Channel 4: Thirty Years Later

Posted on: 3 January 2013

Day 1

Professor John Hill (Royal Holloway), co-editor of Big Picture, Small Screen (1996), set the scene with a keynote address that launched the conference and mapped out four key phases in the development of Channel 4’s relationship with UK film. In doing so it also gave a valuable synoptic overview of British film policy, from the Annan Report (1977) to the BFI’s Opening Our Eyes (2012).

Channel 4, with its introduction of a post-Fordist model of decentralized independent production, was aptly dubbed by Hill ‘a child of Thatcher’, but it emerged as an unruly child, with its commitment (mandated under the 1980 Broadcasting Act) to experiment and innovation (play!) undergirded by these very independent production companies and film/video workshops.

Under Thatcher the British film industry was exposed to the harsh winds of competition with the abolition of the British film quota, the NFFC and the Eady Levy, and ultimately it was Channel 4 that stepped up to fill the gap in terms of subsidy. In 1982 (when Channel 4 was launched) only 4% of UK film production was financed by television; by the end of the 1980s it was 40%, a remarkable transformation of the landscape.

The first panel, entitled ‘Exploding the Canon’ expanded on Hill’s thoughts about the ‘socio-cultural provenance’ of Film on Four, with papers by Andy Willis, Felicia Chan and Claire Monk. Willis and Chan showcased two films funded by C4 which dealt with the experiences of Chinese communities in Britain – Ping Pong (1986) and Soursweet (1988). Partly due to the ‘canonization’ of films like Laundrette, these films have been consigned to relative obscurity, despite their originality and ground-breaking nature (Ping Pong is thought to be the first film by a British Chinese director to gain a theatrical release). Chan and Willis explained that the East Asia diaspora has tended to be overlooked by British film culture whereas Chinese visual artists have not suffered the same marginalization. Claire Monk explored the absence of heritage and period films in the Film4 brand, due to the channel’s association with radical and social realist film. Monk elaborated the ‘discursive framing’ by C4 of Maurice, a film that C4 funded which is now widely discussed in Internet fan circles but which was at first ignored and then treated ironically by the channel (e.g. in an edition of the LGBT series Out on Tuesday called White Flannel).

Prof. John Ellis then introduced a programme of archival screenings from Large Door Productions’ (the independent production company Ellis co-founded) landmark series Visions (1982-85), which gave a full sense of the diversity of film content it was able to broadcast during that period, and featured the late Marc Karlin’s highly personal and poignant essay on the British film industry, A Dream from the Bath (1985).