Learning on ScreenHistories of Channel 4
Meanwhile Brown’s story, very much written in the present, charts the breadth of Channel 4’s innovations, its inevitable failures, its slow but steady growth and its coming of age, in greater detail and with a surer historical grasp. For her, the removal of ITV’s ‘big brotherly’ protection heralded the beginning of its loss of nerve, while its resistance to pressure for privatisation showed the strength of purpose it retained. Michael Grade brought a new sense of realism to scheduling policy with the aim of building audience loyalty by establishing familiarity. Michael Jackson’s tenure in charge saw the advent of commercial divisions with the formation of 4Ventures. Mark Thompson’s instinct was toward potential merger with Channel Five, while Andy Duncan’s (since 2004) has been promoting the range of new digital platforms. And, all the while, the presence of Ofcom looms large. But, as Brown points out, the company’s losses of 2001 were a genuine shock the reverberations of which remain. One commercial response has been the unashamed pursuit of the youth audience, predicated upon the success of Big Brother and its clones. Yet in so-doing real innovation has suffered, and the remit to cater for diverse audiences has largely been forgotten. The only risk-taking seems to involve pushing to its limits the successful formula of reality TV. And look where that strategy landed them last year.
Future uncertainties return us, like the Golden Bowl, to the original fault-line, between public service values and the economic determinants of the marketplace. Fortunately, for the historian, the main task is to tell it like it was. And both narratives succeed in this. Yet for all their worth as historical accounts, enlivened by the personalities involved, neither the journalist nor the academic considers the longer view which this 25th anniversary invites in terms of cultural analysis. It may be the case, with hindsight, that far from creating a natural home for dissident voices of the 1980s, Channel 4’s role in British broadcasting will be viewed as essentially hegemonic: a radical project which has had the conservative effect of incorporating dissent. In this way, its long-term impact has been pluralist rather than oppositional; in the end, the market always wins. And Baroness Thatcher herself would no doubt raise a glass to that.
As to its legacy, two things surely stand out. The first must be the far-reaching influence Channel 4’s ‘publishing house’ structure has had on the independent production sector (even to its own detriment). The second is the range of innovation in television aesthetics which has enhanced production style (in actuality programming, set design, camera mobility and modes of address) across the networks.
Channel 4 was the unlikely progeny of Conservative politicians and liberal intellectuals; as such, it was marked at birth. If, in its first quarter century, it has never satisfactorily resolved its Jekyll and Hyde identity crisis, it has, as both these books ably demonstrate, changed the face of television in the UK.
Justin Smith
E-mail: justin.smith@port.ac.uk
Channel 4 and British Film Culture: www.c4film.co.uk
