YE TO EYE Beatrix Campbell discovers how independent tv has grown up Making The Grade Michael Grade is chief executive of Channel Four This will sound ruder than it is: who do you think you are? You're running Channel Four, and you have a history in television, those are your dynastic origins. How would you describe your position in the world? Well, first and foremost I think I'm a good professional broadcaster. I have entrepreneurial skills which are very suited to the kind of job I do. I'm not a programme-maker. I see myself really as an impresario. In essence, what has stood me in good stead all these years in broadcasting is spotting good people and waiting for them to come forward with what inter- ests them; what obsessions, what pas- sions they have in translating those into programmes. If you try and interpret the public mood, you become a bit of a slave. I'm for the artist speaking to the audience, backing them and letting them do what they want. Which is the antithesis of Jeremy [Isaacs], who is a programme-maker at heart, one of the great programme-makers of the last 20 years. I've thought about this a lot, I doubt that I could have started this channel. I think my skill has been to take the legacy and build on it. What have you built? A structure that will last. The channel has lost its amateur status and become a grown-up, professional outfit. There was a notion that that would mean conservatism, getting rid of the minority programmes. In fact you didn't. I don't know why people have said that, because I introduced the very first strand of minority television, which was on LWT, when we created GayLife. So where did that fear come from then? No idea. People only notice EastEnders, Wogan, the row about Dallas, all that kind of stuff. But the battles I had at the BBC over The Monocled Mutineer and Tumbledown1. I was the one backing those, I was the one that put The Singing Detective on at nine o'clock on a Sunday night. The channel was a hit. And to come in and turn it upside down would make no sense, that would be bad mana- gement. But, we now have to conso- lidate, and I decided that that would have to be a gentle process, not a sort of Birtian revolution. Why? Because there was a lot I admired about the channel which you lose at your peril. 4 MARXISM TODAY JUNE 1990 EYE TO EYE The channel is very '80s' - a loose, people's attention in the way that you Do you take responsibility for them as an pluralistic relationship with producers, and wouldn't if the programmes just went active dad? What's the price you pay when in a sense its audience as well. What can out over a period of 16 or 20 weeks. you're a boss and you're in an obsessive, that become? What's your project in the You'd never get noticed. There's an aw- self-regarding industry like this? 90s? ful lot of television now, screaming for You have to maintain a balance or else What the independent sector brings you the public's attention, and you've got to you go crazy. is diversity. There is no institutional cul- be that much smarter at creating 'event' ture here, which there is at the BBC, and television, a sense of occasion. Mahab- But presumably that balance isn't some- that's what we have to trade on in the harata, for example, which I'm particu- thing that's encouraged either by the dis- next 10 years. I also think that we must be larly pleased with. It was a triumph, as a cipline of the job, or by a culture that the place where programmes get made piece of work. assumes that men don't have to take on because nobody else wants to make them, responsibility for those things because nobody else would make them. One of the things which was in people's women do. What do you think about that? minds was the means by which the channel I was a shocker when I was younger. Are you making any at the minute that was going to be bankrolled, was going to Pipe and slippers. It's too painful even nobody else would make, that only you change, and people felt quite spooked by to talk about. But that was the culture I would back or only you would nurture? all that. Given how things have turned out, was brought up in. Well, obviously Eleventh Hour - I does the channel take enough advantage, couldn't imagine Alan Fountain's output vis-a-vis the advertisers, of the viewing Would you expect it all to be done for you at the BBC. Eleventh Hour is an integral constituency? You've got resourced viewers. now? part of the channel. For parts of the schedule, yes. We don't Now I certainly wouldn't. I cook and run sell the airtime, so it's not in our power the flat. Who do you spend your time with here, are yet, but beyond 1993 we will be. We your commissioning editors people who are were adamant from the beginning that And what do you watch on tv? part of your daily life? The impression is we couldn't retain the breadth of the News. I relish the trend towards more that they're not. remit if we didn't have some security of analysis and context in news pro- 1 They haven't been as much part of my income . That would enable us to resist grammes. Traditional current affairs life as I would like, because for the last the temptation, either from share- departments haven't quite figured out year or so it has been more or less taken holders or advertisers, to turn the chan- how to adjust their agenda to meet that up by the future of the channel. nel into a sort of a yuppie channel. For shift. The first thing I said to the com- there are large chunks of the remit of missioning editors when I met them is little or no interest to the advertisers. So what do you think they should do? that I would not commission one pro- We never shifted from this, that we had I can't figure it out. I think Dispatches gramme. It's up to them, they're the to have some form of secure income has found its way into corners of the people in the job. I don't spend enough that would protect those areas. agenda that others haven't, and Pano- time watching programmes, I will get I think the safety net gives us the rama from time to time hits the right back to that now. What I've been trying ability to do the Mahabharata, Out On note. But the problem is that the last to do in the meantime is to improve the Tuesday, After Midnight, to keep runn- year has been a nightmare, because whole budgeting system. At present it's ing Channel Four News at 7pm, and you're probably on a two or three week completely out of sync, lots of marvel- everything else that in the commercial turnaround in current affairs. By the lous programmes thrown at the screen, world you'd actually have to look at. time your film's ready for the air, the going by with nobody noticing them. People strive for a definition of public- whole situation has changed. They've got to be nursed and planned, service broadcasting, but I always think you've got to plan the showcase and it's very simple. Public-service broad- What do you feel about what's happened in schedules. casting is creating programmes totally the world? 1989! free of any commercial consideration. Knocked 1968 into a cocked hat. ITV have been able to do that because of That was what people would associate with the monopoly. you - skills of scheduling and marketing. Did you feel excited? Things like moving documentaries to Oh it was just breathtaking. What re- nine o'clock, opening up single play Do you want to stay here? mains to be seen is how far to the right strands, and going three nights a week Yes. each country, each nationality will go. with Brookside, which is more obvious. What kind of social democracy will We've beefed up popular entertainment Tell us something about you as a human settle down. at six-thirty with an hour of comedy being. One of the things that besets people strands, which helps the news readers in television is that they're obsessed by it. They've gone much further to the right and boosts our share. And we've tried to Are you? than had been expected. compete, in the audience-grabbing sense, I'm very ashamed to say that most of I have to be very careful talking about after 10 o'clock. The Soviet season, for my close friends, probably all of my politics. I have to live with all parties. example, was an enormous success. close friends, are in the industry. So you're not going to tell us what you One of the interesting things about Channel What about your own family? Do you take think about the prospect of the next gen- Four is that it is pluralistic in its pro- responsibility for the day-to-day running eral election, the prospects of Thatcherism gramming: plug in when you feel like it.