Learning on ScreenChannel 4: Thirty Years Later
The fifth panel was devoted to Channel 4’s support for new talent. Kate Iles spoke about her involvement in a unique new talent scheme sponsored by Lloyd’s Bank – the Lloyd’s Bank Film Challenge. Aimed squarely at the bank’s target market – young people aged 14 to 25 – the scheme gave prime-time C4 slots for six short films. The Film Challenge ran for five years, giving 30 director-writer pairings the opportunity to have their ideas brought to the small screen, facilitated by generous production budgets, and launched the careers of Simon Beaufoy and David McKenzie amongst others. Hannah Andrews discussed the FilmFour Lab, Film4’s experimental low-budget arm. The Lab was founded in 1998 and initially drew inspiration from developments in digital technology and the inspirational ethos of the Dogme movement, as Andrews demonstrated. Finally, Laura Mayne’s paper narrated the complex and fortuitous story of the team behind some FilmFour classics of the 90s, charting how Shallow Grave and Trainspotting came to be made, and how they were supported by the channel thanks to the permissive attitude of Commissioning Editor David Aukin.
Laura Mayne and Phil Wickham.
The sixth and final panel was devoted to notions of independence. Firstly John Wyver spoke about what he saw as the failure of the film avant-garde of the 1970s and 1980s to attract sufficient interest from television audiences and executives alike – in an increasingly competitive media landscape – for such work to have been given sustained support into the 1990s and beyond. Although focusing on political rather than aesthetic concerns, Steve Presence’s paper challenged the received wisdom about the dwindling of radical content on C4 during the 1990s, citing his discovery of documentary series such as Critical Eye, Global Image and War Cries, and the role of radical media collectives such as Despite TV. Finally, Clive Nwonka delivered an impassioned paper which argued that C4’s famous remit to cater for minorities groups and interests not served by other broadcasters has long been abandoned, and called for support for the next generation of black filmmaking talent (asking ‘where are today’s Isaac Juliens and Julian Henriques’?)
Following up from the focus on the Midlands and Wales during the session on regional film culture on the previous day, Rod Stoneman (former C4 commissioning editor for Independent Film & Video) introduced two workshop productions, one made to document the predicaments and life histories of a group of miners on holiday in South Wales (Rumours at the Miners’ Fortnight), the other made in collaboration with a group of unemployed young people in Telford (Giro: Is This the Modern World?).
Finally, the conference concluded with a plenary discussion on Channel 4’s role in supporting regional and independent film culture in the North East of England, with case studies on Amber Films (James Leggott and Graeme Rigby) and Northern Film & Media’s (NFM) initiative The Artist’s Cut (featuring NFM’s Roxy Bramley, script consultant Kate Leys and film producer Samm Haillay).
The Channel 4 and British Film Culture project welcomes feedback on the conference, on their blog articles, and on the project as a whole – visit www.c4film.co.uk. Planned publications from the project will include special issues of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (in 2013) and the Journal of British Cinema and Television (in 2014), and a comprehensive, illustrated filmography of Film4 since 1982.
Dr Ieuan Franklin
See also these related Viewfinder articles and reviews:
- Withnail and Us
- Channel 4: Education with a Difference
- Histories of Channel 4
- Channel 4 and Educational Programming
- Channel 4’s first 25 years
- Walter – the first ‘Film on Four’
