How Channel 4 lost its way

For two decades, Channel 4 was the most exciting thing on British TV. Launched under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government 40 years ago as a commercially-funded, publicly-owned alternative to the BBC, it introduced us to Football Italia, gave us such pioneering, unique dramas such as GBH, and, with Brookside, redefined the soap opera.

In many ways, the channel was the perfect British TV station: it combined shopkeeper entrepreneurialism and a fondness for the arts with some slightly risqué pranks. It saved, and then rebuilt, the British film industry. It launched the careers of hundreds of writers, comedians, musicians and presenters. It made the Paralympics into a prime-time hit, attracting close to 30 million viewers for Tokyo 2020.

There was game show Countdown, the first programme broadcast on the channel’s launch in 1982; Desmond’s, one of the country’s first black sitcoms; The Comic Strip Presents…, which introduced alternative comedy to a wide audience; live coverage of the Tour de France; early evening music show The Tube. The Tube! What bliss it was in that dawn to be alive when chart-topping bands jammed live while weirdos dressed as robots pulled dance moves in the studio audience.

Later, there was the anarchy of The Big Breakfast, the beautiful weirdness of comedy such as Father Ted, Black Books and Spaced, and the startling innovation of factual programmes like Wife Swap. It also grew its own stars, giving Sacha Baron-Cohen, Kirstie Allsopp, Derren Brown and many, many more their first proper platform.

And then there are the movies. It is hard to overstate just how woeful the British film industry was when the channel launched. Since then it has backed the likes of Shaun of the Dead, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Howards End, Trainspotting, 12 Years a Slave and still had enough edge to garner 13 nominations at the 2019 Oscars – roughly the same as Netflix and Fox Searchlight. All of this without costing the taxpayer a penny –something that Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries didn’t discover until November last year.

“The unprecedented thing about Channel 4 was that it basically took, and still takes, money from advertisers and funnels it directly to independent production companies that Channel 4 doesn’t own,” says Tom Harrington, media analyst at Enders Analysis. “It also had risk-taking and diversity of opinion written into its remit. 

“The problem is, what makes Channel 4 special is not economically defensible. If you asked any media company if they’d commission It’s a Sin, they’d say yes because it was a huge hit. The point of Channel 4 is all the risk-taking shows that no one watched. If you see what the people who made those shows did next, that’s where the value is. It’s about the failures that went on to create success.”

Take Sex Education, the Netflix drama about teenage sexual intimacy. The production company Eleven Films owes its existence to Channel 4. Co-founders Jamie Campbell and Joel Wilson started out making prank documentaries for Robert Popper, creator of sitcom Friday Night Dinner, who was running the independent film and video department at Channel 4 in 2001, charged with finding and championing new talent.

They set up Eleven Films working out of their respective living rooms to manage the economics of production, work with other people and steer their careers towards scripted shows. Their first commission, 2009’s Cast Offs, was funded by Channel 4’s disability budget – usually allotted to factual films. The duo pitched a mockumentary about six disabled people on a remote island for a reality show, Channel 4 introduced them to Jack Thorne, gave them a budget of £110,000 an episode, and the result was Bafta-nominated.

Sex Education was pitched to Netflix in 2017 and six days after it launched (two years later), it was heading for more than 40 million viewers within its first month. In 2020, Sony bought a majority stake in the company, but, says Campbell, “we wouldn’t be where we are without Channel 4”.

It is this that needs to be protected: the small fry and the messy stragglers. It’s easy to argue that the station lost its way when looking at the high-profile shows. Indeed, the big successes may have been the biggest problem for the station. The huge ratings for reality show Big Brother, which launched in 2000, became a curse for the channel – albeit, not for the channel’s advertisers – and this coincided with the erosion of standout shows, such as documentary strand Cutting Edge and the arts show Without Walls.

You could almost see the decline of Brookside, Phil Redmond’s Liverpool soap, as running in tandem with the erosion of the channel’s principles. What started as a gritty, politically-committed, but always exciting soap degenerated into an issue-of-the-week ratings-chaser, with storylines becoming less and less plausible.

In the public imagination, particularly among older viewers, Channel 4 now stands for something a bit prurient, a bit Generation Z, and is probably best encapsulated by the gruesome naturist dating game show Naked Attraction. For a channel with a public service remit, you have to wonder what sort of service this is actually providing. In fact, the public service element is a current mystery. If you exclude Channel 4 News, there is very little on the channel that is educational – at least in the more conventional sense of the word.

But outrage and indignation can mean losing sight of some brilliant programming. Its shows for the disabled still lead the way. Derry Girls – a sitcom about a Catholic girls’ school in 1990s Northern Ireland – is a thing of joy soon to be lost to us, with the third and final series premiering on Tuesday. It’s a Sin, Russell T Davies’s 1980s-set Aids drama, leads the nominations in the forthcoming Bafta awards. Then there is Gogglebox, which reveals an unforced Britishness that you would not get on any other channel – and most particularly, not on any streaming service: Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon have no time for eccentric couples from small county towns bickering over obscure brands of local biscuits. So the channel may have lost its way, but a TV landscape without it would be bleak indeed.

And it’s the streamers that illustrate how selling the channel off without a strong remit would destroy everything. 

“No one will buy Channel 4 for its terrestrial frequency,” says Ed Waller, editor-in-chief of C21, the TV trade bible. “TV channels are closing down around the world. Disney closed 30 channels internationally in 2020 and 100 in 2021. The only successful terrestrial broadcasters are streamers with a legacy terrestrial business. The value in Channel 4 is in its brand – and, for potential UK buyers, that rests in its remit.”

If, on the other hand, the channel were to be bought by a US media giant, Waller believes such a buyer would try to strip out the channel’s remit and follow the route of Channel 5, which uses part of its airtime as a shop window for owner Paramount’s pay TV and subscription offerings – showing a few episodes of a show, then driving viewers to part with cash.

“Channel 4’s name might fit into a portfolio of channels using its brand to drive people to a streaming service, but that’s not worth the £1 billion the Government is hoping for,” says Waller.

This would be a disaster. The expected buyer for Channel 4, at time of going to press, is American media giant Comcast, which owns Sky, NBC, Nickelodeon, and the streaming service Peacock, which launches in the UK this summer, bringing NBC shows and DreamWorks animation to the streamer wars. The idea that Channel 4 would be shilling for Friends re-runs after breaking the show in the UK is too grim to contemplate.

Such a move would see a talent drain; the sale of Channel 4 to a US media giant would, for better or worse, end a specific kind of programming in the commercial sector and move it all over to the BBC. That would hugely empower the BBC, making it the National Theatre of the airwaves, the obvious go-to partners for the likes of HBO and the only British voice loud enough to be heard internationally. Advertisers, who can’t get on streamers, would lose access to the writers and actors that pass through Channel 4 on their way to Hollywood.

Harrington thinks it won’t happen. “No one would buy Channel 4 without the remit attached, and that insists on the risk-taking and diversity of opinion,” he points out.

“If ITV were to buy the station, advertisers – who oppose the sale with a passion – would launch a monopolies complaint. Because the reason for selling does have a political element, the Government might shed the wishy-washy ephemeral concepts of risk and diversity without realising that’s the point and that’s Margaret Thatcher’s biggest cultural legacy.”