Learning on ScreenChannel 4: Thirty Years Later
The second panel explored regional film culture, although two of the papers were actually about the film culture of a nation, rather than a region – the Welsh films supported by S4C. Elain Price outlined the ‘seemingly impossible task’ S4C faced of attempting to cater to both a (predominantly rural and traditional) minority Welsh-speaking audience and an urban audience largely sympathetic with C4’s pluralistic project. In comparison, C4 had the freedom to pursue a policy of treating Welsh-language films just like any foreign-language film from around the world (the channel was a great supporter of what would now be termed ‘World Cinema’). Kate Woodward explored the issue of language and Welsh film, highlighting the intriguing trend for shooting films ‘back-to-back’ in Welsh and English, and imaginative approaches to European co-productions and the attempt to ‘internationalize’ Welsh films. Roger Shannon, Paul Long and Yasmeen Baig-Clifford then gave a fascinating presentation about the Birmingham Film and Video Workshop (BFVW), one of the workshops franchised under the ‘Workshop Declaration’ agreed between C4, the British Film Institute, the Regional Arts Associations, and the (broadcasting union) ACTT. We heard about the political context surrounding the workshop movement, the participatory production ethos of the workshop, and, finally, how Vivid, a Birmingham-based arts organization who themselves adopted the workshop model in terms of their adherence to equal pay and a collective ethos, have digitized the archive of the BFVW and have conducted a definitive oral history of the workshop.
The third panel of the day tackled Channel 4’s involvement in print culture: Holly Aylett explained C4’s influence on (and early sponsoring of) Vertigo (a magazine devoted to independent film and video now maintained by the Close Up Film Centre), and Linda Kaye and Rachael Keene discussed their work in the digitization of Channel 4’s weekly Press Information Packs (see above). Like Channel 4, Vertigo stood for independence, innovation and internationalism – unlike Channel 4, Vertigo had an ‘i’ in its name which stood for these things! Kaye and Keene’s paper illustrated exactly how close collaboration can take place between researchers, archivists and software programmers in creating resources for the digital humanities, drawing on their recent work for the Channel 4 and British Film Culture project.
Day 2
Kicking off the second day of the conference, the fourth panel examined film programming and programmes on film. Sheldon Hall gave a witty paper on C4’s bold and eclectic approach to film acquisition and scheduling, which could be summed up poetically as follows (apologies to WW):
Bliss it was in that dawn of Channel 4 (for a film buff) to be alive,
To own a VCR was very heaven.
Channel 4 employed two very different film buyers – Leslie Halliwell, who favoured British and WW2 films, and Derek Hill, who specialized in European and international art cinema. Halliwell was given a freedom he had not had as a buyer at ITV, and Hill was given virtually an open cheque book; in a note on ‘Future acquisition policy’ in a report submitted to Jeremy Isaacs (dated 8 January 1982) he wrote: ‘There seem to be two schools of thought: those who believe I’ve acquired enough for our first ten years; and those who think I’ll have to be given Channel Five.’ Paul Kerr then gave an insightful paper which drew upon his own experiences in producing over a dozen one-off film programmes for the Channel, as well as executive producing the weekly film magazine show Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, during the 1990s and 2000s. Kerr’s paper chronicled the trend toward the rationalization of production and scheduling that was characteristic of this era. This led to more mainstream and Hollywood-oriented film programmes being commissioned, and eventually the wide-spread availability of DVD extras was seen by broadcasters as making film programme superfluous in a multi-channel, multi-platform era. The discussion that followed the papers centred on the paradoxical abundance of films broadcast on television and the narrowing of their range and diversity.
