A Licence to be Different: The Story of Channel 4 by Maggie Brown (BFI Publishing, October 2007), 368 pages, ISBN: 9781844572052 (paperback), £16.99; ISBN: 978-1844572045 (hardback), £50.00
Channel 4: The Early Years and the Jeremy Isaacs Legacy by Dorothy Hobson (I.B. Tauris, October 2007), 228 pages, ISBN: 978-1845116132 (paperback), £15.99
About the Author: Justin Smith is principal lecturer and subject leader for Film Studies, University of Portsmouth. His publications include monograph, Withnail and Us: Cult Films and Film Cults in British Cinema, 1968-86 (I. B. Tauris, 2010) and (with Sue Harper) British Film Culture in the 1970s: The Boundaries of Pleasure (Edinburgh University Press, 2011). He is the Principal Investigator on the Channel 4 and British Film Culture project.
The Channel 4 story has been told before. In 1982, producer Stephen Lambert (then a research student at Oxford), wrote a scholarly account which heralded the arrival of the newest kid on the broadcasting block: Channel Four: Television with a Difference? That survey of its origins, published by the BFI, was complemented by what was subtitled ‘An alternative report’: What’s this Channel Four? (Comedia, 1982), edited by media historians Simon Blanchard and David Morley. If one documented quite precisely the terms of the difficult gestation, the other provided the clarion call to seize the opportunity this broadcasting revolution presented. Yet both titles raised questions – questions which, though apposite, couldn’t possibly be answered at the time. Now, twenty-six years later, they can.
Journalist Maggie Brown and academic Dorothy Hobson share the prevalent view that the innovation Channel 4 pioneered, and the influence it had upon what Hobson terms the ‘ecology of broadcasting’, has also led, in our present deregulated, multi-channel climate, to the very loss of that which made it distinctive. Brown highlights the 2007 Celebrity Big Brother débâcle as evidence of this demise – one which, paradoxically, was the product of the Channel’s own irreconcilable divisions. From where did that identity crisis stem?
For Hobson, Channel 4’s sense of identity was synonymous with the character and vision of its first Chief Executive. Jeremy Isaacs’ single-minded determination, his astute appointment of the first commissioning editors and senior managers (many from non-television backgrounds), and his shrewd handling of critics from ITV, the IBA and the media at large, nurtured and sustained the Channel’s distinctive personality. Notwithstanding the breadth of her interviews with key personnel and her ethnographic study of audience groups, Hobson’s narrative itself wanes as Isaacs’ star leaves the firmament. This is a pity, because the early years don’t really end with Isaacs, but rather with the 1990 Broadcasting Act, which ushered in the satellite era and permitted Channel 4 to sell its own advertising space from 1993. It is often difficult in a medium famously defined as ‘flow’ to define the ‘commercial breaks’, but there should certainly be one here. The one after that, also missing from Hobson’s account, was the departure of Michael Grade in 1997, and the abolition of Channel 4’s original funding formula the following year. To that extent her story, while intimate and engaged, doesn’t go far enough.
Maggie Brown is shrewder about the Isaacs legacy, well aware that his achievement was to hold together aspects of the Channel’s identity, which were divided all along. She articulates that split in personality terms between Isaacs and the first Chairman Edmund Dell, who was always concerned that the Channel’s alternative should not mean merely oppositional. Brown casts Lord Attenborough, the first Deputy Chairman, as wise counsellor and peacemaker here and Justin Dukes, Managing Director, as level-headed pragmatist. Brown’s narrative is journalistic, revelling in ego-driven tussles over policy and the Machiavellian shenanigans of succession. But it is the more thorough and readable for that. And she was clearly blessed with a better proof-reader than Hobson. Her account, while purporting to deploy a range of methodologies, eschews the social scientist’s ‘usual attempts at objective research’, yet feels the need on occasion to make amends by recourse to bolt-on theory. While this approach, where it works best, enables her to achieve a certain intimacy with her subject, too often it feels like twenty-year old material being given a lifestyle makeover.
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