Having sold its soul to the devil in return for ratings, can Channel 4 find that creative spark again, asks Donald Clarke
We all know people who began adult life as angry radicals and then gradually mutated into cynical, middle-aged shareowners with large mortgages and flexible consciences. Channel 4, which celebrates its 25th birthday on November 2nd, could well be personified in such a manner.
When the station sloped into existence in 1982, even the Guardian - then as now, the chief bulletin board for the sandal-wearing classes - seemed faintly taken aback by its determination to remain right-on. "Are you sexually liberated, socially aware and politically concerned?" Nancy Banks-Smith, the newspaper's television critic, asked. "Do you wear legwarmers? No? Then take your sticky hands off my nice new, shiny channel."
Sticky hands? Such is the channel's current reputation that, at times, one is tempted to don surgical gloves before selecting it on the remote control. At the beginning of this year, an outbreak of casual racism on Celebrity Big Brother - Jade Goody said awful things to Shilpa Shetty after an argument concerning roast chicken - managed to simultaneously invigorate ailing ratings, while bringing all kinds of opprobrium down on the station's bosses. Tessa Jowell, then the British culture secretary, pursed her mouth and declared her disgust at "racism being presented as entertainment".
A subsequent report by Ofcom, the UK's communications regulatory body, uncovered further racist remarks made in the house, but not originally included in the broadcasts, and Channel 4 was forced to offer a belated apology. At the time, however, Kevin Lygo, Channel 4's director of television, seemed to find the whole furore something of a lark.
"This was in danger of being the most boring BB that we'd had in many years - maybe ever - and we were thinking, 'oh dear, what can we do?'" he said. "And then suddenly, from the cooking of a chicken going wrong this argument erupted, which was taken on by the media and erupted into this extraordinary story."
Channel 4 did, to be fair, immediately cancel its proposed Wank Week. But Gillian McKeith, the absurd pseudo-nutritionist, recently forced to stop misleading the public by calling herself a doctor, continued to poke through citizens' ordure in You Are What You Eat. Wife Swap recommenced its grisly experiments in social engineering. An unreliable rant entitled The Great Global Warming Swindle was denounced by one of the scientists quoted. Then, a few months ago, during the channel's Virgin Week, we were presented with the gruesome vista of a young, hitherto pure Englishman heaving away atop a Dutch sex therapist. Who's got sticky fingers now?
THINGS WERE ONCE so different. Channel 4 is an unusual beast. The station is entirely self-funded, but is in the control of a state body - the Channel Four Television Corporation - and, as such, is required to satisfy a remit of public-service obligations. These dictate that the channel should demonstrate innovation, appeal to the tastes of a culturally diverse society, exhibit a distinctive character and "include programmes of an educational nature and other programmes of educative value".
There was, of course, nothing new about the notion of public-service broadcasting in 1982. Lord Reith, the first director general of the BBC, had, some 60 years previously, defined the principles to which responsible state-sanctioned broadcasters should adhere.
The BBC's notion of what's good for you did, however, seem to emanate from the minds of tweedy Fabians who, although vaguely concerned for the working classes, remained most at home in Oxbridge common rooms or basement folk clubs.
Channel 4, with its dedication to allowing ethnic minorities a voice and its tolerance for the language of protest, was very much a creation of angrier minds from the redbrick universities. Jeremy Isaacs, the station's first chief executive, was, it is true, cultural royalty - he produced The World at War for ITV and went on to run The Royal Opera House - but he always allowed younger, more disruptive talents the opportunity to launch creative disorder.
The Tube, the chaotic music show fronted by Jools Holland and Paula Yates, exemplified much of what was best about the station in its early days. To this point, pop shows had either been jolly, chart-based affairs - Top of The Pops, Supersonic - presented by professional gibberers such as Noel Edmonds or Dave Lee Travis, or sombre, chin-rubbing exercises in progressive tedium such as The Old Grey Whistle Test. Here, finally, was a show presented by people who seemed every bit as wired as the musicians they introduced. Its influence on the medium has been incalculable.
For all that, Channel 4's ratings were, at first, appalling and, in a cruel reference to its market share, it came to be christened "Channel 4 Per Cent".
Appropriately enough for a station aimed at minorities, it was, apparently, watched by only a tiny minority of the population. As time progressed, however, the station found a way of accommodating its social conscience with the needs and desires of the mainstream. Brookside, the shouty Liverpudlian soap opera, managed to cover issues of race, class and sexuality - need we mention that lesbian kiss? - while gradually accumulating viewing figures of which ITV would have been proud. Coronation Street, originally somewhat twee, eventually paid accidental tribute to Brookside's influence by introducing a transsexual character.
Meanwhile, Channel Four Films (later renamed FilmFour) set about reinvigorating the British film industry by sponsoring such movies as My Beautiful Laundrette, The Crying Game and The Draughtsman's Contract. The superb drama series Traffik debuted on the station, as did Alan Bleasedale's GBH, Vic Reeves' Big Night Out and the mighty Father Ted. Countdown, the first show broadcast on Channel 4, is still pottering along in the custard cream slot.
BY THE MID-1990S, the channel had turned the corner and, without yielding too much of its soul to commerce, had developed a singular identity. This was all the more impressive when you consider that, heralding a change in orthodoxy that would be embraced by most mainstream channels in Britain and Ireland, all the station's comedies, dramas and gameshows were delivered by independent production companies.
Yet the seeds of the station's current decline had already been sown. In an act of slightly belated Thatcherite reupholstering, the 1990 Broadcasting Act abolished the Independent Broadcasting Authority, of which Channel 4 was a subsidiary, and edged the station that little bit closer towards the marketplace.
From 1993, when the changes properly set in, Channel 4 began to develop a new addiction to purchasing popular US series for their primetime slots. Friends and ER might be perfectly decent shows, but did they really belong at the centre of Channel 4's evening schedule? Worse was to follow. In 2000, Channel 4, which then still retained some of its radical credentials, commissioned a Dutch production company named Endemol to produce a British version of a show called Big Brother.
It is strange to recall that in the weeks leading up to its launch, most newspapers - well, the broadsheets at least - wrote about the show as if it were some avant-garde adventure in practical anthropology. This was Channel 4, after all.
The galloping ratings success of Big Brother appeared to spread a kind of poison throughout the network. The channel that once proudly wallowed in contrariness now seemed to have abandoned itself totally to chasing ratings and advertising. A stomach-turning spew of home improvement shows and, more nauseating still, property pornography, colonised the early evening while, each afternoon, Noel Edmonds rose from the crypt to inflict Deal or No Deal on blameless slugabeds.
MAYBE WE ONLY have ourselves to blame. Perhaps younger audiences - and that has always been the channel's key demographic - are less politically engaged and more trivially minded than the donkey-jacketed, CND-supporting students who once huddled around The Tube.
That is surely too pessimistic a view. As the recent, deeply encouraging renaissance in US television drama has demonstrated, modern audiences are quite prepared to engage with challenging, complex programming if they think it worthwhile. Indeed, imports such as The Sopranos and The West Wing have, along with the perennially excellent Channel 4 News and eccentric hits such as Shameless and Peep Show, offered the station's viewers a few nuggets of intelligence among the recent avalanche of filth.
At any rate, Channel 4's mandarins are now finally being forced to address the decline. This summer, Kevin Lygo, mindful that his station may require government funding to assist the shift to digital broadcasting, announced a "creative overhaul" that may well lose the station some viewers and some advertising revenue.
Brat Camp and (hallelujah!) You Are What You Eat will be scrapped to make way for fresh drama and more challenging documentaries.
"A consequence of these decisions means that our ratings will most certainly fall," Lygo said. "But then, look around - everybody's ratings are falling. The alternative is more of the same and that is not what Channel 4 is about."
Best of all, Celebrity Big Brother, that vile jamboree of emotional torture, is to go the way of all flesh. However will the tabloids fill their pages next January? Why is it in the news? After drifting towards crass commercialism with Big Brother and having seen the Richard and Judy show caught up in the scandal over misleading television phone-ins, the station is set to celebrate an unhappy 25th birthday.
Most appealing characteristic Fantastic loyalty to Countdown, the afternoon quiz show that seems to have been around since the first Sack of Rome.
Least appealing characteristic Until recently, unnecessary loyalty to the appalling "Dr" Gillian McKeith, a supposed nutritionist more interested in poo than vegetables.
Most likely to say "By revealing the racism at the heart of British society, the terrible chicken incident in Celebrity Big Brother confirms we are still committed to our public-service remit." Other insane, unsustainable evasions.
Least likely to say "If you see the devil, could you remind him to forward that receipt for our soul"