results. The very phrase expresses so much of what has gone wrong: the search for innovation that braved shocking the audience has subtly changed into a quest for salacious material slightly more mind-seeking than the stuff on Channel 5. Ibiza Uncovered, followed by Greece Uncovered. The Channel has simply ceased to want in any sense to appeal to all levels of taste and intellect. The commissioning editors have ceased to think of themselves as receivers of ideas, so intent are they to find people to carry out their own low-rent whims.

There is no longer a sense of there being a collective endeavour behind it, a kind of college common room endlessly trying to rebuild the world, but rather a Vatican of commissioning editors serving a Pope-like chief executive mesmerised by the arcana of television, not in the world that television is supposed to be dealing with.

As one very able and successful independent said to me this week: "Working for Channel 4 has just become a job - I came into this as a vocation." It is significant that he has never said this to the people who ought to be hearing it - for it is they who have all of the patronage. There are some who think that the channel is simply fattening itself for privatisation, something that I believe, rightly or wrongly, is not on the New Labour agenda and would only, in fact, happen over Chris Smith's dead body. But this could be what happens if the channel does not stop and think very hard indeed about itself.

Surely there are people around who still believe in Channel 4's real purposes, rather than in the pursuit of television for its own sake.

Copyright 2000
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