David Lloyd Lecture on the Future of Channel Four. 1

DAVID LLOYD LECTURE ON THE FUTURE OF CHANNEL FOUR. 1. This time next week, at almost exactly this hour, at a club just up the road from here, a media throng will be gathering to participate in one of broadcasting’s most sacred rituals – a celebratory party. Soon the music will come escaping down the hill, in recognition of a quarter of a century of Channel 4. To the world beyond the guest list, the Channel ’s silver jubilee will no doubt prompt a wide variety of contradictory emotions:- for the Daily Mail and Associated Newspapers who let loose the psychotic Paul Johnson upon it in the 1990s to tag it ‘pornographic’ there will be frustration that the Channel demonstrated a better understanding of the taste of Middle England than they did – even to the extent of witnessing that same Paul Johnson’s son appointed as Channel 4’s chairman. And there will be other emotions too:- 2. For anyone rolled over – as they might see it – by ‘Dispatches’ in its more investigative heyday , the keen and painful re-awakening of the wounds and anguish at being found out. Candidates include South Coast Shipping for the unlawful killing of those lost in the sinking of the Marchioness; Sotheby’s for illegal art smuggling across Europe; Protestant paramilitaries for conspiracy to murder Catholics, all of these forming a ghostly choir of the guilty and damned. And public figures spoofed in a brand of comedy made all its own whether by Chris Morris in ‘Brass Eye’ or Mark Thomas or the twin identities of Borat and Ali G. All of this testimony to a Channel with real edge and social purpose. 3. And then there are the members of Mrs Thatcher’s early Cabinet who, we are told, nodded so enthusiastically at the Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw’s promise of a public service Channel that could be a genuine alternative to the BBC they so roundly detested, only to discover what Jeremy Isaacs defined that alternative to be. 4. Indeed, as one of them so disarmingly put it later, ‘when Willie said it would be an alternative we all thought he meant things like basket weaving and quilt making, nature programmes, things like that, but it turned out rather differently’. 5. It did indeed. One can only speculate on the temperature in the average Tory drawing room as , in the very first weeks of the Channel, a pole-axing anti-vivisection polemic like the Animals film wound on hour after hour from the fourth button on the TV set. 6. But for those of us who shared the Channel’s early history from the inside surprise is perhaps the over-riding emotion – surprise tinged with disappointment that the Channel has survived so long, for we can think back to the end of 1992, to the eve of Channel 4’s new stand-alone financial status, tasked with selling its own advertising space in competition with the all powerful ITV . 7. And on that eve how many advertising slots were booked to secure the Channel’s financial future ? Er, none. Not a single one. 8. And, on that same day, we commissioning editors filed into the board room to hear the country’s foremost advertising space buyer argue, logically and apparently rationally, that the newly constituted Channel simply COULD NOT SUCCEED. Back then, when she predicted financial oblivion for the Channel, how many of us knew any better? But the Gods were with us. Michael Grade had hired as his first Advertising Sales Director someone who knew the subtleties of the market better than anyone else, and understood how this trick could actually be worked. And worked so well that the safety net that had been designed to bale out Channel 4 if it hit difficulties, by obliging ITV to fund the weaker Channel, actually ended up requiring Channel 4 to financially support ITV. 9. Ah, there have been moments. Predominantly today, moments of disappointment . And it is not just because I spent some eighteen years in its service that Channel 4 still remains very much in my blood. For let us not forget what Willie Whitelaw actually brought to pass; with that British genius for inventing and evolving singular public institutions, Channel 4 was to be the world’s first ever publisher/broadcaster, enjoying a wholly different structure from that of the monoliths of the BBC or ITV. 10. And, from the outset, Channel 4 had this unique structural advantage:- it could tap the creative energies of a large and versatile if initially fledgling independent production sector, offering ideas across every programme genre. And thus equipped it would have the capacity , beyond everything else ,to surprise us. Of course the process would, and did take time to mature – and learning how to gate-keep and finesse such a dynamic torrent of ideas would itself require its own learning curve. But the new structure was rightly expected to move the creative goalposts, to innovate as a matter of culture and to occupy the creative vanguard. A public broadcaster – albeit commercially funded – with a public service mission, whose own attitude could be expected to compete with the BBC and ITV and to energise the expectations and ambitions of British television as a whole. 11. But that, frankly, is not the Channel we could describe now. The Channel we witness now, for all that it may be in celebratory and party mood , is a timid institution by comparison whose schedule reads as part of the PROBLEM of British television rather than its salvation, a Channel, in short, that has survived for so long only by the forfeiture of its principle and its purpose. But it’s worse than that: it’s unclear to me whether anyone at the Channel today, in its management or on its board, even possesses the beginnings of any knowledge or understanding to be able to bring a perspective to the Channel’s current position in the context of its very special history and potential. Certainly, they show no public sign of this necessary introspection. All the more reason, I believe, to rain on the Channel’s anniversary parade. Without far-reaching change, of both structure and personnel, it is my belief that the Channel can not recover its proper purpose, can not re-kindle a solution to the present malaise of British broadcasting and will be unlikely to provide much of a starting point for the next phase of Ofcom’s Public Service Broadcasting review. 12. Cast an eye over the main Channel’s schedule most weekday nights. Once Channel 4 News is out of the way we struggle through yards and yards of documentary formats or narrative features. You know the ones I mean : I refer to them only by their generic intent rather than their precise titles – ‘How Crap is your House ?’, ‘How Crap is Your House - Home or Away ?’ , ‘How to Look Naked For Ever’, ‘Loudmouth Twerps Can Cook’, ‘Can you Shag Ragged ?’. It is not so much the sheer banality of much of this formatting which appals, as the sheer predictability and inconsequence that is integral to their design. And isn’t it the ultimate insult to the founding ethics of Channel 4, founded as it was on the capacity to surprise us. For these formats are predicated on happy endings, even in the most unlikely of circumstances. Why even the noodle who set up an Indian Restaurant in the Ardeche had to be seen to succeed in his venture. My God, who ever thought we might yearn for the return of the docusoap , formulaic maybe , but at least able to admit reverses and genuine dramatic tension. And don’t you long for the day when a woman who has been up for rejuvenation looks in the mirror and exclaims ‘But I’m ruined. This plastic surgery has been a disaster. I look 103!’ Wouldn’t that at least allow us to come away from a night’s viewing of Channel 4 and judge that something, just anything had happened that might be of significance, something memorable, something important even. And it is not as if these all too predictable formats deliver knock-out audience share, with the Channel, I’m told, in recent months struggling to hit 8% on most nights. 13. The orthodox account of how the Channel got into its present dismal pickle is best found in a series of recent articles in the pages of the Media Guardian and I interpolate from them as follows: Ofcom, mindful of its financial modelling which shows the Channel’s revenue stream looking decidedly dodgy come digital switchover, appoints as chairman Luke Johnson to bring an entrepreneurial eye to the post. He in his turn when looking for a replacement Chief Executive for the rapidly departing Mark Thompson, goes beyond the usual senior programme executives, and most particularly, the traditional appointee – the then Director of BBC Television, in favour of a marketing man recently arrived in broadcasting from Corporate giant Unilever and, at the prompting of Greg Dyke, selects Andy Duncan. And the rest, so the story goes, is pear-shaped . But – this little narrative, while it may have the merit of joining up the known dots, suffers for me in that, to my certain knowledge, there are more dots. 14. For instance, to be fair to Luke Johnson – and which of us would not strive even to go way beyond the requirements of the Ofcom code to be fair to Luke Johnson? – he will have known , if the board possesses any continuity of knowledge or shared history (and if not, what are they there for ?) he will have known that this would not have been the first time they would have ventured outside the small cluster of senior terrestrial programme executives for a chief executive.

Load more