Dorothy Hobson looks at the legacy of Channel 4's eduational output and the role played by the late Naomi Sargant.
About the Author: Dorothy Hobson is Senior Lecturer & Course Leader at the University of Wolverhampton and the author of Soap Opera (2002) and Channel 4: The Early Years and the Jeremy Isaacs Legacy (2007). She is currently researching a book about adolescents and the Media.
E-mail: D.P.Hobson@wlv.ac.uk
In 1982 British television had only three terrestrial channels: BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. On 2 November at 4.40 the test card faded and the long awaited fourth channel began its transmission. It was charged by Parliament to appeal to ‘tastes and interests not generally catered for by ITV’, to be ‘innovative and experimental in content and form’, and to ‘disseminate education and educational programmes’. The channel had to find new audiences and give a voice to new producers. The most significant thing about Channel 4 when it was established was that it was unlike any other television company. Its structure was based on that of book publishing and there was no in-house production, but an innovatory approach based on the concept of the commissioning editor. Jeremy Isaacs, who was the first and most significant chief executive of the channel, chose the method of operation and commissioning and the selection of both the subjects and genres that the channel would address. The choice of the new commissioning editors to work on those areas was crucial in the development of the channel.
The inclusion of education was part of the Broadcasting Act (1980) and one of Isaacs’ first appointments was Naomi Sargant as Senior Commissioning Editor for Education. It was an unusual and inspired choice. Naomi had no experience of television but vast experience of many aspects of education both as a lecturer and immediately before her appointment, as Pro-Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs at the Open University and Professor of Applied Social Research. She had experience as a member of the Advisory Council for Adult and Continuing Education and had knowledge of how people learned and she applied that intellectual vigour to the planning of her own educational output. She told me that Isaacs wanted educational programmes to be available all the year round - a utility like a water supply. Not a set of segregated or ghettoized slots, but programmes which were at convenient viewing times and which adhered to his philosophy for the genre. They believed that educational programmes should have quantity, variety, regularity and flexibility with a commitment to develop the area. Naomi also convinced Isaacs of the value of repeats in educational theory. She knew from the Open University programmes that repeating a programme gave other opportunities to view and that the commitment of an audience to educational programmes often depended on more than one opportunity to view. There were many educational programmes in the first schedule but they were not of the convention type. As Jeremy Isaacs wrote in his book Storm over Four (1989), ‘Naomi Sargant’s aim was not to equip viewers to attain academic qualifications, but to foster in them a deepening awareness of the world and of their own potential in it’.
Closely allied to the concept of education is the equally mercurial concept of public service broadcasting. At Channel 4 neither was ever seen as a separate element within its philosophy. The idea was that every programme would fulfill a need in some members of the audience. The concept of public service which Jeremy Isaacs chose to create was a mixture of the innovation in content and form, a new type of scheduling where viewers were expected to find a programme which they liked, watch it, and they return later when another gained their interest. However, their most influential form of public service was to expand the range of programmes that were offered to the audience. It is important to remember that Channel 4 was not charged to make up for the inadequacies of the two BBC channels although they were often judged by these criteria. It was the audience not addressed by ITV which they had to serve. They chose to expand their potential audience by targeting specifically young people, women, multi-cultural minorities and genre specific interest groups like music, arts and minority sports and the hour long news programme. In this way they provided programmes which had not been shown before - The Tube, Whatever You Want, Black On Black and Eastern Eye, the arts programmes Four American Composers, Voices, The Draughtsman’s Contract, American Football, Basketball and the un-surpassed Channel Four News. All of these and many others provided public service programming because at that time were definitely not being produced on ITV. In this sense the channel set the standards and the expansion of genres as well as attracting new audiences for the commercial sector and its advertisers.
The legacy of the channel is perhaps not in terms of its educational or any conventional sense of public service and a mission to educate, inform and entertain. Rather it is in the way that it has taught its audience to accept ‘difference’ in terms of television programmes. While it was at first rejected by many of the audience, over the years it became accepted and the notion of difference faded from the way the audience perceived its output. Its attraction, strange and threatening at first, became with the passing of time to be accepted and acceptable. Judged now by its contemporary audience it is seen as speaking to them and offering programmes that they chose to watch. This may be the youth offerings on T4, the range of digital channels or the contemporary lifestyle programmes that attract the 40-year-old audience that has grown up with the channel and now sees it as their channel of first choice.
Dorothy Hobson