Is something in the wind? The last couple of days have seen two stinging attacks on Channel 4 being published by ex-chiefs and executives.
Yesterday, in the Sunday Telegraph, Sir Jeremy Isaacs, the channel’s first chief executive, said that the channel relies too much on such programmes as Big Brother and How Clean Is Your House. And former chairman Sir Michael Bishop also raised questions about the schedule’s quality.
It’s not surprising that Big Brother gets it – Ofcom was recently (PDF) pretty vehement in its distaste in the way things were handled in parts of the last series (and we’re talking about a body that can’t really express itself in questions of taste). But this extract of an interview with Vanni Treves, who stood down as chairman this year, says it all:
“I remember giving Tim [Gardam, then director of programmes] – for whom I have the most colossal respect – grief about Big Brother. I said: ‘Tim, why are we going on with Big Brother? I know it’s very successful but it is crap.’
“Tim said: ‘Ah yes, but what you have to understand is it is very high-quality crap.’”
Then today, another piece appeared in the Evening Standard by Anthony Smith, a founding member of Channel 4’s board. Sadly, I can’t find the piece on the Evening Standard’s website. It’s quoted extensively in the Mediaguardian piece (free reg. reqd.) but here it is anyway…:
Who could have foreseen Big Brother back then? When Channel 4 came into existence, 22 years ago next week, its remit was to be innovative, alternative, risky. Then as now, it was commercial but not obliged to make profits. Its programme makers were licensed to be bold – and had the space to fail.
Yet today the people who run Channel 4 are no longer inspired by this unique remit. They are by no means lacking in distinction as professionals. But they look to succeed by the same criteria as the rest of television – by audience size and advertiser loyalty. Commissioning editors have turned into we-know-best producers like the BBC and ITV of old: they no longer simply let ideas come in and judge from the best. The result is more property shows, My Breasts Are Too Big, and of course, Big Brother 5.
What bothers me is not that such programmes are tasteless though they sometimes are. It’s that they are as boring, predictable and safe as most of the rest of commercial TV. Channel 4 is in danger of solidifying into exactly the creative sclerosis and timidity that it was set up to challenge.
C4 came into existence because it was becoming apparent in the 1970s that the nose-to-nose competition between the existing channels had become stultifying to the point of being morally unacceptable. The ‘duopoly’ of BBC and ITV was a pair of millstones which inhibited or shunned new people and fresh ideas.
So C4 was given – and retains – a structure and a function different from all other channels. Its role was to invest in undiscovered talent, and to employ it to amuse, shock, gratify, confirm, undermine. Its remit was not to succeed but to try, in interesting ways.
And for a long time, C4 fulfilled that remit brilliantly – even if, by its very nature, patchily. Yesterday’s daring TV quickly becomes the mainstream: it is easy to forget just how much C4 changed British TV.
In the 1980s and 90s, for example, it broke new ground for soaps with Brookside. And from Brookside to Queer as Folk, it transformed the portrayal of lesbians and gays in TV. Some of its sports output was truly pathbreaking. It pioneered the making of single dramas. And it constantly pushed the boundaries of comedy, from the Comic Strip to Father Ted to Ali G.
Where are those programmes’ counterparts today? Where is the will to innovate against the commercial conventional wisdom? That is what we are now in danger of losing.
I do not stand with those who harrumph at everything C4 puts out – and there have been plenty of them right from the start. Today, even amid the mass of imported American sitcoms, property programmes, voyeuristic reality shows and quizzes, there are programmes which delight and inform.
You cannot criticise Channel 4 News, unsurpassed on UK television for its intelligence and balance – together with offshoots like Unreported World.
Then there is C4’s commitment to history, evidenced currently in David Starkey’s Monarchy series, which promises to change the whole way we look at this institution. Meanwhile Wife Swap International is completely remit-justifying, deeply penetrating the national psyche through its subjects’ unconscious self-revelations.
But at the same time there is the cynical side of C4. Take the property
programmes: on Monday, Place in the Sun, on Tuesday, Location, Location, Location, on Wednesday, Property Ladder. The whole genre has become suffused with inauthenticity, bred of a desire to hook the attention of the under-35s. These could appear on any channel at any time.
Then there are the missing programmes and abandoned genres. I lament the absence of many of the programmes that almost no one watched, like the experimental regional programmes, from which many of today’s first-rate producers sprang. Even more serious is the abandonment of FilmFour, the Channel’s most important single contribution to the culture of this country.
In part the decline has been a response to real issues. C4 realised it had to cater more effectively for younger viewers than it did in the early years
– yet it failed to think deeply enough about what would interest them. It took the easy way out: hence Porn Valley, Wife for William, and the more appalling abominations of Big Brother.
Of course there is scope for some of this in an innovative or experimental C4. I would have no objection to some of it if it was truly original. But it has damaged the whole public vision of C4. And it will get worse: Big Brother 6 will have to come up with something even more egregiously titillating than its predecessors if it is to continue, like them, single-handedly to lift C4’s audience by several percentage points.
Were C4’s original remit alive in the minds of those responsible, Big Brother would have disappeared. It is no longer experimental or interesting or enlightening – if it ever was. But it remains because it is highly profitable.
The response of C4’s bosses to such criticisms will be to say that that was then and this is now – a different age in which all the pressures of society and the TV industry are transformed. What worked in the 1980s will not work a quarter of a century later.
I agree. The whole idea of C4 was that it should be constantly changing. Indeed it would help fulfil its original purpose if, as in the 1980s, senior staff stayed a few years, presented their most original ideas, and moved on.
But institutions, like people, need to know where they come from in order to see where to go. The whole unique privilege of C4 is based upon an instruction from Parliament to be different, not to be rich; to serve the society, to catalyse rather than to compete head on.
Instead, C4 is becoming tawdry and repetitive. The whole enterprise, if it does not look back to its origins, is destined to slip into the hands of the privatisers – or the owners of Channel Five. The tragedy of that would be much greater than endless new editions of Big Brother. It would be the extinguishing of the greatest creative catalyst in British broadcasting of the last 25 years.
I’ve got to say that I agree with nearly every word of that. Channel 4 News is excellent, even though I don’t get to see it nearly enough since it’s on at 7pm. They also do programmes like the currently airing The White House For Sale, which is the kind of strong programming I expect in primetime. And at the weekend, they showed a two hour documentary on The Minoans, although I’d imagine that was really a two part documentary burnt through in one go. But just how do they plan on topping themselves for Big Brother 6?