Learning on ScreenChannel 4: Education with a Difference
Closely allied to the concept of education is the equally mercurial concept of public service broadcasting. At Channel 4 neither was ever seen as a separate element within its philosophy. The idea was that every programme would fulfill a need in some members of the audience. The concept of public service which Jeremy Isaacs chose to create was a mixture of the innovation in content and form, a new type of scheduling where viewers were expected to find a programme which they liked, watch it, and they return later when another gained their interest. However, their most influential form of public service was to expand the range of programmes that were offered to the audience. It is important to remember that Channel 4 was not charged to make up for the inadequacies of the two BBC channels although they were often judged by these criteria. It was the audience not addressed by ITV which they had to serve. They chose to expand their potential audience by targeting specifically young people, women, multi-cultural minorities and genre specific interest groups like music, arts and minority sports and the hour long news programme. In this way they provided programmes which had not been shown before – The Tube, Whatever You Want, Black On Black and Eastern Eye, the arts programmes Four American Composers, Voices, The Draughtsman’s Contract, American Football, Basketball and the un-surpassed Channel Four News. All of these and many others provided public service programming because at that time were definitely not being produced on ITV. In this sense the channel set the standards and the expansion of genres as well as attracting new audiences for the commercial sector and its advertisers.
The legacy of the channel is perhaps not in terms of its educational or any conventional sense of public service and a mission to educate, inform and entertain. Rather it is in the way that it has taught its audience to accept ‘difference’ in terms of television programmes. While it was at first rejected by many of the audience, over the years it became accepted and the notion of difference faded from the way the audience perceived its output. Its attraction, strange and threatening at first, became with the passing of time to be accepted and acceptable. Judged now by its contemporary audience it is seen as speaking to them and offering programmes that they chose to watch. This may be the youth offerings on T4, the range of digital channels or the contemporary lifestyle programmes that attract the 40-year-old audience that has grown up with the channel and now sees it as their channel of first choice.
Dorothy Hobson
