Channel 4: A History: From Big Brother To The Great British Bake Off 9781911239864, 9781911239840

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To Michael Leapman, partner in writing.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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his book has been written over four years with the help of scores of busy people so generous with their time and advice. They include Channel 4’s former chairman, Lord (Terry) Burns, a wise man with a much prized electronic diary stretching back years, Lord (David) Puttnam, Martha Lane Fox, chief executive David Abraham, Dan Brooke (most directly involved with giving the go-ahead), Jay Hunt, Jonathan Allan, Martin Baker, Charles Gurassa and Alex Mahon. Board members Paul Potts and Stewart Purvis helped contextualise events. Kevin Lygo, Julian Bellamy and others contributed to the pre-2010 chapters, as did Andy Duncan, former chief executive. Those giving interviews and advice on news and current affairs included Dorothy Byrne, the news team at Channel 4, and Channel 4 News editor Ben de Pear with Jon Snow, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Cathy Newman, Rachel Jupp, Michael Crick, Jon Laurence and ITN’s now former chief executive John Hardie. Commissioners and former staffers who contributed and advised on the Film4 chapter included Tessa Ross, the inspiration for so much of Film4’s output, her successors David Kosse, Daniel Battsek and long-serving Sue Bruce-Smith. In drama and comedy Piers Wenger, Shane Allen, Phil Clarke, Nerys Evans and Fiona McDermott were so helpful, as were leading independent producers PACT chief executive John McVay and Catriona Lewis, who started the robust Indie Club. Former Culture Secretary John Whittingdale and Ray Gallagher his advisor were key to the privatisation chapter. Jon Gisby, Bob Harris, Sanjeevan Bala, Richard Davidson-Houston and Sarah Rose explained the challenges of the on-demand services and constant fine-tuning behind 4oD and All4. On relocation Ruth Pitt directed and introduced me to the key decision-makers in Leeds. Channel 4’s move into Paralympics was retraced by Alison Walsh, Ade Adepitan, Lord (Chris) Holmes and sports suppliers IMG Graham Fry and his team. The patient ally behind the scenes, providing essential support on programmes, speeches and illustrations was the kindly Rosie Gleeson, Channel 4 archivist, a source of encouragement and fount of good sense, as she pointed me time and again in the right direction. Channel 4 lawyers, (the former) Prash Naik and Dominic Harrison, were sensible facilitators.

Every chapter went forwards and back between me and Michael Leapman, who polished and cut the prose. Rebecca Barden, the Bloomsbury publisher, was encouraging all the way and calm and professional. Many thanks, too for the editorial help from Peter Bruce. Jeremy Kimberlin, Channel 4 Head of Rights was heroic; he did a great deal of the slog and negotiation, despite the fact he was dealing with the stresses of relocation and a heavy Channel 4 workload. James MacLeod, running the corporate press office, was attentive. Writing is a lonely business. Thank you to everyone, including those who booked and rebooked the appointments and made sure I attended so many screenings and events: you all have helped me with this book. I hope when you pick up a copy you are pleased, as I am, to have been involved. Maggie Brown

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INTRODUCTION

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n the 1980s a small group of inventive people muddled and improvised their way through the launch of Channel 4, from a warren of small offices on Charlotte Street, a short walk from Oxford Street and Soho. They were led by a brilliant maverick – Jeremy Isaacs. I witnessed the ups and downs of experimental programmes and struggling ambitions both as an amused viewer and as a young journalist, getting to grips with the broadcasting industry. It contrasted vividly in tone, scale, informality and naughtiness with the BBC and ITV. There was no tradition of setting up a new broadcaster for anyone to draw on. They made it up as they went along. Visiting the first independent producers I noted the smart cars outside the makeshift offices of those serving this quirky publisher–broadcaster, which in turn seemed to be run by commissioners often indulging their own passions. Here were small businessmen in tune with Thatcher’s enterprise Britain. This was a nascent creative industry run on ideas, ambition and deal-making, in the first flush cottage stage, with Channel 4 as its midwife. Channel 4 and its mission to do things differently some of the time inserted itself into the nation’s popular culture thanks to a small window of opportunity in the 1980s, just before Britain experienced the explosion of satellite channels and pay television pioneered principally by Rupert Murdoch, followed by the rise of the Internet and mobiles as distributors. A decade later, when the 1990s arrived, it was licked into commercial shape by Michael Grade’s team who established an advertising sales force and a more competitive programme schedule. This was so successful the excess cash funded Channel 4’s migration in 1994 from hand-to-mouth offices to iconic headquarters, in hindsight probably too close to Westminster. It also ventured – as did the other public service broadcasters – into digital channel expansion with Film4, E4 and More4, all supported by advertising not subscription. In 2007 the book I authored about this story of the first twenty-five years of Channel 4 was published. Hot coals were heaped on my head by some for the effort. This was a task I had decided on as early as 1997. I was finding it strange that

as an outsider I remembered more about the development of this small, tough, quirky broadcaster than some of the people now running it, let alone the public and politicians. There was little public understanding of its simple model: it takes in money from advertising and converts it into programmes according to a heavily regulated formula, called a remit. One of the traditions of Channel 4 is that the creative team mostly changes with each new regime, which leads to a company culture of naturally looking forward, not back. It was thanks to businessman Luke Johnson, chair of Channel 4 between 2004 and 2010 that this first book was written. No commercial publisher wanted it. We devised a formula. The history was facilitated by Channel 4, but the account was independent. After the somewhat hostile reaction something interesting happened. The book was being read. People kept approaching me to discuss points. I even taught a class for American media students. When a new chairman and chief executive arrived and the team changed in 2010–11, I found it had become a required read for incomers. And so, after much discussion, work began on a second follow-up, what happened next, from 2007 onwards. This second book covers a dramatic period for Britain’s still-never-dull broadcaster. It opens with the realisation its biggest money-spinner, Big Brother, had become a toxic asset and would have to be discarded. That triggered an attempt by a now insecure Channel 4 to compensate by drumming up financial support from the BBC or some other partnership – because it was almost totally tied to the fortunes of the advertising market. The begging bowl was eventually brushed aside after some painful contortions. No one believed Channel 4’s claim it faced a funding gap of £100–200 million in the near future. The high pay it awarded its top team in particular attracted ongoing criticism. Channel 4’s self-help plans, which ran alongside the begging, included an illfated attempt to diversify into commercial radio. But it did start a bespoke catch-up service, 4oD, a little ahead of other public service broadcasters. This could have helped form the basis of a Netflix-style national video streaming service. But it was stopped as anti-competitive. Instead it formed the basis for its own big push into crunching audience registration data and personalised advertising, allowing 4oD to morph into the All4 platform and Channel 4 to begin lessening its dependency on traditional 30-second adverts, which was a key to its future. But it did not solve its by now complete dependency on advertising sources. In 2008 the financial crisis and recession hit Channel 4 hard and fast and redundancies and cuts to the programme budget undermined investment in new programmes for the near future. The decision not to renew the Big Brother contract was made too late, in the summer of 2009, on the cliff edge. The dysfunction of the board was profound under Luke Johnson, and chief executive Andy Duncan was brutally sacked, the only one so far in the channel’s

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history. Ofcom moved fast to make sure an experienced new chairman, Terry Burns, replaced Johnson. Duncan received a big pay-off including a secret extra sum to compensate for his treatment. The cream of Channel 4’s creative team led by Kevin Lygo quit in 2010 and went on to prosper and shepherd ITV into a growth decade. But things stabilised. Both creative programme renewal and financial renewal were required. New chief executive David Abraham possessed a money-making gene and boosted the corporation’s sales stake in the advertising market. He tried and came close to buying Channel 5. This might have been a swift way to bolster Channel 4 and its remit of offering a range of public service programmes, by running the two in tandem, with the trashier shows including Big Brother on Five. But Express publisher Richard Desmond won with a knock-out cash bid. The Burns/Abraham regime was also rocked by the suicide of a high-flying commissioner. All was not well within the supposedly progressive and liberal channel. The culture needed fixing, too. The Abraham regime after 2014 faced privatisation, the most serious challenge to its publicly-owned status, which became a serious possibility after the Conservatives won a majority in the 2015 general election. It was thwarted by deft lobbying led by a Channel 4 executive who was a scion of a grand five-generation Tory family. But it remained a political football, under pressure to substantially relocate outside London, which finally started to take place in 2019, with a new national headquarters in Leeds. Channel 4 from 2011 till 2017 was driven by its ambitious director of content, Jay Hunt, whose piercing intelligence, aggression and bold initiatives mesmerised all who dealt with her. She became the empress of the broadcaster. Nothing was sacred from review, including Channel 4 News and Film4 or television chefs, as the schedules were analysed and success in peak-time TV sought. After a rocky start hits started to flow, as televising the Paralympics of 2012 restored a public service sheen to Channel 4. A range of fly-on-the-wall factual programmes and Gogglebox in 2013 heralded new audience pleasers alongside evergreens including Grand Designs, Location, Location, Location and Countdown. Channel 4 News remained at 7pm. The much-loved 1980s animation The Snowman had an inspired Christmas follow-up with The Snowman and the Snowdog which led on to We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. It is impossible to capture the entirety of a broadcaster’s activity in a book. What stands out is the survival of an apparently vulnerable operation whose programmes are all bought in, and whose successes can be snatched away by better-funded rivals, even as it still functions some of the time as a research and development unit within British television. Channel 4 retaliated with Hunt’s biggest coup, buying up The Great British Bake Off to bulk up its mainstream audiences in 2017, expanding its success with spin-offs that provided something of the same dependable commercial shield as

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Big Brother for a time, but for a mainstream audience. In 2020 it poached another established hit called Taskmaster which had contributed to the fortunes of digital channel Dave and seemingly claimed the rights for a licence to do what it takes to survive. But a feature of the 2015–20 period was a renewed bid to privatise it and a belief by Conservative governments, above all Boris Johnson’s that it had breached its duty impartiality in news and current affairs. Just as it was moving towards middle age and a 40th anniversary in 2022 it was hit by the most serious crisis of all, the Covid-19 global pandemic of 2020 provoking recession. Advertising halved in the months that followed the UK’s lockdown leading to swift massive cuts: the programme budget was cut by a quarter. Channel 4 argued its response proved a degree of resilience in the short term, but past experience suggests such shocks have long repercussions. So this book ends with Channel 4 as an independently run, publicly owned broadcaster with a raft of public service obligations roped into a remit, without the barrier of a paywall to keep viewers out, and with the freedom to strike alliances as it sees fit and the agility due to size to move swiftly. It is riding two horses at the same time, one foot planted on its broadcast channels, another on its future, All4 and related streaming services. It has been a privilege to spend so much time with it. Writing this book stretched out longer than expected because of the haggling over its future and relocation decisions which may provide an influx of new thinking and inspiration. It certainly needs to constantly examine its mission. For now I sign off in the hope it will continue to find a way to survive.

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obody doubted that the Australian-born Jay Hunt had ambitions to succeed her patron and principal ally, David Abraham, as chief executive. She had been responsible for masterminding and promoting numerous successful programmes and series during a time of fluctuating fortunes – political, financial and artistic – for this unique broadcaster, publicly owned but almost totally reliant on chronically unstable income from advertising. As its chief creative officer between 2011 and 2017 she had gained the wary respect of some of her colleagues and programme suppliers after an initial period of deep hostility, though others believed it was wrong that one person, however brilliant, had so much control. “It had the ring of a totalitarian regime,” said one senior colleague. Her credentials received a timely boost in September 2016 when she landed the channel’s most spectacular acquisition, The Great British Bake Off, which was completely her project but which was destined to be her last. It had been running for seven phenomenally successful years, first on BBC2 and then on BBC1, where 14 million viewers watched its final outing the following November. Aware of increasing tensions between the BBC and the show’s originators – Richard McKerrow and his wife Anna Beattie – Hunt had asked the sales director, Jonathan Allan, six months earlier to assess how much advertising and sponsorship it could attract if prised away from the BBC. The answer was plenty. As so often in television, personal contacts counted. Hunt and her husband, Ian Blandford, lived close to the McKerrows in the expensive streets that splayed out from Clapham Common in south London, and both families had school-age children. McKerrow, a former commissioning editor at 4, had supplied programming to Hunt in her previous job, when she ran BBC1. The £75m three-year deal was greeted with dismay among those who thought that Bake Off’s cosiness and essential Britishness made the BBC its natural home. The tabloids made a meal of it, cooking up a storm of indignation and punning headlines: “C4 batters Beeb to whisk away Bake Off” … “Fans’ fury as show is lost over dough”. For a time, almost up to its first series in 2017, Channel 4 ran the risk of becoming public enemy number one. Awkward questions came down like hailstones on canvas. How could poaching an established hit be reconciled with its

Jay Hunt (Adam Lawrence/Channel 4)

remit to be innovative and different? The former director general of the BBC, Lord Birt, and James Purnell, a former Labour politician who had taken on a senior role at the BBC, led the crescendo of criticism, urging tighter regulation of the channel to curb such perceived improper initiatives. There was discontent among the show’s stars, too. Mary Berry, at 81 the doyenne of the judges, immediately decided that she would not work with the new regime, and her path to the exit was quickly followed by Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc, who had provided the comic relief. The chef Paul Hollywood was the only principal talent to stay with the show, with a contract worth £1.2 million. Hunt was mocked by ITV for naively buying a tent in a field. She had hurried to reassure fans in an article in the Daily Telegraph: “The Great British Bake Off will have a safe home. The show of soggy bottoms and good crumb will be made by exactly the same team who have always made it. We love it just the way it is.” As for McKerrow, he said 4 was the perfect new home for the show because it would protect and nurture it. “I think Bake Off would have died without a move to Channel 4,” he observed later. But the transfer was also about money, specifically about a realistic price for a hit, reflecting not the production cost plus a profit margin but factoring in its ability to attract millions of viewers. The BBC wanted to continue paying a simple tariff for factual programmes, around £200,000 an hour. But huge audiences meant

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CHANNEL 4: A HISTORY

costs had gone up, with the need for greater security and higher fees for its stars. A commercially-funded channel could calculate its value by racking up income from sponsorship and advertising, plus increasing the range of spin-off programmes including a junior version, throughout the year. In the end the transfer was seamless, with Prue Leith proving a worthy successor to Berry. But the imperative behind the deal exposed the insecurity of a publicly-owned broadcaster now accused of turning away from the priorities embedded at its conception: to do things differently, find new talent, back innovation and be the dash of alternative sauce in the mix of British life. Channel 4 had an Achilles heel that became increasingly evident after 1993, when the model changed and it became directly responsible for raising its income from advertising, exposing it to raw commercial pressures. It is the one public service broadcaster almost totally reliant on advertising revenues; to the tune of £94 in every £100 of income by 2018. As a publisher–broadcaster designed to support the independent production sector it had very limited options for building up capital by way of programme back catalogues. At best it received only a 15 percent share of any intellectual property revenue flowing from programmes it funded. The BBC had the licence fee, its studios making programmes and a commercial division with global scale; ITV had been snapping up production companies in the UK and the USA, to expand its studios and diversify, to a point where advertising income and programmes were in balance. ITV2 was encroaching on E4’s youth audience with Love Island. Channel 5 was now owned by Viacom, a New York-based American media group, and starting to benefit from extra investment in its programming. Of other challengers, Sky raked in subscription and advertising, and the streamers – led by Netflix and Amazon – were encroaching. Channel 4 was thus driven to be the most fiercely commercial of the bunch: in order to survive it had to fight for its portion of viewers and commercial impacts, and that included regularly providing uplifting new stories of upcoming programmes to the media buyers who went on to fill the advertising minutes on which it all depended. The channel needed cast-iron profit-makers to pay for the worthy programmes that its remit demanded. That was why Hunt had targeted Bake Off. She knew she could never match the BBC’s scale of audience but she wanted a good slice of it. She argued that Channel 4 had performed a public service by ensuring the programme was freely available to all viewers for years to come, not lost behind a paywall to a subscription service such as Sky or Netflix. Another motive for acquiring this popular show was to draw in fresh viewers to sample other programmes – such as 24 Hours in A&E and 24 Hours in Police Custody – and give them a boost. In doing so, it would replace the previous financial anchor, Big Brother, cancelled by 4 in 2010 and transferred to Channel 5. It was also terrified that if ITV had won the Bake Off its rival for advertising revenue would become much more powerful. Hunt sat down with her commissioners and advertising executives to ensure the show would work out. She personally selected the winsome Noel Fielding

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for the jester role, paired with the quick-witted Sandi Toksvig. Once the jeering calmed down it was clear that she had known what she was paying for. In effect Channel 4 had bought intact the services of a large expert production team, who could dream up and film such extreme baking challenges as biscuit chandeliers and meringue flamingos, and insert a Channel 4 special – vegan baking week. The marquee and idyllic venue were unchanged, but the hour-long programme was extended by fifteen minutes to allow for commercial breaks. The first series in September 2017 was a triumph. Hunt had set the bar deliberately low, saying it would be a success if 3 million watched, but it averaged three times that, at 9.1 million, of whom 2.6 million were aged 16–34 – the age group that advertisers most wanted to reach. The ambitious deal could have been her passport to the chief executive post she thought she deserved. She had known for a long time that the business-oriented David Abraham, who had rescued 4 from disarray in 2010 with her help, intended to go. He would have stepped down in 2016, but he felt he should stay until he had seen off the threat of privatisation, which had hovered over the channel through most of his term of office and was not formally abandoned by the Government until the spring of 2017. Recruiting his successor was swiftly set in train. There were initially two internal candidates, both close to the Bake Off deal: Hunt and Jonathan Allan. Hunt made it through to the final three, alongside Simon Pitts, a senior ITV executive, and Alex Mahon, the outsider of the trio, who had spent seventeen years in the broadcast business at Fremantle, Talkback Thames and Elisabeth Murdoch’s Shine TV. It started to look like Hunt, who by now exerted a total grip over the broadcaster, would ride out the challengers: she had also made efforts to reach out to new programme makers outside of London, one of the central issues it faced in 2017. Abraham supported her, as she topped the shortlist in May, and her closest associates continued briefing that she was the one whose foot fitted best into the glass slipper. But on 5 June the top job went to Mahon. This should not have surprised anyone with a knowledge of 4’s history: none of its seven chief executives has been recruited from inside the company. The chairman, Charles Gurassa, himself a businessman, had picked a deal-maker as the first female chief executive. He felt she came closest to meeting the testing criteria the board had set, ranging from “a track record of innovation and risk taking” to “a deep understanding of international markets”. They were prepared to take on trust another sought-after quality: “a demonstrable understanding of the Channel 4 remit”. Following her rejection, Hunt resigned and was quickly hired by Apple TV: thus Mahon’s first key task was to find her replacement. The in-house contender was her deputy, Ralph Lee. Damian Kavanagh, controller of BBC3, was another strong candidate, while Stuart Murphy who had launched BBC3 and overseen Sky’s entertainment channels was also considered.

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But in the end Mahon chose Ian Katz, the former deputy editor of The Guardian who had moved out of newspapers four years earlier to edit BBC2’s Newsnight. He was chosen in part because Mahon recognised that she needed her most senior programme executive to be skilled at handling the inevitable editorial crises that blow up suddenly: a storm over alleged racism on Big Brother had helped undermine Abraham’s predecessor, Andy Duncan. Abraham had relied on Hunt to articulate why, for example, in Naked Attraction, people putting their genitals on display had a public value and was not remotely titillating. At The Guardian Katz had handled big investigations, including the Wikileaks release of leaked documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and diplomatic cables. He had refreshed Newsnight after the loss of Jeremy Paxman, its truculent presenter, although the respect he gained from some of his peers was not reflected in audience figures. On arrival at 4 he zeroed in on the need to restore missing or depleted elements to the channel, including live topical events and brand-defining arts, religious programmes and drama. But he was a gamble for two reasons. First, though a fast learner, he had not accrued the years of experience that the most senior broadcasters have clocked up. Second, he was seen, in the words of one disgruntled northern producer, as “someone with metropolitan London baked into his bones”. That was a timely criticism, because the other big issue that Mahon had to tackle was relocation. Part of the Government’s price for rowing back on privatisation was that the channel should move away from London – in line with the vaunted “Northern Powerhouse” strategy. It had started life in 1982 in a cramped warren of offices in 60 Charlotte Street, the choice of Sir Richard Attenborough, its deputy chairman, who liked the “not quite in Soho” location and the fact it had once been the site of the Scala theatre, where children watched Peter Pan fly over the stalls at its annual Christmas production. “We are in show business” was his motto. In 1994 the airline tycoon Sir Michael Bishop recycled 4’s advertising surplus into a secure asset, the stylish freehold headquarters in Horseferry Road, close to Westminster. Abraham had failed to reach an accord with the Government on a move that would obviously be highly unpopular with the London-based staff. In negotiations with two successive secretaries of state – Karen Bradley and Matt Hancock – Mahon found a solution. It was agreed that a new national headquarters would be established away from London; but it would be only a partial relocation because the Horseferry Road building – valued at £97 million – would be retained, and one in three jobs transferred out of the capital. The ensuing competition for a slice of Channel 4 by 33 cities and towns was conducted briskly with rules set by Mahon. There were three prizes on offer: the national headquarters and two smaller creative hubs. She was playing hard to get, asking what suitors would do in terms of office-ready buildings, communications and a creative environment that would attract relocating metropolitans. She did

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not intend to plonk the channel down in a cold media spot and take on the task of kickstarting a local production industry. A packed April 2018 meeting to explain the process to bidders was a demonstration of how much 4 was desired: a trophy worthy of tough competition. Three clear candidates emerged for the national headquarters: Leeds, Manchester/Salford and Birmingham. On 31 October Leeds was named the winner. It was hailed as the most significant media devolution since the Government had nudged the BBC in 2004 to create MediaCity UK in Salford; but in truth it was far more modest. Leeds was already the base for a large Sky digital team, as well as for Screen Yorkshire and ITV productions including Emmerdale. The new BFI (British Film Institute-run) public fund to subsidise youth and children’s content was also Leeds-based, as were a group of independent producers with a combined turnover of around £35 million. Glasgow and Bristol were to be the bridesmaids, subsidiary hubs for up to fifty regionally-based commissioners, while Manchester continued to house the sales team for regional advertising. Bristol was home already to seven of the twenty main out-of-London producers and offered easy access to the Cardiff-based Welsh group. Glasgow had five big production companies and Channel 4 already had a small office there. “In the absence of a Premier League football team in Leeds, having Channel 4 is as good as it gets,” boasted Andrew Sheldon, founder of True North, the largest of the city’s production companies. How had they pulled it off? In part by recognising 4 as a prickly organisation that had to be wooed on its own terms. Ruth Pitt, a veteran ex-BBC television industry expert and a consultant for Channel 4 based in Yorkshire, helped organise the bid. Business leaders were coached on how to speak to TV types at drinks parties, and to appreciate the informal structure of programme making. The campaign, led by Tom Riordan, chief executive of Leeds City Council, had no compunction about rubbishing the opposition. One of the key documents in the dossier submitted to Mahon delivered body punches to Birmingham – too close to London and in danger of creating a Euston–Birmingham coffee-cup-commuter culture – and to Manchester, which would have placed Channel 4 in the BBC’s shadow. It proclaimed: “This is no longer just about Leeds City Region, nor even Yorkshire – we’re now bidding on behalf of the whole East and North East.” On the first page was a cri de coeur from a Newcastle-based casting director, Camilla Fox: “The link with Channel 4 in Leeds would be a great advantage to our region. It is only an hour to Leeds on the train. Birmingham is in the south and bears no relation to the North East. Manchester is further away than London.” Kersten England, the Scots-born chief executive of Bradford Council, was also leader for innovation and growth in the Leeds City Region. “We approached this by deeply listening to the client,” she recalled.

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Quite different to working with Government – it had to work for them as a business… . It wasn’t political. One in four of our population of 550,000 in Bradford is under 18: we are the youngest city in the UK, full of international, digital natives. We are an immigrant city, with Pakistani and Bangladeshi families, business-like, international, ingenious, entrepreneurial. If C4 is born risky and wants to be inclusive in coverage this is bread and butter to us.

Risk and inclusiveness have been part of the channel’s DNA since its foundation. Approaching the end of its fourth decade, it has managed to keep to some of the ideals of its founders, while external pressures have forced it to abandon or modify others. Between 2007 and 2018 its funding model was first debated and to some extent destabilised, then called into question by a government whose ideology conflicted with much that the channel stood for. But determined leadership ensured that it achieved a degree of regeneration and has survived as a public institution catering to a minority audience, certainly – but a significant one. Just how survival was engineered, and what sacrifices had to be made to achieve it, is the theme of the following pages.

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2 NO ESCAPE FROM BIG BROTHER’S EMBRACE YET

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he 25th anniversary of Channel 4, in November 2007, was celebrated at a party at the pop-up 25 Club in St John’s Street, Clerkenwell. Guests, including the cream of the regulator Ofcom, were presented with a specially minted coin: yet the mood was far from celebratory. The reality facing the channel that November was that its crucial moneymaking machine, Big Brother, had turned toxic, threatening the reputation of a publicly owned body dedicated to a liberal view of life. The teasing by the fictional character Ali G – “Is it cos I is black?” – as he fooled gullible MPs a decade earlier on The 11 O’Clock Show, was a far cry from the explicit racism and bullying including its poster girl Jade Goody captured by Celebrity Big Brother’s spy cameras that year. The damage to the channel’s image was such that it eclipsed the many achievements in 2007 and 2008 of which it could justly be proud, ranging from the exposure of extremist preaching in mosques to a successful adaptation of the Big Brother technique to a new range of reality programmes. The Celebrity Big Brother row cruelly underlined the hybrid nature of Channel 4, the tension of being two characters under one skin. It had to be fiercely commercial to drum up funds from advertisers which supplied its income. The profitable factual and entertainment shows paid for its public service programmes headed by Channel 4 News – frequently an advertising-free zone – and current affairs, and serious documentaries which could never support themselves from advertising. It had to meet a set of requirements in a licence, monitored each year, and however understanding and accommodating Ofcom might be in difficult times, these obligations could not be brushed aside on the grounds that they were unaffordable. It was estimated by critics that roughly a third of its programme budget went on its remit/public service programming. One long-standing parliamentary adviser, Ray Gallagher, who analysed Channel 4’s model over the decade to 2017, described it as “the strangest beast, as if the National Health Service was running fast food franchises to pay for public health programmes, or a Government-owned public educator publishing chick-lit or comics to subsidise books”. 1

In tandem with the anniversary celebrations, Channel 4 began to devise a public relations recovery that would eventually surface as a policy statement entitled Next on Four. In it, the beleaguered chief executive Andy Duncan attempted to knit together its importance to society, to convince politicians it needed significant subsidy. An analysis ordered by Ofcom had suggested it could exhaust its cash reserves in 2012. Duncan was arguing that the channel needed to be futureproofed against such a funding gap – the gap between the income it could realistically expect to earn and its public service role in continuing to fully cater for a range of tastes, interests and alternative views as a publisher-broadcaster. These fears over advertising revenue and whether it was too small on its own – as ITV consolidated and multi-channel competition intensified – were first articulated by Mark Thompson, chief executive from 2002 until he resigned in 2004 to return to the BBC as director-general. This was when – along with the BBC, ITV and Channel 5 – 4 was stripped of the right to own copyright of the programmes it commissioned and financed, which were in large part handed over to their independent producers. Richard Hooper, the deputy chair of Ofcom, who oversaw the regulatory changes enshrined in the code governing this key change in 2003, reflected a decade later that it had been too draconian. “It should have included a sunset clause,” he said – to allow renegotiation and recognise that nothing is for ever. This point was also accepted by Lord (David) Currie, Ofcom’s founding chairman. “With hindsight it is surprising a deal like that prevails. It was great to give a boost to the independent sector, but maybe it doesn’t need that protection any more. I imagined it as a three or four year fix, that would be replaced, but it is still here”.2 This begging-bowl stance would become more insistent as, along with everyone else, the channel headed into deep recession from September 2008, when it was already preoccupied with the need to neutralise Big Brother. The point about Big Brother was the notion that it showed what people really do when they are cramped together in a tense atmosphere and are set challenges and temptations. It might be having sex, it could be fights, or anything in between. The 2007 clashes over how to cook a chicken between Indian film star ShiIpa Shetty and Jade Goody – herself a creation of an earlier run of the programme – had been allowed to develop into racism and bullying, and it had not been stamped out soon enough. There was a brief moment when the broadcaster’s usually smart public relations team could have doused the flames but it was missed. It caught executives “like rabbits in the headlights”, remembered Matt Baker, chief press officer at that time. “It shone an absolute light on the dysfunction at the top of Channel 4.” Put simply, the creative head, Kevin Lygo, did not step up and speak out. Instead he sidestepped and told the press office he did not want to get involved. Danny Cohen, the senior executive in charge, also fell silent and then left for the BBC. Andy Duncan, the chief executive, and Luke Johnson, the chairman,

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took over, though neither had any experience of having to make a programme decision like this, or to deal with a comparable crisis. Duncan had to be produced for the news bulletins: to Baker’s eternal regret, he allowed him to be interviewed in a crumpled polo shirt, eyes black-rimmed, instead of marching him into Hugo Boss and ordering him into a suit, shirt and tie. When the immediate storm had blown over, Lygo did hold talks with Tim Hincks, Endemol’s slick creative director, and changes were hurriedly made to the next two shows. “I knew they were under a lot of pressure,” said Hincks. “Behind the scenes, from the board, at dinner parties, nobody had anything good to say about Big Brother, apart from its being profitable.” 3 Accordingly the 2007 summer version was softened into less of a freak show – a muted outcome confirmed by audience research – while the January 2008 Celebrity Big Brother, the most valuable bit of the format, was shunted off Channel 4 to E4, the youth channel, and renamed Celebrity Big Brother – Hijack. One celebrity a day, over the 25-day run, took control of the young (18-to 21-year-old) housemates, starting with Little Britain’s Matt Lucas and ending with the Sugababes. In between, Hollyoaks actors were mixed with old-stagers such as Janet Street-Porter and the art historian Brian Sewell. This hotchpotch failed to attract a mass audience. The bemused winner – John Laughton, a young Scottish political campaigner – emerged into obscurity, denied the usual few weeks of fame, but with £50,000 as consolation prize. Only 644,000 viewers watched the final episode, compared with 5.8 million in 2007 for the infamous Celebrity Big Brother. It was a failed attempt to refresh the format in the hope people would fall back in love with Big Brother; but it was never tried again. Instead, the main Channel 4 ran its first Food Fight, a campaign against factory-farmed chickens and eggs fronted by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver. (The point was driven home as tearful guests at tables were asked to gas unwanted male chicks under see-through domes.) By now Lygo had lured the energetic Julian Bellamy back from the BBC. He had worked for eight years for 4, as commissioning editor of Big Brother in 2001, head of factual entertainment and controller of E4 before moving to BBC3 in 2006. Bellamy regarded Food Fight as one of his finest hours and displayed at home a framed copy of the front page of The Independent with the headline: “The campaign that changed the habits of a nation”. Channel 4’s first board meeting of 2008 was presented with a paper on what should happen next. The board was worried, none more so than Lord Puttnam, the deputy chairman. “Clearly Big Brother remains a sensitive programme and its future will be amongst the first questions asked when we launch our vision,” the paper said. The problem was compounded because Endemol had in 2006 negotiated a new contract, covering 2007–10. Hincks acknowledged that it was negotiated at the high-water mark of the programme’s appeal, when Channel 4 feared – justifiably, as it turned out – that ITV would make a serious bid to

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snatch it away. Under the new contract, the price paid by Channel 4 went up from £30 million a year to £70 million, a fantastic outcome for executives at Endemol UK, who would eventually reap a £50 million shared bonus at the end of the contract in 2010, which led to the purchase of a number of second homes, noted a commissioner. It meant that the channel was no longer making an estimated £100 million a year from Big Brother, but it was still profitable, as the board paper confirmed, despite a dip in audiences in response to the controversy and the shifting of more hours to E4. It remained the single highest-rated programme strand, and “helps sustain our scale in the advertising market, particularly given its 16-to 34-year-old profile”. Of the top twenty individual programmes for this group of young adults in 2007, Big Brother accounted for seventeen. It also had a halo effect, improving the schedule’s overall performance, allowing new entertainment and comedy shows to be launched in its wake, especially on Friday nights. This would be difficult to replace on the very limited resources by now available. It constituted 15 percent of Channel 4’s programming in 2007, and 39 percent of E4’s. The paper noted that this volume on Channel 4 was broadly equivalent to Coronation Street on ITV and EastEnders on BBC1, habit-forming soaps that ran for 106 hours a year. The negatives were mild by comparison. The programme was suffering a loss of younger viewers by its eighth series: only to be expected because of the known preference of the young for new shows. By page 11 of the paper the conclusion was inevitable: “We are recommending that for now we should continue with the programme as currently planned” but at a slightly lower level than in 2007. “It is still loved and watched by millions of loyal viewers.” Audience research suggested that some of the original fun needed to be brought back, to lighten up the show. From a commercial perspective it appeared that the Celebrity Big Brother row had not inflicted any particular damage: fans were still fans. The cost was to Channel 4’s reputation and public standing with opinion-formers who probably never had time to watch it anyway. Hincks said Big Brother was a cocktail of things, all in one glass. It could be shaped through the casting of housemates, extended into spin-off programmes, while new challenges and games could be added as needed. It was the ultimate flexible friendly TV monster. The board paper triggered an anguished internal debate about what to do in the longer term. On one side were the programme commissioners, who knew it had to be replaced. Ranged against them were the advertising sales team, who loved the certainty it provided. For the time being, Channel 4 stayed with Big Brother. The New Year began with a stab at adopting a jaunty mood. The chipper sales director Andy Barnes, in place for seventeen years, said in his November and December 2007 market reports that, though overall 2007 had been grim, the advertising market was up by 3 percent. “We remain quietly confident that final year ad revenue is £820 million. Portfolio share is up by 0.6 percent on 2006.” His

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confidence was well placed. Final ad revenue was £825.2 million, compared with £777.1 million in 2006. The second half of 2007 had calmed nerves. Competitors for young viewers, such as Sky, remained weak in the advertising stakes. The upbeat mood did not last. By late January 2008 Barnes advised: “We are making plans for the implications of a market decline across the whole year. … Our major risk remains a worsening in the market later this year.” That is exactly what happened. The channel was also suffering an immediate hit from the absence of Celebrity Big Brother, which had undermined its audience share, in turn affecting advertising volumes. The botched replacement, Celebrity Hijack, contributed to be the main channel’s share, falling from 8.7 percent in 2007 to 8.2 percent in 2008. Each 1 percent decline in the TV advertising market translated into £8 million of lost revenue. By June it was a 3 percent drop, approaching the annual cost of providing Channel 4 News. The only solace was that E4, More4, Film4 and 4Music and the +1 versions (collectively called the digital portfolio) were performing ahead of expectations. This was because ITV, which had 46 percent of the advertising market, was restricted by a mechanism – contracts rights renewal – checking its dominant market position by stipulating that when advertising sales contracts expired they had to be renewed on the same terms. This amounted to a protective shield for Channel 4, which held 24.7 percent of the market. Andy Duncan’s expertise in marketing enabled him to channel a significant portion of that overflow – up to £100 million a year – into its demographically-themed digital channels. Moreover, brewing throughout 2008 was a nervy debate about Channel 4’s place, as a niche broadcaster, in what pessimistic policymakers were increasingly identifying as a threatened public service broadcasting regime. This stemmed back to the 2003 Communications Act and the creation of Ofcom. One early symptom was an on-off debate about some arrangement between Channel 4 and the more lightly-regulated newcomer Channel 5, whose owners at first saw Channel 4 as potential prey. But by this point some at Channel 4 wondered whether there could be a better option: a formal and potentially lucrative link with the BBC. This ambitious idea would develop during 2008 from seeking joint venture commercial tieups with BBC Worldwide, its commercial division, to pitching for a direct subsidy from licence fee revenue. Ofcom, a creation of Tony Blair’s New Labour government, was required to undertake regular holistic reviews of public-service television, looking at how effectively the BBC and Channel 4, along with ITV and Channel 5, were delivering their remit to viewers. Overseeing it all was the founding chief executive Stephen Carter, at heart a staunch Labour supporter who had previously run the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson and the failed cable company NTL. Ofcom conducted the first three-part analysis with Tigger-style relish, its demands for evidence setting a new high bar in fact-finding. In the first report, finalised in February 2005, Ofcom’s strategy director Ed Richards envisaged a new body, a subsidised online Public Service Provider (PSP) of content. In part it was

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designed to goad traditionalists at ITV and Channel 4 into a far more ambitious involvement in the online and digital world. When Carter resigned in the summer of 2006, Richards stepped up to replace him. He had been a senior policy advisor to Tony Blair and played a key role in shaping the Communications Act which created Ofcom as a single regulator. Before that he was controller of corporate strategy at the BBC. Carter remained a powerful influence however, after a year cooling off, first as an advisor to Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, and then as a member of the House of Lords, becoming Minister for Communications, Technology and Broadcasting at the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, as well as a Minister at the Department of Culture, Media & Sport. One of the most long-winded titles imaginable! Two ambitious and high-powered strategists were trying to seize the moment to reshape the creative industries, with Channel 4 earmarked to play a key public service role alongside the BBC. But by 2008 support for the nebulous PSP was fading away, because few people understood what it was about. It had met, too, with opposition from the Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, who saw no merit in encouraging a bidding war for slices of the licence fee. Nonetheless, Channel 4’s bid, as set out in the policy document called Next on 4, was strongly influenced by the notion. The channel was also making its sprint into 4oD, its bespoke video-on-demand service – briefly a world first, having beaten the BBC iPlayer to market (see Chapter 16). Two days before Channel 4 delivered Next on 4, in March 2008, the recently promoted Richards made a speech explaining the current thinking: “The idea you can deliver public service purposes solely and exclusively through linear television is now absurd. … Now is the time for us to develop a long-term view about how best to deliver public service broadcasting in the future and ask what is the right transition path … to where we want to be.” There might, he said, be a need for significant change to the role of different organisations, different remits and “to the distribution of funding in order to strengthen the public service system”. 4 The BBC’s protected position as the sole recipient of the licence fee had already been breached, when a portion was reserved for subsidising the cost of switching household TV sets from analogue to digital by 2012. Richards went on to address the issue of Channel 4, in terms that raised the hopes of its cheerleaders: “For the first time since its inception the balancing act at the heart of a publicly-owned commercial public service broadcaster, namely Channel 4, is in question in a fundamental way. Again, it is unlikely to be a question of modest adjustment, but one that lies at the heart of the Channel 4 group and its ability to deliver its mission. The time is ripe: Channel 4’s challenge is to reinvent itself with the same ambition and panache with which it launched twenty-five years ago.” Pressed to define its distinctive contribution, Richards said that all the data with regard to news, current affairs and factual programming showed Channel 4 catered for a part of the audience the BBC finds it hard to reach, and more gener-

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ally it had a different perspective, doing programmes with attitude and edge, not shying away from risk. When asked what boxes it needed to tick, he said: “The most important one is a full and effective engagement in the new media world. That has been very difficult for Channel 4 to do because its public-service remit is technically limited to one channel.” In fact it had, under Michael Jackson and Duncan, spent eight years vastly expanding its digital channels and, most recently, its online activity. But it received no credit for them in assessments of its remit delivery. It was clear that aspects of the 2003 Communications Act were already out of date: it had not considered the impact of the Internet or superfast broadband. And Ofcom was glossing over or missing a key point: these new channels were primarily designed to generate ad revenue and profits to keep the mother Channel 4 afloat. For good measure Richards added he was against the notion of privatising Channel 4 as an alternative to public funding “because it would fundamentally change the nature of the organisation’s purpose”, though he did not seem to consider that handing it public money as a subsidy would also alter and probably erode its independent status. Any public subsidy or funding would certainly lead to it being monitored on the same scale as the BBC – in other words far more closely than it was accustomed to. The Next on 4 document – weighing in at 106 pages, overseen by C4 strategist Jonathan Thompson, with an introduction by Andy Duncan – was launched on 13 March 2008 at an elaborate breakfast for opinion-makers, followed by a press conference at which Big Brother was mentioned only in passing. When Julian Bellamy was asked if it was possible to reinvent Big Brother on more public service lines he replied: “I don’t think you can set out to make Big Brother public service.” The document was designed to unlock a subsidy, but one which would need Government action. It was based on Johnson’s and Duncan’s premise, backed by the board, that the operating model that had served Channel 4 “is fast becoming unsustainable”. This was supported by nine months of research. The lesson learned, wrote Duncan, was that the channel must never shock for its own sake – that is, never have another incident like the one that derailed Big Brother. Following the controversy, executives had asked hard questions about the organisation’s fundamental role and developed an “exciting vision”, building on the original commitment to innovation and diversity. The argument was timely, because in the long term there was a big challenge to traditional channel television, given the rise of on-demand services and the public’s dislike of intrusive advertising breaks. However, as a dedicated publisher-broadcaster it had no scope to produce its own programmes – except in the Film 4 area – to build up a bank of rights or intellectual property for rainy days. That had been torpedoed by the 2003 agreement, overseen by Ofcom, on handing rights to independent producers. It was – and continued to be – hard to diversify into new income streams beyond advertising if subscription was also ruled out.

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One of the definitions of a public service broadcaster is that its programmes are available to everyone. Next on 4 offered a plausible appraisal of its strengths and weaknesses. It was landlocked into the UK, it had no international profile (as the BBC enjoyed) but it was a lively company, well run, with a strong brand, and it knew the 16–34 age group’s tastes better than the BBC, whose expertise at this point did not stretch beyond children. 4’s staffers had commissioning skills and could negotiate programme and online rights. Responding to Ofcom’s very determined nudge, the document set out a view of Channel 4 developing over the next five years as a public service network rather than just a television company, putting out content online as well as on air, raising a new generation of talent and fostering new creative businesses. Its digital channels would be joined and buttressed by radio (see Chapter 3), mobile and 4-branded online services and it would help finance new digital start-ups through a 41P (intellectual property) fund. Public service output complying with the remit would continue with news, current affairs, documentaries, educational programmes, arts, drama, feature films and children’s TV. So it rededicated itself as an alternative voice within British media, offering some things which neither the BBC nor the purely commercial sector could attempt. The four core purposes of Channel 4 were defined as: • • • •

To nurture new talent and original ideas; To champion alternative voices and fresh perspectives; To challenge people to see the world differently; To inspire change in people’s lives.

It also re-emphasised its appeal to younger and more diverse audiences. In other words, it was in effect a restatement of Channel 4’s position and aspirations, with the added ambition to diffuse this mission across the broader range of digital channels and distribution, following adventurous youth. In addition, it committed to introducing in 2009 a new “Public Value Report” to provide a data-based review of its delivery on its commitments. This broadening of its annual reporting was an attempt to silence growing criticism of excessive pay and bonuses for executives and some talent, refusing to break down the revenue and performance of individual channels, as well as what was seen as lax regulation by some critical MPs. But would this pitch be enough to provide “ingredients for success that lie outside our control”: a new model of support to replace the declining value of free spectrum and deliver a reform of programme rights that better rewarded Channel 4’s investment? Even as these proposals were published, it was rashly pressing ahead with commercial radio plans, regardless of any decision about subsidy. A month later, on 22 April, television’s impish grandee Peter Bazalgette (too powerful to be categorised as a court jester), who had originally sold Big Brother

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CHANNEL 4: A HISTORY

to Channel 4, popped up with another suggestion: to fund a new online public service platform called Boggle, to rescue public service content from “oblivion”. It would be paid for by the proceeds of a sale of Channel 4. “Peter made a mischievous speech, he’s having fun,” snapped Luke Johnson. “He’s talking from self-interest. I assume he is one of the parties trying to buy Channel 4. He’s looking for a new job.” Then, after all this posturing, in September the tempest hit. The onset of a global recession swept away any shreds of optimism at Horseferry Road. “2008 has been one of the most difficult years in our history and 2009 will almost certainly be tougher still,” Duncan reflected5. With the collapse of Lehman Brothers on 15 September, the largest such failure in history, advertising revenue responded in step, falling 15 percent compared with September 2007. Around £50 million suddenly drained away from Channel 4’s anticipated revenues for 2008 . This is when Project Benson was put in place – a fast and fierce cutback that would inevitably rule out experimental investment in new programming in 2008 and 2009. Without such investment, it would be mighty hard to protect the channel’s longer-term revenues from the impact of ending Big Brother, whose fate was still under review. Yet 4’s flexibility, its ability to cut its coat according to its cloth (thanks to its outsourced commissioning model), was also evident. On the eve of the board meeting of 22 September 2008, Duncan, backed by the impressive finance director Anne Bulford, proposed a major structural review to reduce costs, a “rapid acceleration of an ongoing efficiency drive” that had already seen savings including the sale of two subsidiaries: C4 International, its programme sales arm, and 4Learning. In addition, broadcast operations had been taken over by Red Bee Media – a move that divorced Channel 4 from live broadcasting by ending transmissions from its headquarters. In order to break even 150 jobs would be cut, some compulsorily, saving £10 million.6 There was a freeze on external recruitment with the aim of reducing the headcount of directly-employed personnel to 800, where it largely stayed for the following decade. “All areas of business will be affected, including commissioning teams and the programme budget,” Duncan warned. Between 2007 and 2010, as the world suddenly nosedived into recession and austerity, the advertising-funded broadcasters – ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 – cut 2,032 jobs. The bulk were at ITV, which lost a third of its workforce and took an axe to its regional network commitments across England and Wales, as well as abandoning children’s programme production. All three shared the same problem: the British television advertising market shrank from £3.436 billion in 2008 to £2.978 billion in 2009 – a drop of £552 million, or 17 percent. As it happened, this unprecedented collapse in revenues came at a time when Gordon Brown’s dying Labour government was engaged in a mission to reshape regulated television broadcasting. In the light of the recession, this intensified, with Channel 4 now in the spotlight.

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On 25 September 2008 Ofcom published its interim second Public Service Broadcasting report (PSB2) and found a £280 million gap in funding public service broadcasting – hardly surprising given the advertising pressures. Among its proposed solutions was using BBC Worldwide as a form of gift-horse subsidy for Channel 4. Between June and September Channel 4 had been discussing collaborations with BBC Worldwide, though stopping short of anything smacking of a merger. Meetings were held with the heads of BBC Worldwide businesses discussing the potential for Channel 4 programmes to be packaged thematically and screened on Worldwide channels outside Britain, which ran on a mix of subscription and advertising. This would have mirrored Worldwide’s relationship with Discovery. At the same time the Government’s Shareholder Executive division, which held the Channel 4 Corporation shareholding, commissioned Morgan Stanley to provide an assessment of the merits of Channel 4 and BBC Worldwide combining. John Smith, Worldwide’s chief executive, was keen on a deal, which would have opened a route to separating Worldwide from the publicly-funded BBC. There was also discussion of joint ventures around DVD sales and magazine publishing, based on Channel 4 leisure and lifestyle strands; but Channel 4 executive Gill Whitehead, recruited from BBC Worldwide and leading the study, knew the difference in scale would cause obvious difficulties. The object was to underwrite Channel 4 as a second main public service provider. During November and December meetings took place between Ed Richards, Stephen Carter and Stephen Lovegrove of the Shareholder Executive division, to find a funding solution for the channel. (Stephen Carter was by now chair of yet another initiative, the Digital Britain Steering group, and oversaw a project team aimed at supercharging universal delivery of superfast broadband.) The idea of a dependent relationship with Worldwide was bound to provoke horror at the BBC, which was intent on developing Worldwide as a profitable international business arm to cushion its public service obligations. It would not take long for the director general, Mark Thompson, to snap that the BBC was not some sort of cashpoint machine for Channel 4. At this point the debate turned more political. By December 2008 the BBC was reported to be considering offering Channel 4 and ITV free and open use of its I-Player technology to head off Ofcom’s demands. There were also plans for a video-on-demand platform, similar to Netflix or Hulu. It would be called Kangaroo and run by the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 as equal partners; but the project collapsed in 2009 see Chapter 15). On 21 January 2009, as expected, Ofcom’s final report set out two options: either Channel 4 should be underwritten as a public service broadcaster by a partnership or merger with BBC Worldwide, or it should be combined with Channel 5 – a solution strongly resisted at Horseferry Road. It added that Channel 4 should receive a £120 million gift from the digital switchover fund, which now looked

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lavishly large, to invest in a Worldwide merger; but it rejected direct funding or a slice of licence fee cash. The conclusion was that the best way to protect the largest volume of public service content outside the BBC was to make sure Channel 4 was safe, while releasing ITV and Channel 5 from most of their obligations. 7 The status quo seemed ruled out; but none of these big-picture solutions were decisions Ofcom or even a government’s industrial strategy could deliver. Taking licence fee funds from the public, or assets from the BBC, and giving them to Channel 4 in the name of helping out a fellow broadcaster, went way beyond Ofcom’s terms of reference. Their proactive stance had already provoked loud complaints from Michael Grade, now executive chairman of ITV. Small wonder that Ofcom’s attempt at policy-making began to attract outright hostility. The Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, was threatening to abolish it if and when he came to power – and the sand in Gordon Brown’s hourglass was trickling remorselessly away. The baton was now in the hands of Lord Carter of Barnes, straddling the Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Department led by Peter Mandelson, and Andy Burnham, Under-Secretary of State in the Department of Culture, Media & Sport. The goal now was a new Digital Communications/Economy Act, to respond to the rapid changes affecting the whole wide sector: television, radio, mobile, online and fixed telecoms. This was closer to an overarching industrial strategy than anything Ofcom could initiate. The aim was to accelerate the growth of creative and digital businesses with universal superfast broadband as a central objective, giving universal access to quality programming. “You have to work back from the outcome we were looking at,” Carter reflected later. “How do you protect public service content? Answer: a combination of Channel 4 Corporation and BBC Worldwide: two players. And you don’t have to write a cheque for a £100 million gap.” Carter was keen to make his mark and leave a legacy before returning to business life, and the positive response from John Smith encouraged him. Martin Baker, Channel 4’s commercial director recalled: “It seems strange that Channel 4 should have launched new channels and the world’s first proper video-on-demand service, and immediately become convinced there was a sustainability problem. I look back and it is hard to see how those things sat together – on the one hand planning a confident bold future, on the other hand saying this is all fine now, but it is going to become difficult. So can you please come and give assistance to us?” The management had overplayed their hand on the funding gap. The non-executive directors failed to make a strong challenge. And lots of clever and ambitious people wasted lots of time going round and round in fruitless distracting debates. No one comes out of it very well.

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Notes 1 Canadian-born Ray Gallagher, a former Sky government and regulatory affairs director, served as an advisor from 2008 to the Culture, Media & Sport Select Committee chaired by Conservative MP John Whittingdale, and moved to the Department of Culture, Media & Sport in 2016–18. 2 Lord Currie, 2 February 2017. 3 Tim Hincks interview, 7 February 2017. 4 Royal Television Society speech, 11 March, ahead of the launch in April 2008 of Ofcom’s second Public Service Broadcasting Review. 5 C4 Annual Report 2008. 6 C4 Annual Report 2008. 7 Public Service Broadcasting Review 2, ‘Putting Viewers First’.

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3 RADIO ADVENTURE

O

ne of the most ill-judged episodes in Channel 4’s chequered history was its bid to become a multimedia broadcaster by diversifying into commercial radio. After all, if the BBC could do it, why couldn’t they? Yet advocates of the scheme should have been warned off by the failure of the channel’s previous venture into the world of radio, One Word, which supplied stories, comedy and children’s programmes. It limped on through 2007 and was shut down early in 2008. This new proposal was, at its simplest, about starting a group of three themed stations – Channel 4 Radio, E4 Radio and Pure4Music Radio, shadowing its TV channels. It was hatched to exploit newly available capacity in 2007, when the second national commercial digital multiplex was advertised by Ofcom. The spectrum itself was free: beware of regulators carrying gifts. A grand alliance of 26 operators came together as 4Digital Group Ltd, led by Channel 4 Radio Ltd. The opening page of the bulky proposal was plastered with an armada of corporate logos. Channel 4 had a 55 percent controlling stake. The aim was to “breathe life into the somewhat moribund commercial radio market”, now at a crossroads. The application for the franchise, published in March 2007, trumpeted the group’s commitment to “the most powerful marketing alliance” in commercial digital radio, with Carphone Warehouse promoting the proposed services through 650 shops. Sky, with its subscriber base of 8 million households, was part of the team, along with five other backers. They pledged to spend £4.5 million marketing digital radio in the first three years, then £25 million marketing their individual channel launches. Channel 4 would spread its risks this time and make money by renting out national slots to other stations – Talk Radio, EMAP’s Closer magazine, Sky News radio, Sunrise Radio, Disney Kids network and a national podcast service. It promised a state-of-the-art network of 174 transmitters, reaching 88 percent of the population, with an emphasis on mobile radio reception to smartphones. The executive driving the project was a bright lawyer, Nathalie Schwarz, recruited from the commercial radio sector and destined to join the Channel

4 board. She ran Channel 4’s commercial activities, 4Digital, and talked a good game. The pitch was: “Digital radio has failed to meet its full potential, listening hours are falling, young people listening less. The BBC dominates speech radio, while the Internet and mobile phones are assuming more importance. The problems are particularly acute in the commercial radio sector, which has lost audience share to the BBC and advertising to online and other media.” Channel 4 could make it work. “The 4Digital Group believes radio has a strong, confident future,” the application declared. “We will do it differently. We will be edgy, bold and surprising … give commercial radio a new lease of life.” While Schwarz busied herself letting the spare frequencies, the man chosen to usher in this apparent new dawn was one of the BBC’s top radio executives, Bob Shennan, who a decade later would go on to run the entire BBC Radio and Music output. He was the controller of Radio Five Live but found himself wondering what to do next when, with serendipitous timing, the offer from Horseferry Road arrived. “What intrigued me was that it was Channel 4,” Shennan recalled. “I felt it was an organisation I could work for. Their track record was one of quality, investment in content, focused on the audience. They knew their place in the market. If Channel 4 was interested in radio it was fantastic, very exciting.” 1 He was invited in to talk to Andy Duncan, whom he already knew and liked from his days running BBC marketing. Duncan loved music, and they had bonded on one of the leadership courses introduced by Greg Dyke for top BBC talent, this one involving a convivial tour of workplaces in Scandinavia. “Andy was (predictably) massively enthusiastic about the radio project. Then I met Kevin Lygo, to see how he saw it. I was always anxious to know how the corporate Channel 4 felt about this venture, because it needed conviction, money, support. I didn’t pick up any vibes at that point: Kevin was less enthusiastic.” Undeterred, Shennan climbed on board in January 2008. (The highly competitive Jenny Abramsky, director of BBC Radio, had tried to enforce strict gardening leave on him, then relented.) On the third floor of the Horseferry Road building were a lot of empty desks and a small group of people starting work on the project. There was a broad-brush plan in place: to its fans it seemed for this brief period like a wonderful opportunity for brand alignment. Channel 4 Radio, aimed at 30-to 54-year-olds, was to be a speech station with news and current affairs at its heart, proposing a breakfast news and analysis programme to compete with Radio 4’s Today. It would challenge the BBC’s 86 percent share of speech radio. E4 Radio would be a contemporary music station aimed at 15-to 29-year-olds, while Pure4Music targeted 30-to 49-year-olds, “complemented by intelligent conversation about the arts and contemporary culture”. Shennan recalled: “Everybody in the sector took it seriously. I was very close to the BBC Radio controllers – Andy Parfitt, Mark Damazer, Roger Wright and Lesley Douglas. We had a farewell drink in Soho. They warned me they would be very

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competitive. Mark Damazer saw the inherent threat to Radio 4: I think the acceleration of Evan Davies’s recruitment to the Today team was in part because of this.” But it was clear once he started how broad-brush the proposal was. “I realised how little had been fleshed out, including where we would broadcast from, and there was no model for commissioning.” He needed to build a studio, draw up programme plans, hire a team, engage with advertisers. Curiously, no one had mentioned that there was a big disused TV studio in the basement. “It was a gift, waiting there. I couldn’t believe it.” He calculated that all three services could be broadcast from there. He started recruiting key team members. Michael Hill from Five Live was to be his right-hand man, while Sam Steele, who had worked at Radio 1 and the independent production company Wise Buddha, would be head of E4 Radio, which was to be the first launched. As head of marketing he appointed Simon Daglish from Global Radio, with a plan to integrate radio sales with the existing TV sales force. With experience at Classic FM, GCap and GWR, Daglish’s willingness to join demonstrated how seriously the commercial radio world, as well as the BBC, were initially taking this new competitive threat. “This was a very grand plan, incredibly exciting,” said Daglish. “Commercial radio was pretty moribund – similar stations side by side and formulaic. I thought this would be more reflective of different tastes, trying new things. Success depended on the listeners. But it would have lifted the whole commercial sector and challenged the norm.”2 . His nascent sales strategy was to sell 30-second radio ads as part of the channel’s TV deals. “We would have been breaking into new markets. Matt Shreeve, head of trading, and Andy Barnes, sales director, were working on how to do it together. Sponsorships, competitions, etc. would be sold by a radio sales team of up to eight people. We felt E4 Radio was the quickest and easiest to launch and monetise.” He used his experience at Classic FM as a guide, to raise about £30 million a year in revenue. But dark clouds were already gathering on the horizon. The timetable was delayed, though budgets for years ahead had been pencilled in. The target date for the launch of E4 Radio was put back to April 2009. Worse, when Shennan joined the Channel 4 management team he found that he was treated as an outsider. The other executives viewed the channel strictly as a television company. When they joined it they had not thought they were investing in radio, and Kevin Lygo was increasingly irritated at the time wasted discussing the project. Jon Snow was pencilled in to do the news programmes, but it soon became clear that there was no question of building a viable challenger to Radio 4 or even Radio Five Live, because it would be too expensive. Between April and September 2008, while Daglish was put on gardening leave, it was apparent even to optimists that there was opposition building up at the management board level because of the amount being taken out of television budget at a

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time when the wider economy was entering a recession. In September serious panic set in. Said Shennan: “When the going was good it was a great project everyone wanted to back. When the going got difficult it lost its strategic relevance. It became dispensable.” What happened was that Duncan and the top team, under pressure, had to cut 150 posts and save around £100 million, in response to a drop in advertising. This resulted in a £50 million cut in the programme budget. “As soon as the going got tough, all the logic – our robust plan – went out of the window for the sake of some TV dramas. I felt dismay. The management team was fractured.” Yet the radio team, in blissful ignorance, were still discussing presenters and ideas and Daglish was starting to meet advertisers. “We were pretty full steam ahead. Then we just hit the buffers.” Matt Hill, at 27 the junior member of the team, had joined in June on a sixmonth contract. “I had two tasks,” he said, “to work out the best phone number for E4 Radio, and research the best international English-language radio to buy in the service. We had weekly meetings about content, in-house production, independents and adverts. I worked with the 4Talent team to run an E4 open competition, to win a pilot on E4 to buy in new comedy voices, I did workshops at the Edinburgh TV Festival in August. There were hare-brained schemes around, too, like poaching Terry Wogan, but others were adopted by the radio sector much later. For example, we were looking at what digital audio broadcasting could do, including pop-up stations, years before Radio 2 Country or the Glastonbury channel.” Early in September Andy Duncan phoned the board secretary, Nick Swimer, at home and asked him to find out discreetly from the company’s external lawyers if the contract could be abruptly terminated, unilaterally breaking up the digital radio consortium. It could. At this stage only two of the other partners were still planning new radio stations: the others were postponed. Planet Rock was the only new commercial digital channel (not available on analogue radio) on the first digital commercial multiplex. Duncan called Shennan to his office in late September to prepare him for the worst. “He said it was just not economically viable. It could never be ruled out, but it would be wrong to give any false hope.” A shocked Shennan had been booked to appear at the BBC’s Radio Festival to give an update on the plans, and kept the commitment, enduring an uncomfortable grilling from the media pundit Steve Hewlett, who knew the real situation. Meanwhile the rest of the team were still working towards a commissioning day, Monday 13 October, to give a presentation to independent radio suppliers. Steve Jones was going to do an E4 breakfast show to play to them as a pilot. The sixteen members of the team were called in to the Channel 4 radio room on Friday morning, 10 October. Hill remembered the scene vividly: “There was an odd feeling in the room. And Bob came in with the most sullen face I have ever seen. His expression was absolute shock. I genuinely feel he didn’t see it coming. I admire the clinical nature of it now – that leanness really helped Channel 4

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survive.” Shennan took him to one side and promised to do anything he could to help. “He was true to that. I had full pay to the end of the year and compensation … Bob got me into 6 Music with a few shifts.” By the time the team left the meeting, the story was running on the Media Guardian website. Duncan said in public: “We’ve taken this decision very reluctantly. We can no longer afford the short-term investment necessary, given we have to cut so deeply across all parts of the organisation.” Daglish, just ending his gardening leave, said: “It was one of my more bizarre experiences. This was probably the most talented group of people I ever worked with – entrepreneurial, innovative – and the backing of Channel 4 was meant to be its bedrock. The way Bob was approaching it was original.” Daglish spoke to Duncan. “The wheels were coming off the economy. It was worrying, I had no job, they made me redundant. But they looked after me well. Andy invited me to look for another job at Channel 4 but the sales force were making their cuts.” He declined a short-term post in the strategy team but bounced back fast and went on to prosper as the sales director for ITV. Duncan offered Shennan the post of head of marketing, made vacant by the resignation of Polly Cochrane. “I thought that was ironic. He was the marketing man who had taken on the role of running this great editorial ship, Channel 4. I was the editorial man, and here he was offering me the marketing job. It was funny at the time.” But three weeks later a vacancy occurred back at the BBC when Lesley Douglas lost her job as controller of Radio 2, in the aftermath of the storm over an offensive phone call that Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand made on air to the actor Andrew Sachs about his granddaughter. He stayed on at Channel 4 until the end of January to wind things up, then moved back to Broadcasting House. “I feel now that commercial radio and BBC radio are more polarised than they have ever been,” he reflected. “I think Channel 4 radio would have been closer to the BBC in ethos but adding a commercial dynamic, an extra opportunity. E4 could have become a multimedia offering, with sponsorship, advertising, talent – a model the BBC can’t replicate. “In the BBC we are quite hard on ourselves, but what an amazing advantage it is to be a joined-up multimedia organisation. Actually Channel 4 doesn’t come close: it’s a TV company. I have no regrets about going to Channel 4 – it’s a potent brand. I still believe to this day Channel 4 radio would have been a great thing for the radio sector, and going there did me a great deal of good.” Yet ultimately he knew where home was. The conclusion is that though there were 7.7 million digital radio sets in use, and growing at the time of Channel 4’s withdrawal, digital radio would prove to be a slow burn. Channel 4 was too early and naive, and its early withdrawal scuppered more digital radio adventures in the foreseeable future. Earlier in 2008 GCap, one of the big commercial radio operators, had withdrawn its digital-only channels after being taken over by Global Radio.

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Channel 4 handed back the licence and it was not re-awarded until 2015. 3 The fiasco not only damaged the channel’s image but was also bad news for the whole independent radio sector, where programme-makers had hoped the venture would provide a big stimulus, forcing the BBC into a more open and welcoming relationship with outside suppliers. Members of the short-lived launch team prospered. The junior, Matt Hill, became a pioneer of the podcast industry, co-founding the British Podcasts Awards. The cost to Channel 4 was minor, around £9 million, 1 percent of its £945 million turnover – “a relatively small amount” as Duncan informed the Culture Media & Sport parliamentary committee on 21 October. But it signified the collapse of Andy Duncan’s strategy of building a multichannel public service broadcaster with aligned brands, like the BBC. It was very much his project and the plotting to replace him grew. Bob Shennan, promoted to BBC group managing director in 2019, has not visited Channel 4 since. The lesson remains: beware of regulators bearing gifts.

Notes 1 Bob Shennan interview, 22 August 2016. 2 Simon Daglish interview, 28 March 2017. 3 In July 2014 Bauer(Magic) and talkSPORT’s UTV joined forces to bid for the second commercial multiplex as Sound Radio with Arqiva.

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4 THE RISE OF FIXED-RIGS 2007–11

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he most significant programme development for Channel 4 in the decade began with an idea sparked over a plate of chilli mackerel at a Vietnamese restaurant in Shoreditch in 2006. This lunch would mark the point when taking the techniques of Big Brother – unmanned remotely-operated cameras, discreet microphones, intensive editing – and applying them to real life surfaced as an interesting and viable development. In this instance it was about putting them into a family home, but over time the technique would be deployed in hospitals, schools, police stations and courtrooms. In a decade it would become a key part of the commercial lifeblood of Channel 4. So at the very point at which Big Brother was starting its decline, from its loins emerged what would come to be known as fixed-rig shows. They proved to be entertaining, popular, even addictive, helping to give Channel 4 the confidence to cancel their flagship programme in 2009. They were more accessible to audiences than esoteric feature-length documentaries and authored series. As one expert at Big Brother put it: “I always thought fixed-rig was a bit of a wanky TV producer phrase – really a way of making reality shows about posh subjects. They’re documentary series without the depth of storytelling.” This is how it happened. In 2006 Simon Dickson, at 36 an ambitious but anxious commissioning editor, was grumbling about Big Brother, between mouthfuls of mackerel, to Magnus Temple and Nick Curwin, producers looking for commissions for their small company, Firefly. “I blurted out I was so sick about everyone at programme review waffling on about Big Brother. I couldn’t understand why so many middle-aged people were talking in glowing tones about a programme for young people. The futility of spending all that money on a space, then filling it with vainglorious ne’er-do-wells. Why don’t we take the Big Brother technology and put it somewhere more interesting? We didn’t use the term fixed-rig – that came later. Magnus said: ‘Like what?’ I said: ‘A house.’ Magnus said: ‘Oh, that’s a good idea!’”1 Programme commissioners like nothing more than a producer saying they’ve had a good idea. A smart producer knows he must seize the business opportu-

nity: the commissioner is always right. The spark had been created. But when Dickson – a burly, determined Scot – went back to Channel 4 the euphoria evaporated instantly. The idea of filming an ordinary family 24 hours a day was dismissed by most of his colleagues as boring. It also seemed like a throwback: the BBC had already run The Family, a twelve-parter deemed to be the first flyon-the-wall series. “Looking back it’s astonishing I couldn’t get anyone to see its potential,” said Dickson. The single exception was his boss, Angus Macqueen, head of documentaries, a jolly, robust man who would shortly return to programme-making. The two men went to Regent’s Park, walked around the rose garden and talked. Macqueen quickly grasped the concept. Together they went to see Kevin Lygo, director of television, who was intrigued. He raised an eyebrow quizzically and asked what would turn out to be a very expensive question: how would they do it? Yet he gave the two men the green light to work out the answer. Dickson threw himself into it energetically, seeing the project as the potential lifeline to making a success of his career. “This speaks to the central truth of commissioning,” he said. “You never get anywhere writing a proposal and putting it in the post. It’s about looking into the eyes of the people across the table and asking yourself if they have the capability to deliver what you want.” The evolution was in truth a little less spontaneous. Confidence played a part. Temple and Curwin felt able to embrace the idea because the key to what became The Family was a low-budget Channel 4 educational show they were making at the time, Going Cold Turkey, broadcast in 2007. It followed three patients a week trying to get off drugs, including heroin and methadone, through a cold turkey process, with live broadcasts in the morning and evening. The producers calculated that the only way to make it was to use Big Brother cameras to capture the private interviews between patient, doctor and parents, uncontaminated by outsiders. They built a small consulting room studio at Harrogate hospital. Remote cameras filmed the reactions of horrified parents as their child listed the substances used. It had required a painstaking process of getting permissions but the late-night version performed well, with an 11 percent share. So they knew the technique worked. 2 Firefly had their commission and now had to find a family and, alongside Channel 4, negotiate the terms of engagement. Dickson wanted a broad, popular approach. A series of eight programmes was ordered, and a Christmas special. By the end of August 2007 the producers had found the family, rigged the house in the Sussex seaside town of Worthing using twenty-three fixed cameras from Big Brother suppliers, suspended the microphones from the ceilings, taken over the next-door house and were ready to go. Dickson introduced his choice of director, Jonathan Smith, an influential talent. On the eve of the Edinburgh Television Festival, Dickson went to meet them. It seemed fine. Then it all went wrong. In the middle of the festival Magnus Temple phoned him and dropped a bomb-

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shell. They had had an anonymous tip-off – one of the family was involved in criminal activity, and if they went ahead, the informant would go to the press about what their lives were really like. Dickson hurried back to Worthing and spoke to the father. The family pulled out. The bill for the pre-production set-up was just under £1 million. Dickson and Smith went on to the beach and stared bleakly at the waves, imagining their careers sinking off the Sussex shore. Dickson headed back to see Kevin Lygo expecting the sack, but Lygo’s reaction illustrated why people loved working with him. He said: “We have come this far. We are going to find another family and do it. We go again.” Rosemary Newell, the powerful scheduler, agreed and they signed it off. But the stress threw Dickson into a depression. He set off on a month-long walking holiday. Back at Firefly the producers had six weeks to find a replacement and had a call centre manned by fourteen people responding to their search, as they strove to secure their commission. Nick Curwin said: “We wanted a family who clearly loved each other, but where there was enough struggle, issues and problems and tensions to try and break them apart. But they always came back together [after rows] because that gravity was stronger than the force pulling them apart.” 3 In their search they alighted on the Hughes family, who lived in a semi-detached house in Canterbury. Simon and Jane’s 19-year-old daughter Emily was pushing at boundaries; Charlotte, 17, was at school; the eldest daughter Jessica, mother to baby Ruby, was getting married; the son, 14-year-old Tom, loved skateboarding and Batman. The black cat Ziggy completed the picture. The family were not put through a pilot and made no casting tape. The producers wrote an imaginary script and took photos of mum, dad, two girls and the boy. Dickson looked at the pictures and said: “That’s them. I knew in a second. They looked like the type of family everyone had told me we couldn’t make a programme about – white, middle-class, middle of the road … I wanted them to be painfully middle of the road, because the comedy would come from that.” The production team decided not to have any commentary – no voice-over and no interviews. The early takes looked promising and they extended to nine episodes. “Say you were walking down the road and neighbours’ houses had the front taken off, like a doll’s house; you see all the rooms and see and hear everything going on in them. It was an ultra-nosey thing to do,” Curwin explained. One of the key scenes cut between the mother and father in bed, discussing the tearaway daughter Emily, while she was reacting in her bed. Dickson also asked the father what he would do if his children wanted to masturbate. The solution was to design a new camera mounting with barn doors, so when people wanted privacy they could put the metal flaps down and signal for audio recording in the gallery to stop. The three months of filming started in December, but early on Christmas Day father Simon woke up, decided he couldn’t take it anymore and started ripping out cameras and cables. Nick Curwin rang Dickson in a panic. Dickson said: “I think

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it’s great, go back to sleep, what’s not to like.” Now the project was under way he had started to revel in its unpredictability. The selling point of rig shows is that they film in places where in normal life you shouldn’t be. And the motivation for those taking part was not getting rich: the location fee, compensation for disruption and subsequent redecoration was modest. Dickson said: “Our pitch was this is an experience, it is not every day television comes knocking, asking if you would like eight hours of film to hand on to your family.” But the reality with access programmes is that there is a price to pay in terms of editorial control. The family did have a say over the content. Channel 4, as the broadcaster, had to ensure the content complied with the rules. Said Curwin: We couldn’t let them decide the programme. But on the other hand these are not politicians or public servants, they are ordinary people – we couldn’t ruin their lives. We had a responsibility to them. So we played them the programmes before they went out, and we saw how they felt. The young boy was terribly upset about showing him playing air guitar in his bedroom: he was mortified, although it seemed unimportant to us. Channel 4 decided there was a good case for it to come out. We had also filmed him crying in his room but he was okay about that.

Series one attracted an average of 2.5 million viewers, and gained a BAFTA nomination. The annual report for 2008 noted how its “unsentimental exploration of family life today triggered enthusiastic comment from viewers”. The fears that the ordinary dramas of an ordinary family might prove of limited interest to viewers more used to the high-intensity antics of a show like Big Brother proved groundless. It was swiftly recommissioned. “Look how far we had come,” said Dickson. “From Big Brother – hermetically sealed, over-produced, a house full of plonkers – to a man with a real job, a wife and kids, going around destroying our equipment. The more challenging it became the happier I became.” The newly-arrived Julian Bellamy, now running Channel 4’s programming under Lygo, decided that The Family was an excellent means to explore multicultural Britain, and the second series featured the British Asian Grewal family, nine members spanning generations, who lived near Slough, which they preferred to call the suburbs of Windsor. This was an inspired piece of casting. The family was blue-collar, aspirational, with a background and ambition in theatre and film, which meant they were noisy and expressive. The family dramas included a premature birth and preparations for a big Indian wedding, while the husband tended to shout at his wife for a cup of tea. They gained the audience’s affection, were entertaining and attracted 2.3 million viewers for the first broadcast and 1.5 million video-on-demand views. The programme research showed that while this was the first programme to look in depth at British Asian life, the themes of family values were far from unfamiliar.

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Educating Yorkshire (Gary Calton/Channel 4)

By this time Channel 4 was in the grip of the advertising downturn. The Family 2 was made on a more economical footing, and used interviews with the family members to compensate for the fact it was filmed for only half the time. It was directed by David Clews, who would go on to influence future applications of the rig, in series including the first Educating Essex in 2011 and the breakthrough, Educating Yorkshire in 2013, directed by another rising industry star, David Brindley. But The Family 3, featuring a British Nigerian family, the Adesinas, bombed at 1.19 million, a 4.4 percent share, and it was not recommissioned. By this time the two originators, Temple and Curwin, had moved on. Elisabeth Murdoch’s Shine bought their company in 2007. But the success of the first two series created a bandwagon. Hamish Mykura, another large Scot, had become head of documentaries in 2008, and he threw himself behind the invention and growth of fixed-rig programming. He could see it making a big impact. “It did the thing I loved most, it used technology to unlock a new way of telling a story. You film and you edit. I decided to just make documentaries with the rig. The move was driven by technology and cost. It was impossible to do a small series of six to eight episodes because of the cost of the set-up. It made sense to do twelve episodes and commit to another run.” 4 At this point drama cost around one million pounds an hour. To rig a venue could cost that amount, though the bill dropped as it became more established; but the cost per hour could be held down to a fraction of that, say £150–180,000. And it might well attract larger audiences than Channel 4’s drama.

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Mykura discussed it with the channel’s bosses. “We saw it as a way of reflecting public service Britain, the heroes of public service. That was how it eventually landed. It meant we couldn’t do much else in documentaries. The money (his budget was around £30 million a year) was going there.” The move from observational documentaries to rigged observational formats was under way. Dickson has a more down-to-earth view. “State-of-the-nation stuff, let’s be honest, that is window dressing. Hamish is like a snowplough. If he could dress up two or three of our potential series as a movement the more likely we were to get them commissioned. Hamish is a machine. He takes the view the more you commission the luckier you are going to be. We were two Scotsmen, mechanistic, absolutely determined to take over the channel with our factual programmes. We were going to compete for every conceivable hour of space and fill it with our programmes. “After the first Family went out we asked Dragonfly (the next company established by Curwin and Temple) what is the next iteration. Ideas started rolling in. They had a list of about a dozen precincts when we met for lunch.” Dickson came up with an idea of his own. He remembered the birth of his first child. It was a rite of passage – moreover he had inexplicably eaten a whole tub of ice cream in front of his wife in labour. Why not concentrate on the relationship between first-time parents? Curwin and Temple pitched the idea for what became One Born Every Minute early in 2009. The problem with hospitals is that people usually don’t want to go there – but in maternity wards you have happy stories. “Lives beginning and others changing forever” was the strapline. Two people go into a little room, three come out, two of them changed irreversibly. “Babies are the least interesting bit,” Curwin observed. “Just a baby. Because of the rig you see the midwives at work, but the most interesting are the parents. It’s often quite good if the mum and dad are a bit hapless, naive or a bit scratchy, or dad is a useless bloke.” But where to film? At the time it was an unprecedented thing to do, and the professionals were wary. Temple said: “We fortunately had a key advocate, the head of midwifery at Southampton Hospital. Format and structure came very easily. We worked out there should be two and a half births per show, which worked with the advertising breaks. One quick in the first half, a story you could quickly throw away, then two main stories, intercut. One ends in part three, the third in part four. It was an emotional format, births are cathartic; also, handily, the programme-makers can work out who is the likely cast, so if you know when you are filming you can approach the women in the area and talk to them about taking part, and largely establish their consent.” By 2009 this version of the rig had been stepped up to forty cameras. One key to success was that each mother was given her own birth video. It was a smash hit and won a BAFTA in 2010 for best factual series. It also had an impact on the filming of the drama series, Call the Midwife, launched on BBC1 in January 2012.

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The Daily Telegraph’s TV critic Benji Wilson wrote: “Over the years reality TV has mutated into something about as real as plastic surgery. But when done right, as in last night’s One Born Every Minute, the greatest drama remains real life.” He pointed to the agonising five-second pause between the new mother’s anguished “Why isn’t he crying?” to the most redemptive “Waah!” in TV history. “Raw, unadorned humanity on display. Tremendous stuff.” Ratings rose to 3.618 million (12.5 percent share) in 2011 to peak in 2012 at 4.29 million (15.6 percent), making it a mass-market hit, before slowly declining in 2016 to 1.98 million – a still respectable 8 percent. But by 2017 it was losing its appeal to men and becoming a show watched chiefly by women. And then it was cancelled. Until then One Born Every Minute gave Channel 4 warmth. “I was not setting out to change the world like everyone else at Channel 4,” said Dickson. “I wanted shows that were watchable and returnable. I am a bit soppy.” The follow-on was 24 Hours in A&E, another ambitious turn of the wheel. This was the idea of Sanjeev Singhal, the third inventor at Dragonfly. The deal went to Nick Curwin and Magnus Temple, and their next new company, The Garden. Julian Bellamy had commissioned fourteen episodes, designed as two a week on consecutive nights, with a cliffhanger in between. But it didn’t work. Nick Curwin said: “We spent a night at A&E, when we realised this involved 24 Hours.” It became a brand in its own way, leading to 24 Hours in Police Custody in 2014. The size of the run meant doubling the rigged shoot and outside broadcast trucks. These first three series were set at King’s College Hospital in south-east London, then it moved to the less cramped and less beleaguered St George’s, Tooting. It would prove to be a key 9 pm strand in the new order of Channel 4, under Jay Hunt’s creative direction, even though it was scheduled against BBC2’s The Apprentice and divided into two seven-part runs. But as soon as the scheduler, George Dixon, saw it in 2011 he relaxed: fourteen hours of great peak programming was in the bag, a strand that would help define Channel 4 in the 2011–17 era. A former member of the production crew explained: “One key factor in the success of 24 Hours in A&E is that the doctors are brokering the process: they tell the patients that they are being filmed, and you don’t say no to the person whose hands you are in – you say fine. It’s a brilliant process … It’s harder if you have to say you’re from Channel 4.” Mykura reflected on the period 2007–11. “We had a wonderful tight-knit team, one of those moments which come in a career, when everything you do is turning into a hit. Once it happens you get green lights all the way down the road from Julian Bellamy: anything we would put forward he would say that this rig stuff is great.” That included a rigged series featuring seven dwarfs, a troupe of pantomime actors gearing up for Christmas. But in 2010 Simon Dickson’s golden touch faltered with Seven Days. Channel 4 invited fifty independents to pitch for a living soap. The commission went to accomplished supplier Stephen Lambert’s independent, Studio Lambert. It was set in Not-

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ting Hill and was a conspicuous flop. Channel 4 spent £1 million marketing it to no effect, and on an ineffective bespoke Channel 4 website, according to Lambert. Yet the methodology he’d pioneered had taken root, and other ambitious producers rushed in. The Garden did not try to protect it or patent fixed-rigs: it was an approach to film-making, not a format. One Born Every Minute could attract sponsorship worth up to £500,000 pounds. It could be made for around £180,000 an hour, because of the economics of high volume. It was an example of how rigged programmes could be both a public service and commercially successful, said Ralph Lee, who succeeded Mykura and would become deputy content director, under Lygo’s successor, Jay Hunt. The series brought in money and had sought-after audience reach: a familiar programme that people turn to. The profits from advertising and sponsorship could be used to subsidise programmes that did not generate a positive return. Fixed-rig programmes were also relatively reliable, compared with traditional documentaries, because there was usually a good chance of a programme at the end of a shoot, another commercial reason to do them in bulk. (The caveat is that some rigged documentaries, especially about crime, can collapse with nothing transmittable). “Hamish and I were creating monsters, juggernauts, huge factual hits,” said Dickson. “It is a virtuous circle at Channel 4, all about extremes, big arresting dramas, documentaries, or things other broadcasters wouldn’t do.” They also had a wide appeal, which meant light viewers of Channel 4 would be tempted in. 24 Hours in A&E reached 18 million people during 2016. The price per hour was held down by The Garden because Channel 4 fully paid for them, thanks to the volume and the resale value of episodes to the independent company outside the UK. The BBC never picked up on rigged documentaries. They had considered it, in 2004, with a series mooted with the Big Brother producers, Endemol, called Families. But it came to nothing, and Endemol concentrated on more lucrative factual entertainment. “They just completely missed the boat,” Dickson chortled. We were gleefully occupying the centre stage with these rig shows and we couldn’t understand why they persisted with the time-honoured shorter runs of stuff. In those years it felt the BBC was utterly lacking in direction. I think they failed to realise how the audience was becoming more sophisticated and more demanding. Here were big, brazen things – long runs, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad in drama – and the audience was looking for similar things from factual programming. Two films on X or Y was not going to cut it any more, when series were being offered up by Channel 4 for their pleasure and enjoyment, and vigorously marketed. We never had a shred of doubt: we were going to show you how Britain works, demonstrate you are not alone in the world.

But by the end of 2012 the Channel 4 commissioners who drove it were in pastures new. And ITV Studios, run by Kevin Lygo, in 2013 then bought The Garden, the

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producer of 24 Hours in A&E, for £18 million and were effectively in constant production from then on. Channel 4 found it impossible to resist formatted documentary series as a method of factual film-making between 2011 and 2017. But when the Jay Hunt team was replaced more challenging variations including 24 Hours in Police Custody were most cherished.

Notes 1 Simon Dickson interview, 11 January 2017. 2 This led to a further series, Britain’s Deadliest Addictions (2007–), fronted by Krishnan Guru-Murthy. 3 Nick Curwin and Magnus Temple interview, 4 May 2017. 4 Hamish Mykura interview, 2 November 2016.

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5 CHANNEL 4’ S ONLINE ADVENTURES 2007–10

I

n 2006 Channel 4 laid claim to a global first, by making its programmes available online through something new, unceremoniously called 4oD, a bespoke video-on-demand website. This novelty, which before long would become part of everyday life, was launched in a series of moves from October 2006, first with Virgin Media and then online at Channel4.com. (The BBC’s rival iPlayer followed in December and quickly became the market leader.) The user first had to download the app, which provided access to a 30-day catch-up on Channel 4’s programming together with some 500 hours of archived classic programmes from the past twenty-four years – all those to which it could clear the rights. To whet viewers’ appetites, 4oD’s first blockbusters were Lost and Desperate Housewives, both expensively bought in. Anne Bulford, deputy chief executive, was credited with rallying the Channel 4 tech troops into this pioneer role. In 2005 she had cajoled Bob Harris, chief technology officer, into finding a way of making it work. He engaged an outside specialist to produce a technical strategy paper and then lead the build. These were innocent days of trial and error. When 4oD launched it was a pay service, asking 99p for a single-view television programme, £1.99 for a film and a “download to own” TV programme. In February 2007 the channel experimented further with a subscription model that was proposed at £3.99 per month for TV, £4.99 for film or £5.99 for both; but all this was so unpopular it was abandoned after six months. ”We were treading very carefully with PACT [the producers’ trade body],” recalled Sarah Rose, the staffer who oversaw the launch. “It would be easier if there was a significant payback. When we had a thousand downloads a day we had cake in the office. It was a milestone.” It took longer to make agreements with PACT for British programmes than for acquired American series. Channel 4 had initially struck revenue-sharing deals with around a hundred independent producers, but after the pay scheme failed, that deal with PACT did not apply. As there was no revenue to speak of, the channel had to switch to an advertising-supported service. Its business affairs director, Sara Geater, went back to PACT and changed the deal to a lump sum payment for the rights. Once 4oD evolved into a free service it grew fast, so that commercials, sold initially in catch-up programmes, were extended to its archive ones as well. The

adverts were not the same as those on the broadcast channels, but since the archive programmes had already been set up with places to insert ad breaks, this went relatively smoothly. Channel 4 was adamant at first that it would not share advertising revenue with anyone. A compromise was then arrived at, which disbursed payments from a pot of money negotiated annually, divided between the producers. It was not until 2012 that payment based on numbers of clicks was agreed, in a larger renegotiation of which online was just one part. Despite this change of funding from subscription to advertising, Andy Duncan was justified in boasting that 2007 had been a “strikingly successful first year for 4oD”. By 2011 it had developed into an established service but getting to that point had involved hard work, focus and investment. The driving force was a belief that television was on the cusp of a significant shift in what audiences wanted: programmes whenever, wherever and on whatever devices they chose. Broadband, online viewing on computers and games consoles, then tablets and smartphones – all those had to be catered for fast. For a terrestrial broadcaster heavily focused on appealing to young adults it was an essential adaptation to make, a matter of survival: fears were mounting that this core audience was rapidly deserting broadcast TV channels. Moreover, new and rapidly-rising Internet and social media sites, looming giants, were already talking to independent producers about acquiring rights to Channel 4 programmes after they had been screened, and catch-up and other repeat rights had expired, cutting the channel itself out of the chain. Inside Horseferry Road there was growing concern that the new breed of video aggregators was going to challenge them and commission programmes direct – which is exactly what happened a few years later. At the same time radical thinkers at an increasingly activist Ofcom, now led by Ed Richards as chief executive, were asking whether television and its commissioned programmes were the only way of achieving the purposes of public service broadcasting. Andy Duncan turned for assistance to a former BBC strategist, Jon Gisby. He joined 4 in December 2007 as director of new media and technology. This gave him a seat on the main board, where he was a faintly enigmatic presence, but one who clearly understood the challenges. “At a tiny fraction of the cost, and a lot earlier, 4oD was beating the rest, but the product wasn’t right,” he said. “It was put out quickly to help Channel 4 have a story for independents and money coming in. But it was a bit clunky: you had to download software. It was doing only about 10,000 video views a day when I arrived. Our aim was to build a product that was nice to use.”1 He persuaded the board to commit to a complete rebuild of 4oD and to redefine its unfocused Channel4.com website as the digital home of all Channel 4 programmes. Thus a user could google and easily find a page about specific past programmes. Since the schedule of programmes sits in an in-house C4 computer system called Pirate, this transfer was relatively simple and cheap. The project, which cut website jobs and therefore costs, was driven by Richard Davidson-Houston, who joined from Microsoft in 2007 and quickly became the mastermind of fixing the website.

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“When I arrived Channel4.com was a sprawling Yahoo-type portal,” he recalled. We had lots of people on staff, around sixty, plugging things, writing ‘Peep Show is back on Friday’, which had no relevance after Friday. It was well meant but very expensive. The main difference I made was introducing the word ‘product’ to Channel 4. I got a lot of quizzical looks. I said a product fulfils a consumer need. I came up with what Channel4.com would become. It was the authoritative source of information and content related to Channel 4 television programmes.

This was an easily-understood practical idea for a broadcaster: tell viewers when a programme is on, who is in it, what is it about, plus a picture or a clip, so they can call it up. The important thing about that proposition is we could be the best in the world about it. We had all the data and information to build the product in the building. We started to link up information we held with the web. It was a simple idea. We automated it. Costs dropped, bingo! 2

The loss-making division, to Andy Duncan’s relief, swiftly moved from the red into the black as the recession arrived. But the real breakthrough for the take-up of 4oD catch-up came courtesy of the BBC’s iPlayer, which rejected the clunky download route and introduced streaming of programmes using Adobe Flash, even though it came at a cost to picture quality. Channel 4 quickly followed suit – so despite the advertising downturn, and despite objections that it was taking money out of drama budgets and daytime programming, the online momentum continued. The upgrade of 4oD, which cost in excess of £5 million, got the go-ahead in spring 2008. Channel 4 had to press on because that was where its audience was heading.

Project Kangaroo In parallel the channel had hopped onto the ill-starred Project Kangaroo, as an equal partner alongside BBC Worldwide and ITV. Kangaroo was designed by the three public service broadcasters as a video-on-demand nationwide platform that would have allowed purchases from their back catalogues, too. But it never got off the ground, principally because it was so easy to paint as an attempt to control the UK market for catch-up video. Its opponents extended beyond the rival telecoms and cable companies to independent producers and PACT, which bitterly resented it. After complaints to the Office of Fair Trading, the broadcast partners self-referred it to the Competition Commission and in February 2009 it was blocked, as feared and expected.

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In essence Kangaroo would have been an early collaborative British version of Netflix, and some still mourn its passing. Was it a huge missed opportunity? Its supporters said it would have saved costs, creating a straightforward on-demand platform for users instead of burdening them with three separate places to search. It had the flexibility to offer both free (ad-funded) catch-up and pay options. From Channel 4’s perspective it can be seen as another of the Duncan era’s big-bet failures; but quite a noble one. Chairman Luke Johnson was convinced that it was a missed opportunity: “It was a tragedy for Britain’s creative industries that in 2009 … the myopic regulators at the Competition Commission blocked our Kangaroo venture. It would have been a pioneering video-on-demand service and a national champion to do battle with the likes of Netflix. Instead it was shot down by small-minded bureaucrats who were heavily lobbied by our competitors.”3 Sharon White, the chief executive of Ofcom, told the Royal Television Society’s 2018 London Conference she agreed: “Kangaroo, that was a mistake. We want to signal very strongly that the public service broadcasters are stronger together.” John McVay, chief executive of trade body PACT, disagreed: “I led the charge to go to the Competition Commission. It was unacceptable – they wanted to hoover up all the rights and put them through this platform.” He said the decision had to be seen in the context of market conditions of that time. 4 Bob Harris reflected: “We almost got there. Channel 4 was ready to go. I was phoned the night before and told it was dead.” The channel had to shrug off disappointment. “I think it was the right project at the wrong time,” Gisby said. The broadcasters moved on to less objectional digital TV collaborations, eventually resulting in Youview, a catch-up, rewind-connected broadband set-top box, and the public service Freesat platform. The block to Kangaroo put the focus back on Channel 4’s own services. Combining television programmes with bespoke websites, several of them commercial, plus mobile and apps, was already part of its multichannel approach. This had been pioneered with early initiatives to stream footage from Big Brother: by series 7 in 2006 there had also been 30 million views of its online video clips. Now it led to a further creative expansion of Channel4.com, which was about to develop into more than just the authoritative place for programme information. Early in 2009 Channel 4 added its programme archive to the web and started to promote 40D catch-up on its television channels. As 2009 progressed the strategy paid dividends, serving up 200 million programmes. In the annual report for that year Anne Bulford claimed it was “the UK’s most popular commercial long-form VOD platform … truly cross-platform in its public service delivery”. Some of the marketing initiatives, though, were doomed to failure. Among them were Channel 4-branded video games and traditional programme-linked magazines for property and cars, aimed at classified advertising. They cost too much, made no commercial sense and did not fit in with Channel 4’s public-service remit. By contrast, a short-term service-providing deal by the company with YouTube proved a limited success. It was given a green light by the board in July 2009. This

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allowed YouTube to boast that it was offering around 3,000 hours of TV when access started in the autumn. Grasping the opportunity to put the catch-up schedule on YouTube in exchange for a handsome fee, plus the right to sell advertising, was a risk worth taking in a recession, even if some saw it as supping with the enemy. With the digital revolution in its infancy, Harris had to carry £4 million worth of programming on foot to Google’s headquarters in Buckingham Palace Road to get it up and running. It proved to be a one-off, though. “It didn’t work for YouTube,” said Sarah Rose. “The numbers were tiny. There was very little advertising. It didn’t cannibalise our own platform either. What it taught us was users were not going to YouTube for premium long-form content. The deal was never going to be renewed.” One of the headaches in the service was Channel 4 News, which, because it was live, had to be scrambled and made ready for YouTube an hour or two after transmission, and was then taken down as old news at midnight. There were by now two key online commissioners on the 4oD public service side: Adam Gee in factual and Louise Brown in entertainment, two of the few executives who bridged the worlds of online and TV. One of the most ambitious and successful online extensions was the health programme Embarrassing Bodies, made by Maverick, a Birmingham-based independent. It began in April 2008 and even morphed into live diagnosis. The TV show and its telegenic doctors drove people onto the digital extension to check and address health issues. This bound people closer to the show and audiences rose. Jemima Kiss, The Guardian’s online specialist writer, paid tribute to the programme: “Stop sniggering in the back there, Channel 4’s Embarrassing Bodies is triggering some of the highest-ever web and mobile downloads for the broadcaster, recording 1.2 million views on the show’s site in the first thirty-six hours. The four-part show covers very intimate health issues including haemorrhoids, incontinence, halitosis. The online version gets very sticky, inviting users to contribute online to discussions and address issues they might be comfortable about broaching with their doctor. It’s classic public service stuff.” 5 A video of consultations, a sexually transmitted disease checker, health calculator and a chance for viewers to submit their concerns were innovative features. Four health check videos that could be viewed on mobile phones or online clocked up 89,000 views in just two hours after the first programmes were broadcast in April. They featured breast, skin, testicle and vulva problems, the last clocking up the most views – 24,438. Three million video clips were viewed on the Embarrassing Bodies website in 2009. Because of the highly integrated use of the web, the team started constructing the TV series around the online response – for example, on the subject of autism. The strand ran for six series and won two BAFTAs, in 2009 for interactivity online and in 2010 for interactive creative contribution. For a time the project was viewed as an indication of the direction of travel for Channel 4 as a whole, and inspired NHS Direct initiatives to encourage referrals and self-checking.

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Another success was The Big Art Mob, aimed at educating people in community art projects backed by the channel. They also worked with Kew Gardens on a database for natural plant remedies as an online element in its Medicine Man series, as well as more obvious programme-linked microsites for its nightly soap opera Hollyoaks, Gok Wan’s How to Look Good Naked and Seven Days, a failed reality show. The Sex Education Show, presented by Anna Richardson, designed to speak frankly to teenagers about sex launched in 2008, leading to a third series, Am I Normal? in 2011. Its last outing was a campaign including a Facebook page and petition called ‘Stop Pimping Our Kids’. The page was criticised for condemning what some believed were perfectly normal children’s clothes. The thinking was then directed towards education. Channel 4’s public purpose of educating older children and teenagers – in an agreed division of responsibilities with the BBC – was patently not best served by television programmes largely broadcast in the mornings, when the target audience was at school or college. Nor were they much watched in the classroom. The channel began planning a switch to educational content online and by 2011 schools programming had fallen from twenty-one hours per week to three. A suite of products were developed to support the curriculum, starting in 2008 with Battlefront, giving teenagers a chance to launch campaigns on issues crucial to them, from knife and gun crime to cyberbullying, as well as an initiative to promote random acts of kindness. This won an International Emmy. The Year Dot Channel4.com website looked at how social networking could help school and college leavers, while The Insiders used comedy and blogs to help teenagers think about careers. Other projects inviting inquiries and interaction included the online game Bow Street Runner, developed by Channel 4 Education to accompany a historical drama, City of Vice, about Georgian England and the creation of the first police force. The game was played over a million times in a year, appealing especially to 12-to-17-year-olds, and won a BAFTA for best children’s interactive project. Another game, 1066, about the Norman Conquest, followed. This was the zenith. Gaming was soon deprioritised, judged to be too expensive in a market where others were investing significantly. Partly as a result, Channel 4’s obligation to serving older children began to melt away. Davidson-Houston, who had presided over this expansion of websites and second-screen extensions, now started to phase them out. He became head of online, and would be integrated into Jay Hunt’s programming/content team, in David Abraham’s new regime from 2010. “I took a pretty dismal view of the use of resources and some of the claims being made,” he recalled. “We cleaned up to an absurd degree on industry awards. These are important to Channel 4; but it was clear to me that the cash I was using had less of an impact than that being spent on great television programmes.” Even at the high-water mark of audience engagement in the prime time quiz show The Million Pound Drop, when you could play along live at home, only 12 percent of viewers were doing it. “I say it was a fad and very expensive. The dividend was innovation, pushing boundaries. It was extraordinary, like Concorde was, but there was no need to have it any more.”

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It was too early to abandon television and the mass impact of broadcasting and to stake everything on the digital world. Although some in the industry were convinced that television could no longer reach young people, that they just wanted to play games, the evidence did not support this theory. Broadcast television was surviving more robustly than the doom-mongers predicted at this stage, even among teenagers. The Inbetweeners comedy, launched in 2008, enjoyed tremendous success with that age group and gave everyone pause for thought. But the decision to withdraw the online games and programmes was still controversial. “The issue was that the impact wasn’t anything like it was on television,” said Davidson-Houston. “The numbers were huge, but I asked the question what country they were in. And that’s when the balloon started to deflate. The vast majority were not in the UK.” The game 1066, which had been played 10 million times in 2009, turned out to be very popular in China. “It didn’t pass the sniff test. We were not fulfilling our remit. And I never thought creating unsustainable little indies by popping money into them is fulfilling the remit at all.” The channel’s focus on older children and schools-related programming lost its in-house architect, Janey Walker, in 2010, and faded despite its passionate team of advocates and Ofcom’s concern about a failure to serve children. At the end of 2012 the T4 scheduling spot, on Channel 4 and E4, was discontinued. That was a flexible weekend and summer holiday zone that included children’s programmes, a summer season on the beach at Weston-Super-Mare, and repeats of Friends until 2011, when Channel 4 relinquished the rights. Colette Bowe, chair of Ofcom, was outspoken in her concern at the de-prioritising of children and the associated educational remit but it was politely ignored at first. Another move that proved too distant from the channel’s focus on television was the creation of the 4IP fund towards the end of 2008. It was a mix of some Channel 4 money with partnerships including regional development funds from Screen West Midlands and Scottish Screen, to invest in creatives devising games, mobiles and apps “to bring public services and qualities alive in the online world”. This had been a key promise in the 2008 Next on 4 policy. One project, Schoolscope, did a useful job of pulling together official government data about schools, including Ofsted reports for every school. It closed in 2012. Another did the same for public transport. By the end of 2009 Channel 4 had invested around £3 million in 40 companies. One at least was a triumph – Audioboo (later Audioboom), a mobile application that allowed recording and uploading audio on the move. None of these gizmos, though, had much relevance to Channel 4’s output – unlike the online applications that Embarrassing Bodies pioneered. And they were mostly too small for 4 to exploit commercially. By 2010, concentrating resources on the broadcast channels and audience data were its priority. 4IP, overseen by the senior executive Stuart Cosgrove, was shut down by David Abraham – but C4’s stake in the successful MyBuilder service, which put registered builders in touch with clients, was sold for a profit in 2017.

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Jon Gisby summed up the company’s dilemma: “Channel 4 did have a better Video on Demand system than ITV – but it is not a digital media company, it is a television commissioner, operator, broadcaster. Within its remit the call was to make the core output better – more engaging, enhanced, and profitable.” The model that aims to harness the best talent and ideas from outside of the organisation had arguably worked well, as experts and engineers were recruited to develop 4oD and websites. The popularity of 4oD meant it had become indispensable. The components were in place for the next phase – registration and the shift to video adverts, and the transition to a more advanced and monetised All4 between 2011 and 2014. One positive outcome of the 2010 Digital Economy Act, hurriedly put in place in the dying days of Gordon Brown’s Labour government, was that it revised Channel 4’s remit agreement by accepting that it would be assessed by its delivery of public service goals across all its platforms. So if it showed it was delivering public value to audiences through responsible spending on innovation in digital services it could invest with a clearer conscience. Ofcom’s founding chief executive Stephen Carter said the aim of remaking Channel 4’s charter and the update of its public purposes was to improve its focus on areas of digital content. This was helpfully vague, seen as a minor adjustment at the time. It would create a backlash as politicians started questioning whether Channel 4 was being properly and forensically scrutinised. For Davidson-Houston, the refocus from 2011, away from faddish second screens, Channel 4-designed apps that never made money and web-based public service extensions, was pragmatic, a realistic recognition of Channel 4’s place in the pecking order. It had all become a sprawling, multi-platform mess, based on an over-estimation of the speed of change in young people’s habits. His proposal was to raze to the ground the whole edifice built around 4oD and start again. Rather grandiosely he called it Project Haussmann, after the architect Georges-Eugene Haussmann, who redesigned nineteenth-century Paris in a vast public works programme, creating wide tree-lined boulevards to replace the higgledy-piggledy network of narrow streets. This was the seed that would germinate as David Abraham’s vision of recasting 4oD as a platform and a destination, offering more than catch-up programming. He would rename it All4. The trouble was that viewers had by now got used to the workmanlike, easy-to-access 4oD. What all this striving illustrates is the messy creative process which shapes new projects.

Notes 1

Jon Gisby interview, 15 December 2016.

2

Richard Davidson-Houston interview, 27 April 2018.

3

Sunday Times column, 22 July 2018.

4

John McVay interview, March 2017.

5

The Guardian, 1 May 2008.

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6 ANDY DUNCAN SACKING. LUKE JOHNSON OVERRULED

T

his is the story of how things fell apart and the toxic triangle of Johnson, Duncan and Lygo at the top of Channel 4 was broken. In the autumn of 2008 plotting started in earnest. Luke Johnson wanted to remove Andy Duncan but his deputy, David Puttnam, wanted to stop him … at least for the time being. One certainty was that Duncan, whose weakness was that he always saw the best in people, was in deep trouble but seemed largely unaware of it. Puttnam described what happened at a board meeting on Monday 27 October 2008, held at the offices of Birmingham City Football Club: It became very evident something weird was going on. People were behaving oddly. Luke was particularly cruel to Andy at that meeting. It wasn’t like other meetings. Afterwards Tony Hall and I caucused and asked each other what was happening. We decided what was going on was a putsch. It was absolutely true that Luke, without telling anyone, had basically offered Kevin Lygo the job [as chief executive of Channel 4] and he was going to sack Andy.

Hall and Puttnam had observed that Johnson and Lygo had shared a car for the meeting and were very friendly.1 The board was being hosted for the first and only time by another non-executive director, Karen Brady, managing director of Birmingham City, whose appointment ran until July 2010. She was a staunch Tory, very direct, and her bombastic style was viewed with distaste by several board members, a few of whom tried to avoid speaking to her. It did nothing to increase her popularity when it was announced that she had just been recruited as a guest interviewer on the BBC’s The Apprentice, alongside Alan Sugar. At the time Channel 4 was embarking on Project Benson, its cost and job cuts programme sparked by a shocking collapse in advertising. The project had already killed off the ambitious plan to diversify into radio stations. A senior executive at Channel 4 noted: “The radio collapse is the moment it emboldened Kevin Lygo, as the thing that Luke would use to get rid of Andy – but something stopped him.

Radio was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Everyone started behaving badly, mutinously, and it came out into the open after that.” Lygo confirmed he had indeed been suddenly summoned by Luke Johnson to his home and told he intended to get rid of Andy, and that he, Lygo, would be the replacement. But nothing happened for months, though the rumours and leaks which poured out of Channel 4 confirmed that it was a very unhappy ship. “What Tony and I absolutely agreed on was that with only little more than a year to go you could not change the chief executive or bind the new chairman to the new chief executive,” Puttnam said. “We were not a bloc against Kevin Lygo. We were a bloc against anything happening arbitrarily, initiated by Luke. So Tony and I would not be budged on the removal of Andy till we knew it was impossible for anyone not to make the case for a new chief executive. Anything I did, I did in lock step with Tony. On your own you achieve nothing on a board, I learnt this a long time ago.” A third powerful non-executive, Martha Lane Fox, broadly agreed with their approach. Luke Johnson’s tenure would end in January 2010, and it became clear in the opening months of 2009 that the next chair of Ofcom, the forceful Colette Bowe – already a member of the Ofcom board before succeeding Lord (David) Currie in April – was aware of problems at Channel 4. Johnson would in due course be warned by Bowe that the choice of the next chief executive was not his to make, which infuriated him. So Andy Duncan’s tenure was protected for the time being, although a painful realisation started to dawn on him. He would serve out his remaining months as chief executive navigating a political quagmire, hoping to secure some sort of helping hand or subsidy to crown his campaign to ensure that Channel 4 was financially secure enough in the long term to provide a good proportion of loss-making worthy programmes – and in so doing save his skin. At an awkward press conference in May 2009, when presenting the annual report, he virtually pleaded in front of journalists for more time to fulfil his mission, while Johnson looked on stonily. The chairman’s own observations were grim: “The media establishment is undergoing its most violent upheaval since Channel 4 was founded twenty-six years ago. The digital revolution, combined with severe economic downturn, means all commercial broadcasters are under significant pressure. We are no exception.” The tense atmosphere had its roots in the confrontation that soured for good the relationship between Johnson and Puttnam and exposed their incompatibility. It had occurred three years earlier, on 10 April 2006, shortly after Puttnam had joined the board: “I had the worst row I ever had with anyone in my life with Luke,” Puttnam recalled. “It was volcanic. He had decided I was a plant.” The gist of it was that Johnson accused him of being a Labour Party grandee imposed as a check on him by David Currie, a Labour peer, and Stephen Carter, Ofcom’s chief executive and a future Labour minister. The confrontation was played out in front of Currie, who described it thus:

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I had arranged to see Luke and David in my flat, by Smithfield Market, as part of a general catch-up. We had what seemed to be a reasonable meeting. Then they left. Suddenly there was a ring of the bell, and David and Luke came stomping back in. David said to Luke: “Repeat what you just said to me!” Luke was saying: “I can’t possibly work with David.” It was a mutual thing. Luke gave his reason: David was a placeman. I told him to calm down and said: “You chose David. I didn’t tell you or force him on you – it was your decision.” I don’t think I lost my temper, but I thought it was just ridiculous. Why couldn’t they get on? To make that kind of relationship work there has to be mutual respect, while being prepared to argue through issues… . But Luke is a very short-tempered individual, brusque and somewhat dictatorial I think, and finds that hard. I was worried. It’s quite clear that Luke wasn’t good at chairing a meeting or dealing with people. I just didn’t know how difficult he could be: it hadn’t come out during the appointment process. He said I had imposed David on him. That is complete nonsense, something I would never dream of doing: the chairman is entitled to choose his own deputy. But I did point out to him reasonably that if he and David could work together they would be a very powerful combination. David is very wise on the media, on public service and content. Luke had his entrepreneurial side to rely on. If it had worked it was a fantastic combination – but it didn’t. That was the element of gamble, the fact that Johnson hadn’t been on a public board before.” 2

So Currie’s aim for a balanced board, graced with both business and media flair, failed. He was surprised, too, by Channel 4’s begging-bowl strategy, or at least its crude expression. “In a sense we at Ofcom had floated the idea that public service broadcasting was in difficulty, that there was a problem, that finding a solution was important. … What Luke was saying was not a million miles from what we were saying; it just wasn’t said in a subtle or constructive manner. It struck me as very unplanned and opportunistic. It wasn’t credible. If you really wanted to make a very good and strong case it needed to be well documented and consistent.” Johnson was shocked by Currie’s dressing-down. He apologised and went off with Puttnam for a conciliatory coffee. But the truce was only temporary and they had a testy relationship from then on. Johnson did have grounds for feeling an outsider, because Puttnam had taken a lead role in vetting the legislation which led to the 2003 Communications Act and the creation of an extremely powerful Ofcom, encouraging experienced heavyweight candidates such as Currie and Carter to apply for the founding positions. By January 2009 detailed discussions were taking place about the future of Channel 4, couched as finding the “preferred funding option”. The most talked-about was the possibility of Channel 4 and BBC Worldwide which was favoured by Carter. It was the deal of choice for Johnson and Duncan, too, bearing in mind the solid £112 million profit that Worldwide had declared in 2008, and its sound business model based on a spread of assets, TV channels and international programme sales.

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The discussions were chaired by Carter, by now Lord Carter of Barnes, Communications Minister in Gordon Brown’s administration. He headed an inter-departmental Digital Britain Steering Group, including officials from the Treasury and Ofcom. Briefings were also held with Jeremy Hunt, the Conservative shadow Culture Secretary, and Don Foster for the Liberal Democrats. The aim was to broker a politically acceptable deal, as the Labour government headed towards its final year. On 29 January the Government published Carter’s interim Digital Britain report, a discursive green paper, listing the options for a second public service body after the BBC – effectively a financially beefed-up and digitally ambitious Channel 4. By now it was clear there would be no direct transfer of money from licence funds to Channel 4. The BBC’s Director-General, Mark Thompson, said just before the report’s publication that the BBC was not a portable cash machine. At the BBC Trust the influential David Liddiment, a former ITV executive, gave blunt warnings about the impact of any such deal on Channel 4’s independence. Thompson ignited fresh controversy by reviving the prospect of a merger between Channels 4 and Five – harking back to his time at Channel 4 when he had helped to set that hapless hare running. The three options in Digital Britain were: a combination of Channel 4 and BBC Worldwide assets; a combination of Channel 4 and Five assets, and a combination of Channel 4 and another party’s assets – this last effectively a semi-privatisation. There had been talk, too, of Endemol, the producer of Big Brother, buying a stake. There was no mention of Ofcom’s suggestion of giving the channel £120 million left over from the digital switchover fund to buy into UKTV, the joint venture reliant on recycled BBC programmes, 50 percent-owned by BBC Worldwide. UKTV was run by David Abraham who memorably described its relationship with the BBC as that of a yappy dog, always demanding more repeat programmes to fill its channels. Between February and May, meetings continued between Channel 4 and the Digital Britain Steering Board. They included a joint presentation from Channel 4 and BBC Worldwide, whose chief executive, John Smith, had already held discussions with Duncan and Johnson and, unlike Thompson, would have welcomed a tie-up. “My attitude was that any venture which produced more revenue and profit was worth pursuing. Luke Johnson was very receptive. His concern was for the long-term viability of Channel 4. We talked privately about it. At BBC Worldwide we thought we would aid Channel 4, but in the minds of some people at Channel 4 it was the other way around: they thought we were taking advantage of them.”3 At the same time Smith was advocating selling a share stake in BBC Worldwide as a way of raising working capital. It got close to happening in 2010/11 when David Cameron and George Osborne came into office, but it was blocked then by Lord (Christopher) Patten, who had succeeded Sir Michael Lyons as chairman of the BBC Trust.

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On 26 February Channel 4 representatives met with their opposite numbers at the European broadcaster RTL, which then owned Channel 5. This was followed eight days later by a meeting of the principals from Channel 4 and RTL/Five: Luke Johnson, Andy Duncan, Gerhard Zeiler and Dawn Airey. A month later Bertlesmann, the German media group that controlled RTL, said that Five did not have a sustainable future without a merger with ITV or Channel 4. The group’s results revealed that net profit had dropped by a third, with Five singled out as a special drag. The group was so gloomy about the state of television advertising that in April it formally baited its rod and publicly talked up a merger of Five with Channel 4. But this was something on which Johnson and Duncan were united and agreed. They saw Five as a weak brand, a loss-maker, and viewed the merger as a means for Five’s desperate owners to take backdoor control of Channel 4; not a solution to the apparent funding gap of £100 million plus that they kept highlighting. The view at 4 was that, if there had to be a merger, Five’s portion should be a realistic 20–25 percent of the enlarged company, not the “unrealistically high” 39–45 percent proposed. They also questioned the accuracy of financial information and feared the ultimate deal would deliver up Channel 4 to an asset stripper. Notwithstanding all of these unpromising cross-currents the discussions continued, and on 1 April Luke Johnson, Andy Duncan, Anne Bulford and Kevin Lygo attended a joint meeting with RTL/Five, where a presentation was made to Stephen Carter on the possibility of a 4/Five tie-up. Discussion also continued within the Department of Culture, Media & Sport, the Department of Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, the Shareholder Executive, MPs, the opposition, members of the House of Lords and key stakeholders including PACT and the BBC. The civil servant Jon Zeff, DCMS Director of Broadcasting at the time, at the centre of it all reflected: “Carter had made it his project by late 2008 to deliver a Digital Economy Act. The Digital Britain interim report posed the question whether Channel 4 was the right organisation to be the online public service provider. There was perhaps an exaggerated view that ITV’s days as a commercial public service broadcaster were numbered. The Government rejected the notion of Channel 4 getting public funding quite quickly, partly because the BBC were dead set against it, though 4 themselves were quite attracted to it. BBC Worldwide was too tied up with the BBC to be split off – they were never going to let that happen – so the discussions migrated to synergies between the two. A great deal of detailed work went on.” But it was cumbersome. Negotiations continued over a limited joint venture deal with BBC Worldwide, or a partnership with UKTV and its themed digital channels. This would have covered the TV channels, DVDs, publishing, the sale of UKTV advertising, and an infusion of Channel 4’s marketing nous. There were parallel tripartite discussions between Channel 4, the BBC and the Government during April. Carter visited the

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Channel 4 board meeting to update them in April and again on 18 May, a month before he published his plan. The belief spread that the BBC and Channel 4 were close to striking a deal. It was just wishful thinking. On 16 June, the final Digital Britain report was published at a strangely unfocused press conference. It ruled out any form of part-privatisation of Channel 4 and the RTL/Channel 5 deal: those many months spent by economists and advisers had been wasted. As a face-saver it gave a green light for continuing “slimmed down” joint venture discussions with BBC Worldwide, which took place in July but were doomed to peter out. Channel 4 was left in limbo, to its own devices. 4 The Government also took the view that a straight asset transfer from the BBC to Channel 4 would have significant competition implications. The parties have worked on a series of partnerships including around digital channels, advertising and DVD sales. … We are ready to facilitate such joint ventures if commercial terms can be agreed. 5

With the proposed Netflix-style Project Kangaroo also blocked, Channel 4 was forced to allocate an additional £10 million for development of its own portal, 4oD, for future online data gathering, rather than being able to piggyback on the BBC iPlayer technology. An observer at the inconclusive 2009 talks between BBC Worldwide, Channel 4 and Ofcom recalled: “Mark Thompson was not neutral. He had strong views. He thought he knew as much about Channel 4 as Andy Duncan. Duncan used to work for him and was his junior. The dynamics were difficult, especially when Duncan told Mark he was wrong… . I witnessed it. Mark is very able, his natural inclination is to be commanding and dominating. He was not going to give BBC Worldwide away.” Andy Duncan said: “I passionately believed the UK was better off with not just the BBC but a second state-owned Channel 4. For me as chief executive, that was number one. Channel 4 needed some creative renewal and reinvention. The 4/Five merger had rumbled on behind the scenes pretty much all the time I was there… . Stephen Carter and Colette Bowe were agitating for a more creative solution, Luke Johnson deep down wanted to do a commercial deal. Ultimately the BBC Worldwide proposals were an alternative to taking public money. It was Ofcom that was the catalyst for this interesting idea. There was an interesting deal to be done: it could have been done but the BBC were not happy.”6 Sir Michael Lyons was deeply suspicious of Johnson. “It was a frenetic and confusing time,” he said. “I had some of the fiercest conversations with him, most striking: he engages very fiercely but I was not intimidated.” He said to me he wanted “some of your buns, not pickings off the table”.7 At the same time, in a separate unsuccessful commercial move, Project Panda was being pushed. This was the brainchild of sales director Andy Barnes, working with Duncan’s oversight, and Nick Milligan, his opposite number at Sky. They pro-

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posed a merger of the two broadcasters’ sales teams, designed to cut the headcount by half. The joint sales team would command a satisfying 38.1 percent slice of the TV-ad market, to counter ITV. This would almost certainly have involved a Competition Commission inquiry. Meanwhile the 22 June board meeting, immediately after that disappointing Digital Britain report, recorded “disagreement over the future direction of Channel 4 and its leadership”. The board had been invited to table proposals for an updated and modernised Channel 4 remit to be incorporated into the Digital Economy Bill – the rushed piece of legislation that was salvaged from the mess the following year. By now Colette Bowe was well advanced on her most urgent task: to sort out Channel 4, starting with a new chair. She was only too conscious of turmoil within the upper echelons at Horseferry Road. She told Johnson she needed to attend a board meeting to review its composition, to see what qualities the next chairman needed. When she did she was so shocked by the bad behaviour she witnessed that she resolved to invite each board member to talk to her separately after Andy Duncan left. Tony Hall told her she was like a Royal Navy frigate coming in and parking offshore to make sure that nothing untoward happened. She was just determined to bring the “toxic trio” effect to an end. The directors told her they wanted a proper chairman to run the board. She had already sounded out the former Treasury Permanent Secretary, Terry Burns (also a friend), as the ideal replacement. He had conducted a review of the BBC Charter and regulatory framework, completed in 2006. His sharp brain and imposing presence were balanced by a courteous and cheery manner and a cultivated appetite for music and the arts. The July board meeting was a lengthy affair. The begging-bowl strategy had failed and was abandoned. A long-debated and delayed decision to cancel the expiring Big Brother contract, which had been pending since April, was finally noted and effectively ratified. The board agreed to strike a short-term content deal, putting Channel 4 programmes on YouTube, for a fee, given the collapse of the Kangaroo project. And so it arrived, this was the moment when the board could safely fall out with Andy Duncan. Digital Britain had failed to provide a financial solution and it was clear he had lost support from everyone. The blow was delivered a month before the 2009 Edinburgh Television Festival. On 22 July Johnson and Puttnam agreed their plan and had it endorsed at a special meeting of non-executive directors. Duncan was then summoned to meet the two men in a small private room next to the boardroom. Johnson did all the talking. He told Duncan that the board had lost its trust in him, that the relationship wasn’t working. Puttnam recalls: “What was really amazing to me was that Andy was shocked – absolutely stunned, as if we had got a gun out. After all that had gone on, all the unpleasantness, the nastiness, he hadn’t seen it coming. It was first a breakdown in relationship between the chairman and chief executive and then, in the

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end, between Andy and the board. Andy and Kevin [Lygo] had virtually stopped talking for at least six months before.” Johnson took charge of the negotiations with Duncan, using his (Johnson’s) personal lawyer. Duncan, for so long Mr Nice, fought back. It was a tortuous deal and there were clashes between the lawyers – the outcome of years of bitterness. Duncan reflected: “When I look back on it, it was incredibly bad. It was the personal politics, calculated dishonesty. For me, you can have private disagreements, but leaks from the board were happening. I don’t think Luke leaked anything, but he created such a dysfunctional context, being a maverick chairman, doing the job badly, it gave permission to other people who thought that was how things were done here. ”From my perspective there was seriously bad behaviour by Luke Johnson. It led to a toxic board. When things came to an absolute head I felt it went from being difficult to deal with to crossing a line. The funding issue was part of it. There was no clear funding settlement with the BBC – it was a damp squib – but it left Channel 4 to live and fight another day. We were on the cusp of refreshing the remit across all channels and platforms. Luke saw it as an opportunity: what we wanted had not been ultimately successful or delivered, and Luke was coming to the end of his tenure. Once I left, installing Kevin Lygo was his preferred option.” The agreement was that the departure would be announced in a dignified manner on 16 September, well after the Edinburgh Television Festival, where the focus could be the decision to end Big Brother. But the sacking was leaked at Edinburgh, where Duncan looked a broken man. After bitter negotiations he signed a compromise agreement, including a donation from Channel 4 to two of his chosen charities, which included helping sexually abused trafficked women. The termination date was extended from 16 September to 17 November. The document, summarising the payments, said that as compensation for news of his dismissal being leaked before the agreed announcement date, he would receive a sum equivalent to seventeen days of his gross remuneration package. It amounted to £38,521, “donated to charity on his behalf ”. The aggregated total payment was £731,000. The bulk of it was made up of his annual base salary of £625,875. What was not known at the time was that he had agreed to a cut in his salary from 1 May 2009, from £669,500 to £581,750: a response to the rising clamour about excessive C4 pay. In all he received £1.481 million in that year. The full details of Duncan’s pay off, specifically the extra payment to charities, were kept out of the Channel 4 annual report and therefore withheld from MPs on Parliament’s Culture, Media & Sport Committee which did not escape the eagle eye of advisor Ray Gallagher and its chair John Whittingdale. It took a freedom of information request to flush it out. When Lord Burns was pressed on the pay issue he told them: ”I would expect the days of salaries at the level of Mr Duncan’s were in the past.”

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Andy Duncan was given the courtesy of presenting to the board an eleven-page review of Channel 4’s six years under his charge before he left on 17 November. This emphasised his important contribution in driving the growth of C4’s free advertising-supported digital channels – E4, More 4, Film 4 and 4Music. By 2010 they would be attracting a third of all Channel 4 viewing and they had played a key part in boosting advertising income to bolster the main channel. E4 was the most lucrative and important because it had the largest share of the viewing by 16-to 34-year-olds, 4.59 percent – beating ITV2’s 3.97 percent. More4 had the highest share of ABC1s among its competitive set. The digital channels had moved into profit in 2008 and the profit forecast for 2009 was £49 million. Channel 4 had prepared for a digital future and pioneered the first UK video-on-demand service, 4oD. Less successfully for the future, it was moving its entire education service from TV to online. Reading his review, an objective outsider might wonder if Duncan had ever reflected that this litany of (some) success undermined his pleas for subsidy. His response was that he had never said Channel 4 could not survive on its own: the debate was about how much public service broadcasting it could afford in the near future. Luke Johnson was an unsuitable chairman for an organisation that had a broad public remit. As Sir Michael Lyons commented: “He’s a venture capitalist: it’s an extraordinary mindset, but to think because he is good at business he will be good at the top of Channel 4 is like Philip Green being called in by Cameron to advise on how to make public services more efficient. When I look back on it now I wonder what the rest of the Channel 4 board was doing. It was full of the great and the good and they agreed these items.” Johnson himself wrote in his last regular widely-read Sunday Times Business column, before he took a break over the Patisserie Valerie collapse, a description of the valued role entrepreneurs play, as free thinking unpredictable outsiders: Entrepreneurs are the anarchists of the business world. Their mission is to overthrow the existing order. … Established organisations are constantly trying to maintain the status quo, but they are almost always doomed to decline. … Every entrepreneur is a disruptor and a libertarian – even if they might not describe themselves as such. … Entrepreneurship is a vital yet haphazard part of humanity that will never be replaced by artificial intelligence.8

Colette Bowe now expedited Ofcom’s search for the new chairman. This was handled by headhunters but Terry Burns was the preferred choice and he fitted the bill. First, he had to assure himself that Channel 4 was in a stable financial position, so Anne Bulford took him through the books in September. It was clear that the advertising market was about to look up. Burns formally applied and was duly appointed in November. The departing Johnson had started the process of recruiting Duncan’s replacement, but Burns

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was put onto the board as well to make sure he oversaw the appointment and who sat on the selection board. This included the power trio Lord Puttnam, Tony Hall and Martha Lane Fox, alongside Burns and Johnson, who was allowed to serve out his term until 27 January 2010. But Luke Johnson tried to stop Puttnam’s inclusion on the appointment board. “I had to spend one of my early weekends resolving this, time, emails, because David was deputy chairman, and Luke was saying he should not be on it,” said Burns. I have mixed feelings about Luke, over the three-month period I got to know him – haven’t seen him since. He is very clever, thinks about things in different ways to other people. Not a surprise he is a successful entrepreneur. Fascinating. The problem is his personal skills. I basically suspect Luke found dealing with Andy Duncan very difficult. They were polar opposites. He went to Kevin as the second option. They are both slightly contrarian people. Not bedfellows but they had some similar characteristics.

Andy Duncan, ever conscientious, popped in to see Burns at his Santander UK office just before he was due to leave and offered his services a bit longer to help bridge the transition; but this was politely declined. There followed a subdued leaving party at Horseferry Road, and that was it. “Andy Duncan was the nicest of chief executives I have worked for,” said Matt Baker, his head of press. “He was very open, pretty forgiving, having got a barrage of crap poured over him. He never lashed out at anyone. He acted with dignity throughout. You can blame him only for not being more egotistical.” Shortly after the July board meeting 4’s head of programming Julian Bellamy had decided to tell Tim Hincks of Endemol that the Big Brother contract was not being renewed. They met at the Piccadilly Hotel for coffee. Hincks had known it was coming, but it was a courteous way of breaking the news, rather than a phone call. As things stood Bellamy was in need of producer allies because that autumn he thought he was in line to land his goal of becoming Channel 4’s director of programming – provided Kevin Lygo succeeded Duncan. He started drawing up his detailed plans for a creative overhaul and pencilled in his dream team to carry it out. The glimmers of light denoting a recovery in the advertising market, which had helped persuade Burns accept the chair, grew stronger. In October the board was told the situation had improved and in December came a gift for the next regime: the sales team had managed to conclude terms with two of the biggest agencies, and sponsorship was holding up strongly. Christmas was coming and with it the need to advertise everything from perfume to alcohol. Winter approached but a wan sun finally began to shine on Channel 4.

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Notes 1

David Puttnam interview, 10 January 2017, House of Lords.

2

David Currie interview, 2 February 2017, House of Lords.

3

John Smith interview, 6 February 2017.

4

The three key elements of the report with regard to Channel 4 were: • Rejection of a merger with a commercial partner as in a “minority privatisation”. • No direct public funding. The Government, having looked at 4’s current and prospective commercial position, concluded that it could not make available direct Exchequer funding. “Such direct funding could over time alter the ethos that has made Channel 4 a valued part of the public service mix.” • The Government considered the option of a merger between BBC Worldwide and Channel 4, involving greater structural separation between Worldwide and the BBC and a recast Channel 4. This had such practical and strategic implications for all parties that it needed further work.

5

Digital Britain pp. 148–9, paragraphs 52–6.

6

Andy Duncan interview, 17 January 2017.

7

Sir Michael Lyons interview, 15 January 2017.

8

“Animal Spirits” by Luke Johnson, 7 October 2018. He was caught up in a financial collapse at the Patisserie Valerie café and cake chain he chaired as part-owner.

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7 DAVID ABRAHAM

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ednesday 13 January 2010 was not a day to raise the spirits. It was snowing in Central London and the pavements were slushy. David Abraham, though, was undeterred. A thoughtful 46-year-old, his black hair matching his trademark black spectacles, he plodded along Mayfair Place from Green Park underground station and ducked into the corner coffee shop to change out of his wellington boots. Now in polished black shoes, he walked the final few yards to Devonshire House, the plush offices of headhunters Egon Zehnder, and went up to the ninth floor. He was approaching a life-changing interview. He was one of just two television executives competing for the top job as Channel 4’s chief executive, only the sixth such vacancy in its 27-year existence. A third candidate, Carolyn McCall, chief executive of the Guardian Media Group, had pulled out the day before. Abraham was the dark horse. As Jay Hunt, who would become his chief creative officer, later reminisced: “To be blunt, it looked like a long shot for him. He was an outsider. He wasn’t part of the broadcasting establishment.” The person to beat was Kevin Lygo, Channel 4’s talented director of television, who had garnered publicity by announcing the cancellation of Big Brother five months earlier. He was seen as so important to the delivery of the channel’s distinctive hits, especially comedy and entertainment, that he had been given a hand in selecting the last chief executive, Andy Duncan. He thought that this time the job should be his. Indeed, he believed he had been promised it, in the autumn of 2008, by chairman Luke Johnson. But these were far from ordinary times. The board had just sacked Duncan after his campaign for financial assistance had collapsed like a punctured tyre. The channel was still coping with the effects of a severe and sudden advertising downturn linked to the onset of the recession, which had torpedoed some of its plans, including investment in new programming. It was cutting loose from Big Brother, its cash cow in September, after milking it for a decade. “Creative renewal” was the glib catchphrase on everyone’s lips. But the imminent digital TV switchover, the challenges of online competitors and the new addictive smartphones and iPad all

pointed to something greater. There would need to be a commercial renewal for a broadcaster dependent on converting money from advertising into a wide range of programmes. Its future was still under debate, with a General Election looming in May, likely to unseat a relatively benign Labour government committed to keeping it as a publicly owned company. The on/off negotiations over whether Channel 4 and Channel 5 might combine, or Channel 5 be sold to a new competitor, were still alive. Duncan’s naive solution, financial subsidy from BBC Worldwide, had been abandoned. The begging-bowl strategy – help, we are weak – had not been convincing. Yet in the words of Ed Richards, chief executive of Ofcom, Channel 4 never seemed to behave as if it were on the breadline. The disarray within Britain’s second state-owned broadcaster was reflected in the make-up of the interviewing panel of board directors, waiting in a narrow, characterless wood-panelled room, its one window overlooking Green Park. The real power now lay with the life peer, Terry Burns, who had been parachuted onto the board by Ofcom. A grandfatherly figure with a first-class brain, utterly confident, now the chairman of Santander UK, he had no problem establishing his authority. Another peer who insisted on being present was David Puttnam, the deputy chairman, who by now acted like an Old Testament prophet in his defence of the civilising forces of public service broadcasting. Kevin Lygo had upset him by turning down some of his programme suggestions, including a history of British cinema – though a history of the Olympics turned out fine. The outgoing chairman Luke Johnson had upset Puttnam almost from the moment he joined in February 2006, by suggesting he was an Ofcom/Labour plant to keep him (Johnson) in check. This particular accusation had climaxed in a ferocious row in April at the Smithfield penthouse home of Ofcom’s then chairman and peer, David Currie, who described it thus: “Luke said he couldn’t possibly work with David. I told him to calm down: ‘You chose David, I didn’t force him on you, it was your decision.’”1 Puttnam remembered it as “the worst row I ever had with anyone in my life”. Also on the panel was Tony Hall, chief executive of the Royal Opera House, former managing director of BBC News, who would later become Director-General of the BBC. The one woman in the line-up was Martha Lane Fox, founder of lastminute.com, who had helped guide 4’s first ventures online. Puttnam, Hall and – from time to time – Lane Fox had formed an alliance to check Johnson and ensure he did not install Lygo, his favourite. David Abraham was tense but confident. He was one of life’s optimists, a quality that would be tested in the years ahead. He had prepared meticulously for this hour-long interview. Burns would say later, with a smile, that it had been on his life plan. Jane Root, a former controller of BBC2, who had briefly occupied the office next to Abraham when they both worked at Discovery Networks, also believed it had long been on his personal radar.

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David Abraham (Ranald Mackechnie/Channel 4

He had read every speech made by the previous five chief executives. He had also enlisted as his unofficial campaign manager Dan Brooke, the son of a former Conservative Cabinet Minister, a scion of five generations of Conservative MPs and, crucially, a former Channel 4 executive who had launched E4. He would prove to be an accomplished lobbyist, having imbibed politics from a young age. Behind the scenes he had encouraged Abraham to introduce himself to opinion-formers. Dom Loehnis, the Egon Zehnder partner who handled Channel 4 executive recruitment, sternly told the candidate in December: “You’re being considered but you’re not going to just get this by walking in. You have to tell them what you think needs to be done.” Abraham presented each of the panel with a glossy brochure about himself. This summarised his advertising career, which had peaked with the foundation of the trendy co-operative advertising agency, St Luke’s. Then, in 2001, he had made a bold switch into television, beginning at Discovery Networks UK before moving to take charge of an American cable channel in 2005. Since 2007 he had settled back in London as chief executive of UKTV, a joint venture with BBC Worldwide. There he had attracted attention by applying his marketing skills to redefining its ten channels, mostly running BBC repeats, with catchy names such as Dave and Blighty. He was commercial, with just enough television commissioning experience and channel branding success to tick the board’s boxes. Under other headings

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came creative change, combined with business innovation. A succinct writer, if with a weakness for marketing jargon, he had marshalled his thoughts during a Christmas holiday with his two teenage children in Morocco. He asked permission to make a five-minute speech. “I am a unique hybrid – so uniquely qualified,” his notes said. He made a joke that, at 46, he was the same age as the founder Jeremy Isaacs and his successor Michael Grade when they took on the role. And there was the inevitable mystifying Abrahamism: a promise to “activate the brand through emphatic/amphibious linkage of channel/platform”. Then he faced questions from the panel. Luke Johnson said little. Most of the probing was about how not to stall the Channel 4 engine, bearing in mind the ending of Big Brother and the challenging advertising downturn. Abraham had only ever visited Channel 4 once, in the days of Michael Grade, when he was running St Luke’s. His first meeting with Lord Burns had taken place a month earlier, on December 14, when they had a “fireside chat” to get to know each other, and for Burns to take a measure of the candidate. “Kevin was the one to beat. Kevin could have done the job. It’s just he would have done it differently,” Abraham would later reflect. Lygo was also interviewed, but it did not go well. The killer, according to three members of the panel, was his response to a question about how he would deal with underperformers. He said: “I would withdraw my love” – a gnomic, even joking response that almost certainly torpedoed his chance. A chill descended on that small room. The day after the interview, Burns phoned Abraham to offer him the job. The panel were unanimous: even Johnson had agreed. Martha Lane Fox reflected: David was very poised, very professional, a completely different ball game. When he presented his case I thought that this was the person to run this edgy broadcaster. He sat upright, he had researched each person, he inspired confidence. We could see a way forward. He had the intellect, a passion for the model, understood the macro issues, had experience in business. It was a no-brainer to me. We needed that shift. People would lay into him as a non-programme-maker but for me it was an easy decision. 2

Abraham and Burns entered negotiations and the result was announced by Burns on 22 January, though they continued to discuss how they would work together, alongside the usual contractual terms. The outcome was a document clearly distinguishing between the duties of chairman and chief executive. A letter of agreement to end the regime that some felt had hobbled Duncan contained twelve bullet points based, Burns said, on the practice he had developed at Santander. 3 It established the chief executive’s power of appointments to the executive board, and for them to agree together for appointments to the main board. Duncan had never had the power to sack Lygo, though he’d probably wanted to. A board subcommittee covering editorial matters, chaired by Tony Hall, was abolished, handing the final say on such decisions to the chief executive.

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Lygo needed to be told the panel’s decision. A keen art collector, who occasionally conducted programming meetings at exhibitions, he was in Sotheby’s when Johnson called him back to his office and broke the news: “It’s not you, it’s David Abraham.” In retrospect the reasons for the decision are clear. The new chairman wanted a clean break with the past. In choosing Abraham the board knew they would lose Lygo, though the speed of his departure shocked them. A lunch with Abraham in February had not gone well, principally because the incoming chief executive vetoed a suggestion to hire Jonathan Ross to shore up Friday nights. Lygo resigned on 30 April, the day before Abraham formally took up his post, and was quickly snapped up by ITV’s incoming chief executive, Adam Crozier. Over the next seven years Lygo, a master of entertainment, proceeded to build up ITV Studio’s production arm with a range of deals, before moving on to become its director of television. In part, the appointment conformed to an established pattern. Channel 4 had always looked outside for a new chief executive. It had never produced a successor from within its ranks, however worthy the candidates. What could be seen as a failure might also be a key to its longevity and sustainability, an influx of new blood and talent every now and then refreshing the organisation. But there were several points of difference. David Abraham was the first chief executive never to have worked directly for the BBC. He had founded and run an advertising agency, displaying entrepreneurial flair. He promised a new direction for advertising sales, a modernisation and shake-up of a system little changed for seventeen years, with an emphasis on collecting and monetising personal data from the channel’s online users. He was the first to have worked for an American broadcaster, in Britain and USA, and done so with dynamism and success. Finally, the chairman, chief executive and (when she arrived) the chief creative officer, Jay Hunt, determined to stand united and keep disagreements private. There had been widespread dismay at the many leaks and general disarray at Horseferry Road under Duncan and Lygo. Channel 4 was about to enter a new era.

Notes 1 David Currie interview, February 2017. 2 Martha Lane Fox interview, 23 March 2017. 3 Agreement between Terry Burns and David Abraham: 1. The CEO’s job is to run the corporation under delegated authority from the board. 2. Developing and delivering the corporation’s strategy and financial results within the values established by the board, striving consistently to meet financial and operating directives. 3. Ensuring the appropriate management of day-to-day business affairs: the CEO is

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assisted in this by the executive committee established UNDER his authority. 4. Reporting regularly to the board, providing timely and relevant information to enable the board to discharge its own responsibilities. 5. Informing the chairman of all matters of significance to the board so the chairman and the board can each discharge their roles. 6. Ensuring that corporate culture promoting ethical practices including diversity and social responsibility is fostered and the policies and corporate values approved by the board are communicated throughout the organisation, so that its culture, values and ethics are aligned to its strategic objectives. 7. Making recommendations to the board on its Strategic direction. So major capital expenditure. 8. Clearly apportioning responsibilities among senior management and establishing appropriate risk management systems and controls. 9. Demonstrating exemplary leadership behaviour, ensuring an effective management team, an active plan for the evaluation and succession of that team business. 10. In consultation with the board, responsibility for selecting and developing senior management team and heads of department, who will be direct reports. Excluding executive directors, whose appointment will be chair and CEO. 11. Maintaining a positive and ethical work environment to attract and retain talent at all levels. 12. Serving as chief spokesperson for the organisation, ensuring its chief stakeholders are properly informed of its business stance and corporate affairs.

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8 CHANNEL 4 IMPORT AFTER CHUCKING OUT THE CHINTZ, AND BIDDING FOR CHANNEL 5

D

avid Abraham won the plum post of chief executive of Channel 4 by convincing board members he possessed “the full tool kit” to run this tricky broadcaster. “I am a unique hybrid, so uniquely qualified” was his claim. How true was it? He certainly had an interesting heritage. The family background was shaped by two major events of the twentieth century. His Jewish mother, Jeanette, a Belgian, was saved with her parents and four siblings from the Nazi concentration camps during World War Two, hidden by French Catholic farming families in the Ardennes. They were known as les enfants cachés. His father Esmond, born in India, was part of a Sephardic Jewish community in Calcutta, and left with his family after independence and the upheaval of partition, arriving in England by boat when he was 19. He then studied at the Regent Street Polytechnic and qualified as an architect. Esmond and Jeanette met at a kibbutz in Israel but decided to make their life together in Britain. Jeanette gave up her medical studies. After Esmond, a British citizen, had done National Service in the RAF, and with money very tight, they settled in a bungalow in Lincolnshire, where David was born in 1963. His father progressed as an architect, moving south to Essex, eventually becoming chief architect of Chelmsford Borough Council. (The family lived near Maldon, later represented in parliament by John Whittingdale, who would open a debate about the privatisation of Channel 4 in 2015.) As a child, David would often visit the schools, houses and swimming pools that Esmond designed and oversaw. This attention to design and detail in the pursuit of public service left an imprint. In an act of homage to his adopted country, Esmond supervised the restoration of a derelict historic country house, Hylands in Chelmsford, purchased by the council along with its grounds. He wrote an elegant booklet about it, reprinted in Country Life, and was praised for “the scholarly care” with which he had supervised “a delicate and difficult task”.1

David, who was proud of his cultivated father’s quiet achievements, went to Ingatestone School in Essex, a state school specialising in the international baccalaureate. He underwent his Bar Mitzah as a secular rather than an observant Jew, and won a place at Magdalen College, Oxford, studying modern history. On graduation he joined the advertising industry and from 1990 worked at the London office of the high-profile Californian creative agency Chiat Day. 2 He formed a close friendship there with a graduate trainee, Dan Brooke, who would play a key role as a loyal confidant and coach as he prepared to enter the contest for the top executive job at Channel 4. In 1995 the sale of the Chiat Day agency caused client conflicts, which led to the creation of a new agency, St Luke’s, through an employee buy-out headed by Abraham and Adam Law, a fellow executive. The deal burnished Abraham’s reputation as a bold business innovator with a radical twist. St Luke’s was a rebellious reaction to an industry seen as largely sympathetic to conservative principles. Its co-operative ownership structure set it apart from its contemporaries. Everything was shared – even computers and office mobile phones – and policy was debated at a workers’ council. Some in the industry derided them as the “Moonies”, while others thought them ultra-cool. He was in tune with the Blairite New Labour zeitgeist. St Luke’s styled itself with a swagger as “the ad agency to end all ad agencies”. Abraham was marketing director and was responsible for its first big break, landing IKEA, the Scandinavian furniture chain, as a client in 1996, when funding was precarious. Chairman Andy Law said the deal was “down to David Abraham’s persistent salesmanship”. The IKEA adverts carried the strapline “Chuck out the chintz”, and featured legions of women marching against flowery armchairs. Other memorable campaigns included Eric Cantona singing the praises of the Eurostar train service. Clients came knocking at St Luke’s door, including Sky. In 1999 it was named Agency of the Year by the trade magazine Campaign, and its enterprising spirit was captured in a book, Open Minds, 21st Century Business Lessons and Innovation from St Luke’s, written by Law. It was also profiled in a Channel 4 Cutting Edge documentary and in the Harvard Business Review. Abraham, recognising that the company needed to be run more professionally, took himself off to Harvard Business School for an accelerated management course, returning to St. Luke’s as operations director. The book includes a photo of a slender, serious thirtysomething Abraham, on the phone, in what became his trademark tailored black suit, white shirt, tie and dark glasses. One consistent comment from Channel 4 employees throughout his tenure between 2010 and 2017 was that at least he always looked and dressed like a proper chief executive, even when dressed down on Fridays. Andy Duncan, by contrast, had habitually appeared in rumpled polo shirts. Law describes Abraham as “administratively sound, a superb intellect: his attention to detail was copper-bottomed”. He added that with his financial acumen and drive he could have been a multimillionaire in his mid-thirties. He had

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caught the eye of the broadcasters and, coincidentally, had started to look at television production, suggesting to the St Luke’s workers’ council that it should invest resources in the area. At this point he got a call out of the blue from headhunters and was wooed by Joyce Taylor, head of the European end of Discovery – then still in its protected semi-commercial state, a partner of BBC Worldwide. She was looking for someone who understood marketing, who could create and run targeted branded channels aimed at specific demographic groups and interests. Abraham had the reputation of being a brand man to his fingertips. He was appointed general manager of Discovery Networks Europe in 2001 and despatched to the US headquarters in 2005 to rescue the popular factual cable channel TLC (The Learning Channel), after the previous management failed to buttress it with new programme series. He revived it, and one well-connected British supplier, Roy Ackerman, became a trusted confidant. Abraham’s stint at Discovery gave him an understanding of television programming and commissioning, and experience of the ruthless US media market. This was when he got to know Jane Root, an early backer and supplier of Channel 4 in the 1980s and a former controller of BBC2, now in the process of leaving Discovery to set up Nutopia, an independent production company. She discussed Channel 4 with him, and realised he had an aspiration to run it one day. He returned to Britain in 2007, having been recruited by Darren Childs, director of channels at BBC Worldwide, as chief executive of UKTV. This was a group of themed channels, run as a joint venture between BBC Worldwide and Virgin Media, which allowed the BBC to recycle its old programmes with advertising breaks on digital channels. Childs explained Abraham’s unique qualities: “The great thing about David is that he possesses both left-and right-side brain skills. In TV it is extremely rare to find someone who understands both the business and creative sides of what we do. I am always amazed how few people in TV get how advertising works, given that it funds the business. But David knows advertising inside out.”3 At UKTV Abraham first met Jay Hunt, who was running BBC Daytime. They got on well from the start. “I tried to hire her – we just hit it off, she was incredibly smart, funny, great at everything, an exceptional executive.” 4 He failed to convince her in 2007 to join UKTV to oversee content: she took instead a short-lived job as director of programmes at Channel 5, before being called back to run BBC1 a year later. But in her view the meeting itself was less remarkable than what happened afterwards. He followed up the unsuccessful approach with a message listing ten reasons why she should have joined him. “It was a striking intervention: it stayed with me. He stopped and thought about it. That impressed me. It shows you something I still value in him, an empathy, an ability to read people and what motivates them. He was one of the most impressive people I had ever met. He lives in a world of infinite possibility, he is a very optimistic person, he just believes most things are possible. I think the journalist in me

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makes me much more pragmatic, more grounded and likely to see where the bear pits are: the truth is somewhere in between.” 5 They kept in touch while he embarked on a three-year overhaul and rebranding of UKTV, with catchy names – Dave, Alibi, Watch – for its channels. Their paths crossed from time to time over the BBC programming supplied to UKTV. In the summer of 2009 he met her in Villandry, an upmarket café close to the UKTV office, and told her he was thinking of having a go at landing the Channel 4 post. If he did, would she join him? “I said I would be really interested in it. He didn’t sit there in 2009 and say: ‘This is your job.’ It was if, if, if … would I be interested in having a conversation? To be blunt, it looked like a long shot for him. He was an outsider, not part of the broadcasting establishment at that point, for what has always felt like a high-profile job; but I was certainly pleased to see him again and talk of possibilities.” She was also aware that more conventional names, including two former BBC1 controllers, Lorraine Heggessey and Peter Fincham, were being linked to the potential vacancy at 4. Yet Abraham, the dark horse, was beautifully positioned to monitor the mishaps and moment of big change approaching Channel 4, watching from the sidelines throughout 2008/9. His shareholders were preoccupied with it, too. “The tenure of Luke Johnson was coming to an end, after a period in which the board of Channel 4 had tried to do a big partnership or a joint venture with BBC Worldwide,” he mused. The chair of UKTV, John Smith, ran BBC Worldwide, one of Channel 4’s potential targets during its begging-bowl period looking for a slice of the BBC’s assets. Virgin Media, a joint owner of UKTV at this point, was in the process of exiting the television industry to concentrate on telecoms and cable. It was selling its UKTV share, and later its satellite and cable television channels. It was also preparing to close its sales house, IDS, which sold UKTV advertising, raising the question of who was going to handle UKTV’s advertising sales in future. Separately, in this media mating season, Channel 4’s veteran sales director, Andy Barnes, was working with Nick Milligan, his opposite number at Sky, on a radical and advanced plan, codenamed Project Panda, to merge their two sales forces and form a joint company. The idea was that Sky had the male viewers, Channel 4 had young adults, women and everyone else. Putting Channel 4’s 24.7 percent share of TV advertising with Sky’s 13.4 percent created a satisfying 38.1 percent to ITV’s 46 percent. It was vetoed by the Channel 4 board at the last moment, in the autumn of 2009, due to the dogged opposition of one non-executive director, Stephen Hill. When Anne Bulford became acting chief executive of Channel 4 in November 2009, to steer the ship after Duncan’s sacking, Abraham started talking to her about a more practical possibility of taking UKTV sales to Channel 4, which would effectively start to change the nature of the sales house into a service agency

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for a range of clients. This deal, nailed down later that year for ten years, proved durable and increased the share of total British TV advertising it handled from 24.8 percent to 27.8 percent, close to £1 billion, giving it more power in a market susceptible to bullying by media buyers.6 Channel 4 in 2010 needed both a creative renewal, to fill the hole post-Big Brother, and, less obviously to outsiders, a fresh approach to the advertising that paid for its programmes. On landing the job in early January, Abraham had an intense period of one-to-one negotiation with Terry Burns to work out the ground rules of running the channel without conflict. “Huge principles we agreed on,” he recalled. “One was that the begging-bowl strategy was silly. It was not a viable approach for us to continue with, because Terry and I had looked at the balance sheet.” It had also effectively hit a brick wall anyway. They also knew that the first green shoots of recovery were appearing, meaning advertising revenues would start to rise. They were correct: they rose from £706.7 million in 2009 to £794.2 million in 2010. “Another big point I spoke about was the need for partnerships [rather than Luke Johnson-style deals]. Maintain your independence but agree not to be isolated: be bigger.” The ground rules for running Channel 4 were set out in a confidential document on 23 March 2010 with eleven bullet points. “This was our manifesto to each other. I think it worked brilliantly. It was all on the basis of what we thought was important. Everything flowed from it. We didn’t want a dysfunctional relationship. Remember, here was I, a less experienced person being hired by someone who had worked for Margaret Thatcher and ran the Treasury. So I was listening very carefully to how he saw things.” There was a cash limit to what Abraham could approve on a daily basis before seeking board approval, up to £5 million. Any acquisition would have to be referred to the board. But that did not cut across the editorial responsibility of the chief executive and the team. Luke Johnson and Lord Puttnam had put in place an editorial subcommittee of the board in 2008 after the Shilpa Shetty incident. The new regime was keen not to return to that, so in a letter accompanying the agreement it was made clear that there was to be no editorial involvement of the board, apart from acquisitions and post hoc reviews. (This led to a sense of frustration among some non-executive directors afterwards). 7 Burns saw it this way: “The biggest discussion I had with David after appointing him was assuring him he was editor-in-chief. He didn’t want to be in the Andy Duncan position. The agreement I sent him was not novel, it was based on the one I had with the chief executive of Santander. It spells out that the chief executive is the person to whom the board devolves day-to-day responsibility for running the organisation. You do not have two executive heads.”8 For Burns it was about the fundamental relationship between a chair and the chief executive:

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Can I get on with this person? Would he give adequate warning about problems, with timely information, never springing surprises? These were all very important considerations. If an organisation has been at war it is essential that the [incoming] chief executive knows what his job is, and is not going to randomly roam around the organisation doing what he is interested in, as if it is a hobby. We needed a fresh start. It was a bit of leap. This was an ideal job for him. If I had a worry, it was going to be a very big change for the organisation. I knew that, when I appointed David, Kevin would leave. That led to anxieties given this creative black hole, the ending of Big Brother. We knew Kevin’s strengths and weaknesses. Creatively he was very good, very stimulating and funny. But he has a curious management style: he almost delights in setting people against each other. He likes tension. The creative world is like this, people who have the characteristic of coming up with potential ideas, wacky ideas: they are not natural managers because they work with a different part of the brain.

In the negotiations Abraham agreed effectively to a reduced annual salary of £490,000, boosted, however, during 2011 by allowances and variable bonus pay to £701,000. Burns abolished the long-term incentive payments, which had meant that Duncan had received large extra payments, regardless of the current state of the market and company. Instead he introduced a bonus system worth up to 50 percent of salary. He also made sure that Abraham’s appointment was announced on 22 January, though this was before his departure had been negotiated from UKTV. But Burns formally took over as chairman of Channel 4 on 28 January, and needed it in the open. There was, as Burns expected, a widespread sense of shock among the staff, who had hoped and expected that Lygo would be appointed. Lygo said: “I had one significant meeting with David. We met for lunch. Jon Snow was at the next table. He said to Abraham: ‘You’ve got the best man in television.’ I said: ‘I know: I have got Jonathan Ross.’ After the debacle at the BBC I had been talking to him. I had potentially signed him (Ross) up for two years at a knockdown price. There was this Big Brother gap. He could do twenty programmes a year. Bad Boy returns to Channel 4.” Ross had started his TV career at Channel 4 in the 1980s but he was now in disgrace at the BBC. Lygo saw him and a chat show as a stopgap solution to fill an empty Friday night entertainment slot. Abraham disagreed. “I said: ‘By the way, David, is it all right?’ He said: ‘No, Kevin, we can do better than that.’ Lygo: ‘Are you telling me you don’t want Jonathan Ross? I think we should do it.’” Lygo called Abraham a week later to say he needed a final decision. It was a no. Abraham reflected: “It wasn’t an easy decision for either of us. From day one, I said: ‘It’s awkward, but we have to get on with it now.’” Lygo knew that once Ross was vetoed he could not stay at Channel 4, “if I am not trusted to pick my chat show host”. Shortly afterwards Lygo bumped into John Cresswell, acting chief executive of ITV, who asked if he knew Archie Norman, the incoming ITV chairman. He was

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then quickly invited to meet Adam Crozier, the new chief executive. “In two weeks I had been offered the job of director of ITV Studios.” The maverick of television relaunched his career in a more lucrative post, proved adept at spotting production companies in the USA and UK to acquire, moving on in 2016 to become director of television, overseeing among other things Love Island’s devastating success. He called the encounter with Cresswell on the streets of Soho in Spring 2010 “the luckiest day of my life”. He formally resigned from Channel 4 the day before Abraham officially joined.

Sarah Mulvey Suicide Another blow to the incoming chief executive was the shocking suicide of a talented documentary maker, Sarah Mulvey, on 28 January. She is primarily remembered for starting First Cut, a slot on Channel 4 reserved for new directors. Mulvey had made a formal grievance claim in 2009 alleging bullying, sex discrimination and having had her responsibilities diminished by her boss, Hamish Mykura, head of documentaries, the powerhouse of Channel 4’s programming, who was also controller of More4. She described a macho culture in the department and pointed out Mykura was married to Janey Walker, the managing editor of commissioning, who oversaw her terms of employment. When her complaints were largely rejected, unwell and in a disturbed state of mind, she vanished to a residential treatment centre which later closed down, from which she discharged herself. David Abraham held two private meetings to head off further damage with her father, Dr Christopher Mulvey during 2010, and Channel 4 paid her estate an enhanced sum for death in service of £300,000 plus outstanding costs. He ensured during his first months in charge that staff attended a range of training sessions including the need to comply with a code of conduct. Terry Burns reviewed the internal grievance documents and thought the case demonstrated the bad practices which bedevilled the creative sector. It certainly was not the way he wanted Channel 4 to be run. A celebration of her life was held in July 2011 at the Century Club in Shaftesbury Avenue attended by Burns, Abraham, Channel 4 colleagues, rising directors she had championed and independent producer Kathy O’Neil who gave her a start in TV – alongside the family and friends. The tribute that stood out was made by David Glover, the Channel 4 commissioner renowned for putting Gogglebox on air. At times fighting back tears he said: I was Sarah’s friend. She was so pretty and intelligent and I was immediately interested in everything she had to say. … Yes, she could be a bit of a workaholic, a fanatic about detail, hard to budge, cajole to make her laugh. But on a humanely perceptive level interested

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in people, compassionate. She was clever – like Sherlock Holmes she understood science and the arts, people and ideas, poetry and how to write pre-title teasers. Because of the circumstances of her death the fact is we have developed an awkward silence around her because she died in dispute with Channel 4 – like no one wants to speak her name. Today the silence ends here and now. At Channel 4 we boast of how bravely we take on a difficult subject matter, how unafraid of scandal we are. Channel 4 should not have been in dispute with her. I’m not blaming anyone, the bigger picture is she should have been listened to. In retrospect Channel 4 should have bent over backwards in their dispute with Sarah. Channel 4 is a magnificent and wonderful institution and attracts people of such talent as Sarah. And some of us are vulnerable. It is changing its culture, I think for the better, with a greater emphasis on more collaboration and being a friendlier place. It can go further….believe rather than deny we have a duty of care to each other in disputes. Not easy but nothing less will do. Sarah got less than that. 9

But the biggest additional question he faced, even before he formally arrived, was what to do about an unexpected opportunity to buy Channel 5, which could settle their long-running flirtation in Channel 4’s favour.

Channel 5 Bid The approaches started again, this time in desperation. On 16 March 2010 Dawn Airey, the forceful founder programme director of Channel 5. and Gerhard Zeiler, chief executive of subsidiary RTL, its owner, met Burns and Abraham at the chairman’s Santander office in Euston Square. Airey had abruptly quit her job running ITV’s channels in 2008 to return to rescue Channel 5, now on the market. She explained that although RTL had been a consistent shareholder the Bertlesmann family, ultimate owners, had become nervous during the slump in advertising and were selling. She and Zeiler had asked for the meeting in a last ditch attempt to try to persuade Channel 4 to buy Five, rather than letting it fall to the controversial Richard Desmond, whose Northern & Shell publishing company owned Express Newspapers, but whose early success had been built on publishing pornographic magazines. The TV producer Endemol, which supplied Big Brother, was sniffing around but not in the race. Airey viewed the decision to sell outright as a mistake. She was correct in her analysis that the sale was anyway mistimed, because the market, as she accurately saw it and agreed with Abraham, was about to bounce back by 16 percent, instead of going down a further 6 percent. She had already renegotiated programme contracts with suppliers to cut costs, and even increased the audience share a little. “I was not happy. This was pretty dark, a nightmare for us,” she said.

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Airey had gone through the finances with Anne Bulford, but there was no love lost between the two. After years of mistimed courtship, Channel 4 remained deeply suspicious of Channel 5’s finances and viability. But this time it was different. Now it would be a straight sale, not the creation of a joint company. Abraham saw the potential in a merger immediately. “I was a new, ambitious chief executive who believed he could put all the pieces together. This was the big one. We were still emotionally in a recession. Nobody wanted to splash money around. I said to Terry that it was quite exciting, and if we could get it cheap, why not?” Burns put him in touch with the merchant banker Simon Robey, with whom he had worked when the Abbey National building society was sold to Santander. Robey was a mergers and acquisitions expert and also chairman of the Royal Opera House, therefore close to Tony Hall, a Channel 4 board member. Channel 4’s strategy director, the dynamic Gill Whitehead, was put onto the task. A plan was worked out to run Channel 4 and Five in tandem and rationalise the channels. Airey wrote a strategy paper for Abraham: Channel 4 would go back to being a purer public service broadcaster and Channel 5 would be the commercial front end to take on the cancelled Big Brother and lifestyle factual programmes. The multichannel family would then be expanded with a new digital channel, C4 USA – this was before the creation of Sky Atlantic – showing the best acquired work. Burns said: ”A lot of work was done. The real value as far as Channel 4 was concerned was to develop its digital strategy with an adjacent channel, basically turning Channel 5 into a lifestyle channel.” One key point in favour was that it tied in with its subsidy model: from 2010 onwards the main Channel 4 would be relying on profits from its digital channels: E4, More4, Film4 and 4Music to cover losses. The big problem was in the timing. Burns had only just become chair and Abraham was not even formally employed by the channel. It did not have huge reserves – and to spend them all on this one deal was high risk. Even if they had bid up to Desmond’s level, he could have returned to the fray and kept on going higher. “I know David thinks now we were too cautious,” said Burns. “It was circumstances. Channel 4 had been through a terrible period. We did talk to Jeremy Hunt [Culture Secretary]. We told him we were looking at it. He took note: he didn’t say anything encouraging or discouraging.” David Puttnam, the deputy chairman, was dubious about a tie-up with Channel 5: “I never saw it as a deal that would transform Channel 4’s fortunes. I was never a fan, and nor was Tony [Hall]. You were trying to put two cultures together and they would not have lived together. In my experience when you try to pull two cultures together it is a car crash. I don’t think Terry was ever convinced.” Hunt, new in the post and busy needling the BBC and championing his pet project of local television, was vague. Bundling Channel 4 and Channel 5’s additional £270 million advertising revenues would not have faced regulatory opposition because it was still dwarfed by ITV. It would help to anchor even more securely

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Channel 4’s remit through cross-subsidy from Five, and act as a bulwark against overweening advertising sales agencies. But passing the control of Channel 5’s licence to Channel 4 would have faced testing scrutiny because it was a public service broadcaster and would need regulatory clearance. Under the 1996 Broadcasting Act, Channel 4 was barred from owning the Channel 5 licence. Realists – including John Whittingdale, chairman of the parliamentary Culture, Media & Sport Committee – argued that a Conservative-led government would never have allowed Channel 4, a state-owned broadcaster, to absorb a privately-owned one. “I would have publicly opposed it very strongly,” he said. Meanwhile Endemol had opened discussions with Richard Desmond but got nowhere. Channel 4 remained in the bidding until it closed on 23 July. It had put together a hybrid bid: around £80 million cash and the rest in a convoluted form of long-term programme deals for both channels, bought from Fremantle, the production arm of RTL. Abraham told Zeiler that the Channel 4 board was prepared to increase its offer but not negotiate with a gun to its head. He asked for a few more days to come back with a new proposal. He was told this was very difficult, as Desmond had made a straight offer of cash. Airey contacted Abraham at the eleventh hour, when it was clear the business was going to be sold that day, urging him to raise Channel 4’s bid before the final deadline. The advice was to increase the cash offer to as much as £115 million, to cap Desmond’s. “I rang Terry,” said Abraham, “but he said we couldn’t get involved in this horse-trading: we will negotiate properly or we are out. It was surreal, intense and slightly mad.” Abraham went home and at 5 pm there was Richard Desmond on television, with a fat cigar, outside Channel 5. He had paid £103.5 million. He had simply written a cheque. Three years later Desmond gloatingly told senior figures at the Royal Television Society’s grand Cambridge convention – chaired that year by Abraham – about the moment he held the banker’s draft, waved it at his management team and asked if he should put it back in the bank. “Did they want me to commit – and more importantly, fund a budget of over £300 million a year? It was a big moral and financial responsibility. Everyone agreed we could do this by working together.” Well, he was the boss. Later, in 2014, Desmond sold Channel 5 to Viacom, the American conglomerate that owned MTV, for £463 million. Northern & Shell, the holding company, reported a profit of £359 million on the sale. Desmond and the top team had a £100 million bonanza. He framed the cheque from Viacom and put it on his office wall. Abraham reflected: “I never understood it. Gerhard Zeiler sold it for a song just as the ad market was rising. Anyone could see that it was not difficult to put Channel 4 next to Channel 5 and make it work. When you have a business [like Northern and Shell] run by one individual, the big advantage they have is decisiveness. But it was what it was. It was the one that got away. It was a shame.”

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A solace for him was that the Channel 4 board had backed him in his first three months as chief executive in pursuit of the deal. At the time the channel’s cash reserves stood at £152.2 million, down from £201.9 million, so a purchase in excess of £100 million would have left it exposed, though it owned its freehold headquarters in Horseferry Road. It also did not know how badly the loss of Big Brother would affect it in 2011 and beyond. Channel 5 moved quickly to snap it up. But as the advertising market recovered Channel 4 was able to report a £54 million pre-tax profit for 2010, a reversal of three grim trading years. For everyone at 4 involved in trying to close what would have been a strategic game-changing deal, turning a competitor into an ally, it was something they continued to refer to as their biggest regret, the big what if? It hurt even more as Channel 5, the new home of Big Brother, started to thrive and carry off programme awards under its new American owner.

Notes 1 Hylands: An Architectural History, 1988. 2 This was launched by M. T. Rainey, who became a non-executive director and deputy chair of Channel 4 from 2011 to 2020. There was a strong Chiat Day influence on the board. 3 Darren Childs, Royal Television Society Journal, May 2010. 4 David Abraham, in interviews, July 2016 5 Jay Hunt, in interviews, August 2016 and April 2017 6 One odd feature of this period is that the efficient Anne Bulford did not apply to become chief executive of Channel 4. Those involved suspected she subsequently regretted it, but thought she probably decided her lack of television industry experience was a drawback. 7 Side letter between Lord Burns, chairman of Channel 4, and David Abraham, from David Abraham interview, 11 July 201. 8 Terry Burns in interviews, January 2016–May 2017. 9 The verdict of the inquest into Sarah Mulvey’s death in 2012 was suicide by opiate toxicity.

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9 THE CHALLENGE AS ABRAHAM PICKS JAY

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empting though the prospect of acquiring Channel 5 might have been to Abraham, as a dramatic statement of intent, it was in truth no more than a diversion: the real challenge was the health of Channel 4 itself. As he knew, “Big Brother was a monster to this channel, it shored up our ratings in the summer, then it shored our ratings up in January when Celebrity Big Brother came in.” That comfort blanket had been in place for ten years. “It was like the Golden Gate Bridge,” he recalled. “Everything suspended off the posts – that was how the schedule worked. And we are now removing those posts.” The last series would air that summer. Altogether Big Brother had amounted to 240 hours of primetime programming annually. “The music signalled the start of summer for its viewers,” lamented sales director Andy Barnes. Kevin Lygo had likened it to crack cocaine – addictive and at the same time destructive. It had guaranteed the channel’s finances. To make matters worse Channel 5 was poised to snap up the Big Brother rights. Given the serious effect of cancellation, Abraham thought that Channel 4 had been too laid back, failing to appreciate that it was a genuine emergency. Critics observed unkindly that Kevin Lygo seemed to have been asleep for two years, when new programmes could have been trialled and launched off the inherited audiences of Big Brother. Even so, the apparent lack of preparation was not the whole story. Julian Bellamy, effectively running the channel since early 2008, was well aware of the challenges; but the recession had leached crucial development money out of the programme budget. From the moment he was appointed, Abraham’s ear was being bent by suppliers brimming with self-interested advice and untested formats, anxious to grab some of the £70 million a year that would no longer be going to Endemol. He knew that the first hundred days of any regime were when a new boss sets the tone and pace. He was keen to position himself as a creative leader who understood the business of television in all its aspects, even though his connection to the people who made

programmes was a tad tenuous. So he was keyed up at his first board meeting in Cardiff on 18 May 2010. Two weeks earlier he had delivered a “Here I am” speech to the 800-plus staff at the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre in Westminster, in a session introduced by Jon Snow. He had laid out his manifesto for change – and more practical details, such as his intention to spend mornings with the commissioning team on the first floor (which left some of them bristling), and the afternoons with the business team on the second floor (where the commissioners thought he rightfully belonged). He also signalled zero tolerance to the cynicism and leaking that put Channel 4 in jeopardy – saying “loose lips sink ships”. His brisk, business-like speech was received coolly by the staff. They didn’t know me from Adam: for 90 percent of the people here I was an unknown person. I was treated rather sniffily by everyone when I turned up; but I understood what they needed to do. I was absolutely determined I was going to be listened to by the creative people. Kevin wanted to throw me off as a superficial ad guy. He had no right to judge me.

The thing that had shocked Abraham on arrival was the influence exercised by Rosemary Newell, the head of channel management, who ran the scheduling team and in effect decided what would be broadcast and when. Over thirteen years this efficient, sensible and analytical executive had accrued great power, partly out of necessity. “Rosemary had been making a heck of a lot of decisions for Kevin in the latter years. He seemed very semi-detached to a lot of people,” Abraham observed. Despite their differences, he gamely turned up at Lygo’s leaving party, jam-packed with entertainment stars and talent, at the Tabernacle, Notting Hill, in July. He bore it stoically as Lygo was fêted, lionised and led by Alan Carr to a golden throne. With Lygo’s departure he had a freer hand to move on the programming side. His immediate challenge was to head the Channel 4 delegation to the annual Los Angeles screenings, when the studios unveil their new season’s programmes. There he bought The Event from NBC, an emotional conspiracy thriller series about the exploits of a group of extra-terrestrials. He thought it would bolster Friday nights that winter. It turned out to be an expensive flop. Not a good start. At the May board meeting he was on more familiar territory, starting with an overview of what changes were going to occur as a result of technology by 2015. Digital switchover was just two years away. He described the major creative, commercial and technical work streams he planned, “leading to a future point when Channel  4 would have direct digital interactive connections to millions of its viewers”. He pointed to 2014 forecasts, envisaging connected television devices supported by high-speed broadband rising from the current 4 million homes to 10 million and – pretty accurately – smartphones spreading from 8 million to 30 million users.

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This fed into his big commercial proposal: Channel 4’s investment in collecting audience data, the launch of a new platform to target advertising and a closer relationship between the creative side and advertising sales. His presentation correctly focussed on the need to negotiate a new rights framework with producers, so that “deeper convergent commissioning” would result in programmes that could be systematically reused across the digital channels in multiple repeats, including catch-up, which effectively started to happen from 2012. He rounded it off by speculating light-heartedly on how they would market the end of Big Brother that summer. The message flashed up on the screen: “Big Brother, you have been evicted. Please leave the house.” At the meeting, the board agreed to link up with UKTV by selling its advertising airtime. “There is a natural fit with Channel 4, the home of alternative high-quality public service content,” the proposal stated. “Under the contract C4 will take over the advertising sales representation of UKTV’s ten channels. This is a straightforward deal between organisations with aligned objectives, good for both, commercial efficiencies for both.” Which they did. After the undelivered schemes of the Duncan era it was an emblem of the new regime. 1 After the board meeting Lord Burns, whose people skills rarely faltered, took Abraham for a walk around the Cardiff Bay waterfront, where Abraham slowly unwound. Burns reflected: “No one teaches anyone how to be a chief executive. You only learn doing it, watching other people and through mentors. [As chairman] you’re there as a critical friend of the executive, wanting them to succeed, not fall flat on their face. If people blunder in they will get a lot of things wrong. You never override a chief executive in a board meeting: you give them a chance to take a decision away and come back.”2 From the start, Burns’s priority was the channel’s audience share, a critical matter of great sensitivity without Big Brother. A key set of performance indicators was established at this point, which involved holding the main Channel 4 at 7 percent of total viewing and a related share of commercial impacts. There was also a particular emphasis on E4, the most profitable digital channel. “I wanted to keep people’s attention on these things. Without the ratings you’d never get the earnings to fund programmes: the whole thing is a circular process.” So Abraham urgently needed to get to grips with the programming renewal. He had spoken to Jay Hunt in January, phoning her immediately after he got the job. The interviews for director of content were held in July. Hunt was a warm favourite from the start, assuming she could be persuaded to tear herself away from the BBC. Julian Bellamy was one of two other final candidates produced by the headhunters Egon Zehnder. Bellamy had impressed Abraham with his dedication to the job and ability to adapt. This was no artifice. Bellamy really treasured Channel 4, as did many of its employees. He was a dynamic commissioner in certain genres, including entertainment, and was the staff choice; but he knew that with Lygo out he most likely was next to face the axe.

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The third candidate was talented Wayne Garvie, managing director of BBC Worldwide Content, who later rose to become president of Sony Pictures Entertainment, International Production. He had the credentials for the job but suspected he had been dragged as a makeweight into what seemed quite an informal hiring process. He had a long video conversation with Abraham, whom he knew well, but was not asked to provide a strategic creative vision paper. He agreed that Channel 4 needed a thorough culture change, had lost its way and had not planned sufficiently to tackle the Big Brother gap. In preparation Abraham had wasted no time ensuring a leaner editorial team. The titles of Controller of E4 and More4 were abolished, meaning an effective demotion for Angela Jain and Hamish Mykura. Jain had successfully galvanised E4, which had two key series – Skins and The Inbetweeners. She was on maternity leave and came in with a baby in her arms to discuss her future with Abraham. She was the first of seven senior women to lose their jobs and was eventually hired to run ITV2, the competing channel. Mykura, caught up in the Sarah Mulvey tragedy, was gently encouraged to leave, and found a post at National Geographic the following year. Abraham said: “I had run portfolios of channels; I didn’t want a conveyor belt of people whose egos were satisfied by being channel controllers.” The job description of content director (formerly director of programmes) now included editorial oversight of online developments and drama, which had been run in an overlapping group alongside Film4, overseen by Tessa Ross. Drama would become a direct report to the content head. In effect total control over programming and scheduling was being concentrated in the hands of one executive. At Hunt’s job interview she was asked how she would run a team operating a multichannel portfolio, competing with others. “I said that was exactly the way broadcasting was going. I talked about the experimentation we had on BBC1, the need to be future-facing but targeted. I talked about the schizophrenia of Channel 4, the types of content to be used to make up for Big Brother, the value of using audience insights in commissioning them.” She pointed to her success in taking BBC1’s Countryfile from its insignificant Sunday morning slot and revamping it as a huge but inexpensive hit on Sunday evenings, at one-sixth of the cost of a period drama such as Cranford. She spoke of the handy lessons she had learnt during a brief period at Channel 5 in 2008, buttressing its weak schedule, working in a commercially-funded broadcaster with a sales team far pushier than Channel 4’s. “I talked about how important it was to invest in drama, so Channel 4 was not just a factual channel. We needed to get to the point where drama can be scheduled at 9  pm [rather than 10 pm] no matter what others are screening.” Her aim was to move away from operating public service programmes at the edges of the schedule, instead steering them towards the mainstream. She reminded the panel about two outstanding BBC1 dramas she had backed – Occupation 2009, about three soldiers based in Basra, and Luther, the edgy Idris Elba detective drama, a big hit.

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“I talked a lot about refreshing Channel 4’s 8 pm features slot. There was quite a lot of stuff substantially less good than Embarrassing Bodies” – one of its mainstays. She quoted a BBC1 survey which suggested Channel 4 needed to perform better on consumer issues affecting people’s lives; issues beyond finding a new home. The 8 pm programmes had a special duty to double the Channel 4 News audience, and in doing so kick-start the evening schedule in the face of fierce competition. She maintained that public service broadcasting ran through her veins, and it had always gone hand-in-hand with big popular statements in factual programming. As an example she highlighted The Day the Immigrants Left, a bold documentary set in the fens of Cambridgeshire, which experimented with unemployed locals replacing immigrants in the potato fields. “Hand on heart I think my primary editorial sensibility was always a Channel 4 one. On one level I was a BBC person, on the other I am not a natural EastEnders fan, though all those sort of programmes you have to get across in that job. I was a natural Channel 4 viewer, my channel of choice if I didn’t work in telly. There is something about taking a risk, punching authority on the nose: it’s about who I am as a person.” Questioned about her leadership style, she said it was democratic. She also thought Channel 4 needed to work with more out-of-London independents. “But I believed it was important to be decisive, that when an independent producer walked in with a great idea, they probably needed a greater clarity of leadership to guide them.” She also said something which she later regarded as an error of judgement. I said it was important when someone joined a new organisation they listened carefully in the early days to find out how things happened. An error, because in retrospect the one thing I would have done differently, I should have identified what was wrong with the culture – which was profound – and lightly encouraged people to leave, because the cultural problem led to a toxicity in this organisation which it took me too long to tackle, out of a misplaced and a slightly female belief that I didn’t want to presume to understand what I didn’t understand. In retrospect I listened and observed too long.

The last paragraphs from the official transcript of the interview included this summary from Egon Zehnder: “I think she would work really well with David, and positively challenge him. I get the sense they would be a very strong partnership. Jay is a force of nature, with high impact.” Ten days after the interview David Abraham rang and offered her the position. “It had gone from being theoretical to ‘Did I really want the job?’. And that was quite traumatic.” Walking away from the BBC1 controllership and its near billion-pound annual programme budget was a big deal. Hunt kept Abraham waiting and negotiated hard. “When it came to it, I wasn’t quite sure it was right. To be blunt it was a moot point whether this was an upwards move, a sideways move or even a backwards step. I was already running the biggest channel with the biggest budget.”

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She went away on holiday, then in August to the Edinburgh Television Festival, where her prospective job change was the talk of the city. She was by now in advanced discussions. Mark Thompson, the BBC Director-General, who was giving the keynote MacTaggart lecture, had been approached by Abraham, and he had to agree her notice period and timing. Although the path was cleared he did not want anything to detract from his speech. Two of the executives who would have their noses put of joint by Hunt’s appointment were also in Edinburgh. Julian Bellamy, interviewed by the BBC’s Martha Kearney, told her he was proud of what he had being doing. Wayne Garvie, pondering a job offer from All3Media, needed a clear signal from Abraham of what the future might hold. Abraham was gearing up for a presentation to advertisers. The Channel 4 board had told him to hold off announcing the decision until the details were complete, just in case of upsets. Hunt had made one further stipulation: she needed to bring her BBC1 scheduler, George Dixon, with her. She needed a comfort blanket. Channel 4 was voted channel of the year by the festival delegates, and David Abraham bought celebratory drinks afterwards alongside Bellamy – who collected the award, even though he knew he was effectively out of the race. On the return train south, Wayne Garvie was in one carriage, Jay Hunt in another, David Abraham in a third, and never did they meet. A few days later The Sunday Telegraph’s Neil Midgley disclosed to the world that Hunt would be going to Channel 4. On the morning of Saturday 11 September, the day after the final special edition of Big Brother had finished, Abraham rang Bellamy – who had guided it to eviction – and formally told him the job was Hunt’s, not his. Bellamy was surprised not so much at the decision itself but that his rejection had not been confirmed face to face: Abraham was moving house. On the following Monday they negotiated a departure package. Abraham said: “In hindsight I can understand how he may still feel hurt by the abrupt way things played out from his perspective.” But Bellamy addressed the board later that month, gave them a rousing vision of his passion for Channel 4, which left a strong impression on them, and exited with head held high. “They were lovely,” he reflected. “In television it is just the risk you run: you can be the beneficiary or victim of tectonic plates shifting.”3 Hunt said: “In the end I came for two reasons only. I came to work with David and I love the content on Channel 4, the tone of voice.” The post offered her the chance of working across a portfolio of channels and online sites. “I was thinking of future-proofing my career; it was a smart thing to do.” This was when she began her virtual conquest of Channel 4, where she would over time wrest control from the scheduling and channel management team. David Puttnam, who discussed the appointment with Abraham right up to the wire, warned she would be a challenge. “She is very bright. My view was always that the ultimate test of David as a manager was how he managed Jay.

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I had a conversation with him in the tea room of the House of Lords and told him: ‘Your time at Channel 4 will be defined by your ability to manage Jay. She needs managing.’”4 As BBC1 controller she had hitherto given Channel 4 only cursory attention. “Channel 4 was completely irrelevant to me then: that’s the honest fact of it. The launch of Big Brother and The Big Fat Quiz of the Year were the only press announcements that Channel 4 made that anyone on BBC1 ever cared about, because they were the only shows that did any volume. The terrible thing about being at BBC1 is that you put your tank on the lawn and there it is. You don’t really care about anyone else – well, sometimes ITV. “Because of the strength of BBC1, Channel 4 was not really on my radar; and this was borne out when I got here. There was schizophrenia over Big Brother.” By this she meant that other, more intellectually demanding programmes were being broadcast simply to bolster the channel’s upmarket credentials. They could afford to make shows that they knew would not attract a big audience because of the cash cow that was Big Brother. For good or ill it would not and could not now remain the same. “With Big Brother they could be confident they would have the ratings, and they could carry the losses. We didn’t have that. I even thought it was possible Channel 4 had left it too late to fix the Big Brother deficit.” That autumn, theoretically on gardening leave, Hunt sat at home viewing hours of Channel 4’s 2010 programmes, while in her de facto office in exile, in the Dean Street Town House, she met independents supplying the channel and pitching. She concluded that the position was “pretty catastrophic”. She had already sensed a bad feeling about the great white hope, Seven Days, a real-time show set in Notting Hill that failed for three main reasons: the wrong choice of area, the fact that the characters did not know each other – unlike successful shows such as ITV’s The Only Way is Essex – and a specially constructed Channel 4 website that did not work. “It wasn’t making TV you really wanted to watch,” said Stephen Lambert, veteran producer and Notting Hill resident. “I didn’t realise how many people don’t like Notting Hill, because they associate it as a place full of rich people.” Which he had become. 5 Other programmes that failed to catch viewers’ imagination included Titanic: The Mission, a landmark documentary in which four engineers reconstructed a 30-foot section of the doomed ship’s steel bow, to scale. Another strand, The House That Made Me, featuring four celebrities talking about their childhood homes, lacked the emotion of the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? and disappeared in December. The Event was simply a non-event. “From the moment I resigned from the BBC and walked in through the door (in January 2011), I did think the scale of this was greater than I feared, because you would have hoped that something would have stuck. We were going into the end of Big Brother with nothing you could think of that was going to make up for it. To be fair to the people working there, lots of money was taken out of the schedule and development pipeline without anyone apparently thinking of the impact.”

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The construction of Channel 4’s schedules was built upon the return on investment (ROI) that programmes contributed. At this point advertising supplied 83 to 85 percent of Channel 4’s income and the proportion was destined to increase well above 90 percent. The dream ROI would be around 3:1 – that is a programme whose advertising return was three times the production/acquisition cost. All bought-in series – whether Friends, The Simpsons, The Big Bang Theory or, from 2011, Homeland or Fargo – had to return a profit, or they would be dropped. This was part of the tough commercial core of Channel 4. Friends was lost in 2010 after Comedy Central pushed up the bidding. While he was aware of these commercial realities, Abraham insisted that the big question for the immediate future was: “What is the real purpose of Channel 4? How much public service have we delivered?” His pitch to the board had included the heading: “I believe Channel 4 must be much more distinctive from the BBC. Protecting independent non-conformity in an age of increasing digital homogeneity and BBC caution; including challenging entertainment, more Derren Brown, more Gok Wan, less Deal or No Deal. Programmes that are positive.” There were new shows of promise slated for 2010 and 2011. The drama miniseries based on William Boyd’s novel Any Human Heart was designed for the run-up to Christmas. It starred Jim Broadbent and Matthew Macfadyen and was about a man’s journey through the twentieth century seen through the lustful eyes of Logan Mountstuart.6 As a contrast, the first TV series of This Is England ’86 was being readied, based on the 2007 film from Shane Meadows and Jack Thorne. It tracked a group of skinheads traversing the Midlands during the 1980s. “We were not creatively bankrupt by any means,” Abraham insisted. “But we had that gap to fill.” On Tuesday 7 October 2010, drawing on his American experience, he launched what was to be the first annual lavish, theatrically-produced “Upfronts” at the Freemasons Hall in Covent Garden. This reminded hundreds of media buyers – youngish, keen to identify with Channel 4 and nicely warmed up with glasses of fizz – of recent successes and new buzzy programmes to come. “We basically needed to work harder to keep the advertising money,” he explained. “All the agencies were fearful, the elephant in the room was the disappearance of Big Brother. Would they move money off Channel 4?” He had a sense he was tap dancing at this, his first major external event, wooing the advertisers. Fortunately a two-year deal, sealed in the spring by sales director Andy Barnes and Matt Shreeve, had bought the Abraham regime time before new ones had to be struck in late 2012. The arrangement to take over the selling of UKTV advertising airtime, kicking in in 2011, would by then be expected to increase its firepower. In Abraham’s script for the Upfronts, full of bravado, you can detect the spirit of the founder of St Luke’s ad agency. He told his guests: “We can at last stop talking about creative renewal and start launching a new look schedule with you tonight. One of the main strengths of our brand is that viewers expect us to try new things and that is precisely what we are about to do. I am keenly aware of how we pay for

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all the great content we get to commission. Hopefully, under my watch, Channel 4 will continue in its great tradition of innovation and creativity as a media partner.” Listing the channel’s attributes, he concluded: “These are traditions we are building on, but we are far from complacent about the future.” The 2010 retrospective zoomed in on the ageing Shameless, which would reach 100 episodes in 2011, whose saving grace was that half of its viewers were under 35. Next came This Is England, featuring its teenage star Thomas Turgoose, who “couldn’t be here tonight; he’s got his driving test”. There was Glee, Any Human Heart, and in 2011 The Promise – Peter Kosminsky’s epic based on the creation of Israel and Palestine, – Top Boy, an East End gangland saga, and Naked Apes, a comedy drama about Leeds paramedics. Entertainment and comedy ranged from the Million Pound Drop; Pete Versus Life, a new comedy on E4; Phone Shop; The Morgana Show and Frankie Boyle’s Tramadol Nights, neither of which survived into second series. The Inbetweeners, on the other hand, was breaking all records on E4, and the film proved to be a gold mine. In 2011 would come Famous and Fearless, a sports and celebrity event in the Celebrity Big Brother January slot. (This was mocked on transmission as not very famous people doing not very fearless things, and it flopped.) Other short-lived ideas included Lily Allen setting up her own shop, retail guru Mary Portas’s debut in a Great British Shopper campaign, and Katie Price’s My Beautiful Friends, meeting a range of people overcoming disability and prejudice.

Friday Night Dinner (Dave King/Channel 4)

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Comedy hits included Friday Night Dinner, starring Simon Bird from The Inbetweeners; The 10 O’Clock Show satire, featuring Charlie Brooker; the return of Peep Show and The IT Crowd’s fourth series. In factual entertainment Undercover Boss was in its second series, the fixed-rig show One Born Every Minute was under way, and My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding was a veritable godsend. The presentation closed with the promised arrival of Youview, the converged media platform. “Mass market, mainstream, to enable your mum to watch TV and catch up with on-demand content in one seamless experience in the living room.” He ended with the cry: “Make some music. The show starts!” Hunt was there. “I went to the Channel 4 Upfronts, and I thought he had nothing, absolutely nothing to sell. He had told me about Famous and Fearless and I had said I was really worried about that show.” While she was on gardening leave, she was shown, along with David Abraham, an explosive survey called Creative Review, ordered after the shock of Sarah Mulvey’s suicide. It comprised 65 pages of glum disillusion, distilled from surveying 60 internal commissioners and other executives; 65 independent producers from London, and the regions; digital agencies and other stakeholders, who had recorded hour-long interviews and taken part in discussions between June and September that year. The report struck some wounding blows: Programming was little or nothing to do with the Channel 4 remit, and as long as there are one or two [remit programmes] the schedule can remain free for very commercial revenue-generating programmes that are repetitive and derivative. That leads to a schizophrenic schedule with a commercial imperative, rather than a schedule of commercially successful programmes that have public service broadcasting qualities. … There is a reliance on returning series, replicating that tried and tested supercilious shouty tone – parochial.

“A silo structure has grown up, in which departments compete against each other: there are tensions, little collaboration, scant sharing of resources. Some people inhibit the use of [their] talent working with other departments” – a reference to an inbuilt dislike of allowing stars associated with one area of Channel 4 programming to work on other shows: for instance, could Gordon Ramsay be used outside of restaurants and food? Rivalry between Channel 4 commissioners meant that schadenfreude was likely to greet a failure. The report’s authors found little sense that people were working for the success of the channel as a whole: they were too busy looking over their shoulders. It hasn’t been a very happy place for a long time. Channel 4 should be more than a miserable downtrodden gatekeeper – it should be a hub for energised creative people. Rivalry and fear have made this place closed off, internalised, a somewhat isolated culture… .The place is seething with internal politics. The silo structure means there

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is little internal communication or collaboration… .There is no creative community, there is no heart: there are pulses, but no beat. If you want a strong creative culture you want a clear creative vision.”

The report’s researchers also ventured into discussing the defects of the commissioning structure: There has been a pyramidical structure … the head of Channel 4 apparently deferred to the schedulers when making commissioning decisions as ratings potential became a decisive factor, leaving commissioners demotivated and feeling disempowered. A fear of ratings failure: if this goes pear-shaped my job is at risk. In an organisation of frustrated commissioners scared of failure and working in an uncollegiate back-stabbing environment, inevitably that will start to affect behaviour. A lot of very eminent and highly-respected producers, unprompted, were eager to unburden themselves of allegations of bullying from certain people but asked not to go on the record.

Roger Graef, a founder director of Channel 4 alongside Jeremy Isaacs, now running his own production company, recalled around that time working with his team for 110 hours including Saturday on a current affairs programme under the unappreciative eye of a commissioner who had a reputation for shouting at people. “I pushed to make sure he stayed after he made the editor cry. I was going to report him to HR for anger management, but he left.” There were only two copies of the report – one handed to Abraham and one to Hunt – because it named people and it was so sensitive. As she reread the document in 2016 Hunt mused: That is exactly what I encountered when I walked through the door. … I can tell you, when we had it presented to us, we walked out of the room and we were both quite shaken. Because this is wrong at its core, isn’t it? I had taken the job, seen the schedule go off a cliff. I knew the January 2011 entertainment was going to be a disaster. Then I read a document that said it was one of the most unpleasant places to work. That is quite a thing. It was an incredibly useful shot across the bows because it said this wasn’t a creative renewal; it was a fundamental turnaround of the way the organisation worked. If you are in an environment where you have a complete lack of alignment between the chairman, the chief executive, the creative head, where you are top heavy at the management level, is that what happens? That the behaviour of talking behind people’s backs, of back-stabbing is seen to be rewarded? In my career [at the BBC] the only thing I ever found as bad was Panorama. It never occurred to me I would be walking into a hostile environment. For the first six months of the job I was in a state of shock. At my very first board meeting [January 2011] I said we would be very lucky to see any change in under eighteen months, and even that I knew was low-balling, but you

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can’t really say to a board that it will take even longer than that. It wasn’t just the loss of the biggest show: it was the complete lack of development behind it; the dysfunctionality of the team, this strange thing that the whole system was based on what the scheduling side decided went on television. There was no editorial leadership. There wasn’t a tradition of a channel controller having a perspective or a vision, because it had become: this is what works… . Did I ruffle feathers when I arrived? Without a shadow of a doubt.

Also ticking away during the autumn of 2010 was the Miriam O’Reilly industrial tribunal case, in which she alleged unfair dismissal on grounds of ageism. So the stage was set: the next two years would be testing, to say the least.

Notes 1 Channel 4 and UKTV Sales, paper to C4 board, 18 May 2010. 2 Terry Burns, in interviews, 10 January 2016 and 11 May 2017. 3 David Bellamy interview, November 2016. By then he was ITV director of studios – alongside Kevin Lygo. 4 David Puttnam interview, 10 January 2017. 5 Stephen Lambert interview, October 2017. 6 Channel 4, 21 November–12 December 2010.

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10 JAY HUNT IN CHARGE

T

here is a school of management that creates a day zero narrative to legitimise a fresh start. Channel 4 had experienced this, notably when Mark Thompson, arriving in 2002, rubbished Michael Jackson’s legacy. There was more than a hint of day zero in David Abraham’s and Jay Hunt’s approach. The three years from 2011 were tough. The year of transition, 2010, had seen audiences decline by 6 percent, to 7 percent of total TV viewing – a level not seen since the early years of the 1980s. And there was worse to come. The start of 2011 was supposed to herald Creative Renewal, “a year where Channel 4’s spirit of creativity, risk-taking and innovation will flourish”, as David Abraham had maintained in his introduction to the 2010 annual report. Creative Renewal meant revitalising the schedule so as to reverse the channel’s decline in reputation. There were some interesting new programmes being created alongside existing reliable performers, but not enough sturdy ones. Jay Hunt officially joined on 10 January 2011 and became the most discussed personality. All but eight months of her broadcasting career had so far been spent at the BBC, which hired her as a researcher on Breakfast News in 1989, after a degree in English at St John’s College, Cambridge. Several contemporaries remembered her intelligence, energy, fast talking and good humour; but some also pointed to an apparent lack of understanding about the effect of her decisions and actions on other people. She is Australian by birth, one of three children, and came to Britain when she was 15. Her father was John Hunt, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School and a consultant to many large companies, who died in 2015. He had huge drive, set high standards and could be overbearing. His daughter’s career in BBC News scaled the peaks, encompassing Newsnight, Panorama and organising the coverage of the Hong Kong handover. In 1999 she was made editor of the One O’Clock News and Six O’Clock News, where she popularised the agenda for early evening viewers.

In 2005 she became controller of BBC Daytime, after a successful spell commissioning daytime programmes, based in Birmingham, which gave her experience of running a major segment of the television week, across channels. The brief involved overseeing everything from The Weakest Link to Doctors, the daytime soap opera, and popular food programming, which offered her insights into taking promising programmes and people from the fringes and bringing them into the mainstream. On the strength of that, she was appointed programme director at the under-performing Channel 5 in September 2007. She threw herself into the job – her first exposure to commercial television – with energy, partially reinvigorating the neglected schedule with fixes including Ice Road Truckers and Neighbours, and hiring, less successfully, the expensive Natasha Kaplinsky as the glamorous news presenter. She was welcomed at Five. Colleagues responded to her work ethic: early starts and a sandwich lunch at her desk. She proved a match for the hard-nosed advertising executives trying to pressurize the programming side. But she had only been there three months before it was announced that she was going back to the BBC. The Controller of BBC1, Peter Fincham, had been caught out by a rogue piece of footage at the press launch of A Year with the Queen, which had been doctored to show Her Majesty purportedly stalking out of a photo shoot. Mark Thompson, the Director-General, asked Hunt to take over, which she did in May 2008, having worked out her notice at 5.1 Her solid news training and editing experience were crucial qualifications for a job where fast decisions and fine judgements were needed on big news and taste issues. In many ways her channel management style was paced as if she were still running a live news programme, all to a deadline, with numerous pitfalls to be avoided and decisions to be made urgently. Ironically, though, one of her most successful programming decisions at BBC1 would give rise to a major controversy, eventually involving her being sharply criticised by an employment tribunal. Countryfile, the rural and farming affairs magazine show, had chugged along in a regular Sunday morning slot since 1989, with a modest programme budget of £60,000. Hunt had studied it when running Daytime, and was convinced that, in a different slot, it could attract far more viewers than its average of 2.5 million. She moved it to 7 pm on Sunday evenings, and trebled its audience. The revamp had involved a new roster of presenters. John Craven, the silver-haired former Newsround star, was kept on, but in November 2008 Miriam O’Reilly, then 51, was told she was out, along with Charlotte Smith (44), Juliet Morris (43) and Michaela Strachan (42). Julia Bradbury (38) and Matt Baker (30) were brought in as main presenters. Hunt was concerned that the average BBC1 viewer was aged 52, and that there was a need to bring in younger audiences, rather than being content to satisfy the “heartland” older viewers.

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After The Guardian broke the story the Daily Mirror published an article suggesting the decisions were ageist, and The Times ran a piece headed “No Country for Old Women”. Other media outlets followed suit. O’Reilly was accused by the BBC of being responsible for the leak, which she denied. Strachan asked: “Did Jay need to make it quite so brutal … name us all and say we are being dumped? Oh, it’s a cruel, harsh world.” The relaunch of Countryfile took place in April 2009 and was an instant success. O’Reilly took time to arrive at her decision to file an employment tribunal complaint, which she did on 25 January 2010. In giving evidence to the tribunal that autumn she quoted a view that “Jay Hunt hated women”, which Hunt dismissed as hurtful and categorically untrue. But the quote was in the public domain – just one of a series of embarrassments for her as she prepared for her new role at 4. Her evidence was a central plank of the corporation’s defence against O’Reilly’s allegations, but the tribunal ruled that some of it was inconsistent. They were unconvinced by her defence that this was “just the way things are done in the media world” and ruled that O’Reilly’s dismissal amounted to ageism and victimisation. In response, the BBC apologised to her and said: “We will ensure senior editorial executives responsible for these kind of decisions in the BBC undergo additional training in the selection and appointment of presenters and produce new guidance on fair selection for presenter appointments.” The timing of the ruling could not have been worse for Hunt, coming as it did the day after she arrived at Horseferry Road, where disgruntled commissioners, miffed at Julian Bellamy’s departure, duly noted she had been caught out being economical with the truth. It also led to the belief that Hunt could be bad with talent – in contrast to Lygo, who humoured and cherished his stars. People gossiped about the way she had insisted on having Chris Evans as a Friday night presenter of BBC1’s The One Show, upsetting Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley, who quit for ITV in 2010. Yet many senior figures in the industry came to her defence and, crucially, David Abraham was unflinching in his support. His confidence in her as the right person for 4 was not shaken. He saw someone who could take a low-cost magazine programme, analyse its appeal and turn it into a primetime hit. He wanted some of that fairy dust. Channel 4’s unflappable general counsel Prash Naik was asked to give her advice on how to handle things before she formally joined Channel 4, as was its chief press officer, Jane Fletcher. “I felt the BBC let her down,” he reflected. “The press was very unkind, too. It came, it went, we moved on. It didn’t bother me or Terry at all. In public life you have these episodes. She is a resilient and very thoughtful person. She understood what it was about. When it comes to presenters, someone has got to make the decisions. What she did on Countryfile was right: it is a huge success. In general, executives should be respected for their judgements – it is not a popularity contest.” This was the first of many times they stuck together in public: it would be a hallmark of their regime.

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Hunt’s arrival meant the departure of Rosemary Newell and her key scheduler, Jules Oldroyd. It was also a signal for other commissioners to move on. One observer said: “What happened is power absolutely shifted dramatically, and suddenly Jay was at the centre of the organisation: the steering wheel went from the scheduler to Hunt. One of the critical things was that Lygo had a much looser approach to creativity, delegating and trusting his commissioners, so he seemed more benign. After all, what is the point of paying someone as successful as Sue Murphy [head of factual features] if you step in every five minutes and say ‘don’t develop that, that title is wrong, the music isn’t right for that programme’? “Jay became the centre of that organisation, in every sense, not just creatively but commercially. At the end of the day the advertising sales team can come in and wave the red flag and say ‘don’t put that movie there, we can’t monetise it in October, but we can do so in November’, and if she says ‘I want it in October’, then that is that.” But the new pyramid being created for Hunt could mean centralisation without checks. At the BBC there were guide rails. The controller of BBC1 could not turf out a head of entertainment. The focus on Hunt would in a short time make her a target for criticism, sometimes unfair, since the competition for Channel 4 commissions from independent producers – sharp-elbowed creative businesses – meant far more proposals were rejected than accepted. It was assumed she was the person saying no or tossing ideas back to them as not good enough. On her arrival she was surprised to discover that Sue Murphy, a powerful and effective populist, had been given full responsibility for the crucial 8 pm features slot. That was stopped. Murphy, in post for thirteen years, had been overseeing the 8 pm “wall of leisure” programmes, among them some evergreen classics, Location, Location, Location and Grand Designs; Property Ladder; the new Undercover Boss (the first from Stephen Lambert’s Studio Lambert) and the unexpected big hit, Big Fat Gypsy Weddings. She also had a strong creative relationship with the Channel 4 chefs, led by Gordon Ramsay, whom Hunt thought were starting to fade – although Jamie Oliver was always seen as a core talent. Murphy had been promoted to an expanded role shortly before Lygo quit, but fell seriously ill with leukaemia during 2010, then left for a plum job with an independent producer.2 There was no doubt that she was a major loss, because it is only at 8pm, after Channel 4 News ends, that the primetime schedule gets the chance of attracting larger audiences. It was noticeable that six women in the top commissioning team were swiftly ousted, or chose to leave: Angela Jain, Rosemary Newell, Jules Oldroyd, Helen Warner, Camilla Campbell and Sue Murphy. Janey Walker, managing editor, and Claire Grimmond, who headed up programme research, were also out. It left the feisty Dorothy Byrne, head of news and current affairs, in defiant isolation, who would outstay Hunt. The axe fell on senior male executives, too; but the O’Reilly legacy meant it was the women whose departure was more controversial.

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On arrival Hunt told the commissioning teams to stop giving work to the same people, stop behaving in a cosy way, stop squabbling over talent and start getting on trains to visit regional independents. She was shocked that Channel 4’s commissioning was overwhelmingly London-centric, neglecting the nations and regions, except for its continued support for the Merseyside-based Hollyoaks. That was in contrast to practice in the BBC, where she had scouted for talent away from the capital. “If ever there was a channel not meant to represent metropolitan London it was Channel 4, and she clocked it immediately,” said her chief scheduler, George Dixon. She confirmed this: “There was a very short list of people on speed dial. I also stopped any suggestion you could invariably walk out of Channel 4 with a (programme) commission.”3 In December 2010, before she formally joined, she had toured the country and met producers. “One of the funniest things they said to me was: ‘Will you ever come again?’ They thought I had done it once and would never come back. I did it every year. We had to get out and see people.” Channel 4 had an executive, Stuart Cosgrove, notionally assigned to that task, but he was now sidelined. “You don’t say you have a man who does creative diversity. You have to get on a train yourself,” she reasoned. This made her popular with out-of-town producers including Firecrest, run by Nicole Kleeman in Glasgow, who became a regular supplier. By July 2011 she had met 170 producers based outside the M25. Commissioners, including history executive Julia Harrington, recalled her trying hard, forwarding emails with proposals. But Catriona Lewis, chief executive of Nine Lives Media in Salford, came to realise that this improvement did not lead to a swift growth in commissioning series, on which businesses are best based. “We kept hearing from Jay Hunt how passionate she was about out of London. She spouted a lot of hot air, did not put her money where her mouth was.” Hunt’s budget was boosted by the £70 million previously paid for Big Brother and a matching sum for the rights to Friends, discontinued in 2011. These funds were now reallocated.4 Entertainment and comedy were the major beneficiaries, gaining an extra £32 million, then factual. The third series of the smash hit The Inbetweeners had just run on E4, attracting more than 4.2 million viewers, and the first film was out, contributing a windfall. The new programme strategy was based largely on the pragmatic view of the Lygo regime that there could never be a replacement for Big Brother. Instead, there would be a range of new programmes, ideally longer-running returning series, in which the new genre of fixed-rig shows played a part. A bonus of £20 million cash went to drama in December 2010, funding a slate of returning series and more youth-oriented comedy drama alongside Fresh Meat, a new series about six students. There was also a big boost to Film4, which had its budget restored to £15 million by Abraham: a shrewd political move which pleased the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, and his junior minister, Ed Vaizey.

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Jay Hunt decided to act. “One of the most fascinating exercises when I started was to say I wanted all my commissioning heads of department in one room. It was not very Channel 4. I gave them a big pile of [names of] programmes on different channels on Post-it notes and asked them to stick them on the wall divided into three categories: those that could possibly be on Channel 4, those that could only be on Channel 4, or never conceivably on Channel 4. What this exercise disclosed was that there was absolutely no agreement among my heads of department about what a Channel 4 show was. It was a good exercise to do at the time because we kept saying to the independent sector: ‘That’s not very Channel 4.’ And we didn’t know ourselves.” This back-to-school exercise certainly stuck in the minds of those in the room years later, as well as the forty or so who worked directly on commissioning, many of whom would be leaving during 2011–12. It was a trigger that convinced Hunt she had to “supercharge everything we did in factual” in order to find the range of new programmes needed, while also getting drama, as she saw it, back on course. She explained: “Most of my team had been here for quite a long time. There were genres like entertainment, where nothing was going on, though that was concealed for quite a long time by the success of Million Pound Drop.” Alan Carr: Chatty Man had run for four series, but was a 10 pm show, and he invariably lost out in the competition for star interviews with Graham Norton on BBC1. The greatly loved Peter Kay was starting to outgrow Channel 4. Friday nights went through a swift change in June 2011 and were reinstated as entertainment zones, dropping property and life-swap programmes for entertainment, including 8 Out of 10 Cats. But there was the new Friday Night Dinner comedy. Peep Show trundled on, while The IT Crowd, from Father Ted’s Graham Linehan, completed its fourth and final series in 2010. In the comedy area, Hunt had to make an immediate judgement call about Charlie Brooker’s first Black Mirror, fantasising that a British Prime Minister had sex with a pig: she let it through. Caitlin Moran who had published a bestseller and was admired by Hunt (“the only person who talks as fast as me”) was wooed for a future comedy (Raised by Wolves). Much of her early months was spent hunting and signing up new talent, including Mary Portas, even if they did not have a strong project in hand. “To do these jobs you have to be prepared to jump off a cliff without a parachute,” she stated. Brave and rash? There was a fundamental tension in Channel 4 anyway between the creative commissioning side and the advertising sales force, which wanted certainty, in the form of a schedule to sell to clients, and had less of an appetite for risk. Facing up to that reality, she now thought a deal should and could have been done to keep Celebrity Big Brother, instead of panicking after the Shilpa Shetty 2007 row and running the unloved Celebrity Hijack in 2008. “Looking back strategically I would absolutely have done something different. I would have kept Celebrity Big Brother without a shadow of a doubt.” She knew the previous regime had discussed it but for some reason could not make the contract

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work. Back in 2009 Julian Bellamy and Kevin Lygo had judged that keeping Celebrity Big Brother would be the worst of all worlds. Channel 4 would have had to pay a very significant premium and it would have continued to have a PR downside, soiling the Channel 4 brand. In December 2011 the industry magazine Broadcast reported on the clean sweep of Hunt’s commissioning restructure and the exodus of commissioners. Helen Warner, who ran a highly successful Daytime schedule from January 2007 – including Come Dine with Me and Coach Trip, two bubbly successes that had contributed to an audience share of around 20 percent – suddenly found that the period of being able to try new formats was over. Hunt had run daytime successfully at the BBC and wanted to be involved in the details. Some viewers complained that the newish Countdown presenter Rachel Riley’s outfits were inappropriate. On this she let the commissioners decide on the dresses! One executive, lightly encouraged to leave, said: ”I liked her, she was clever and funny: I just have a problem with what she did. It became difficult to stay. You were not able to do the job in the way you had. It was micro-management – but in her defence that is her style, and it had been very successful at Channel 5 and BBC1. I don’t necessarily criticise her for that. But it just did not work for me. What slightly grates is the notion that Channel 4 was broke and she fixed it.” There were several such personal clashes around the company as the new team took over. One eyewitness at an introductory meeting with the scheduling, channel management and research team in spring 2011 described passed-over people bursting into tears. It was regime change, red in tooth and claw. “It was like, who do these bunch from the BBC think they are?” recalled one of the executives involved. “They are changing stuff, and it should have been me.” Hunt responded: “Whenever there is regime change some people go, some come – that’s natural for a confident organisation.” Slights were amplified, snubs imagined. People became accustomed to averting their eyes when they spotted out-of-favour commissioners summoned from the first floor to the second, to meet the HR team and their P45s. The shake-up, and abolition of some posts, accelerated through the autumn of 2011. Two expanded factual departments were created to facilitate the clear-out. Comedy, run confidently by Shane Allen, and entertainment, under Justin Gorman, were left alone for the time being. Tessa Ross ruled her own fiefdom, Film4. In November the energetic and intelligent Ed Havard, a former editor of BBC Question Time, who had gained entertainment experience at Endemol, joined to work closely with Hunt in a newly-created post of channel executive. After a year the post was abolished and he moved on to run live events, including a new charity fundraising event, Stand Up To Cancer and the Paralympics, and then entertainment. His early specific function was to oversee a second series of the topical 10 O’Clock Show, but his more important role was that of loyal lieutenant, to relay Hunt’s instructions and make sure they were followed.

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In December 2011 Sophie Gardiner joined as drama commissioning editor, working for three years on Southcliffe, Utopia, My Bad Fat Diary and Run. Dominic Bird joined from the BBC as head of formatted programmes and to oversee Daytime, E4 and T4. Damian Kavanagh arrived for a brief period to run features but made a swift dash for the exit to return to the BBC, where he became controller of BBC3. So what did this exhausting round of musical chairs mean for viewers? In December 2010 Camilla Campbell, predicting a 40  percent increase in drama hours thanks to the extra £20 million injected, was reported as saying that she did not feel drama needed creatively renewing “as our output last year was very strong; we never do the same as we have done before or the same as someone else”. 5 At this point Shameless (4.29 million) was in its eighth year, and the long-running Teachers had not been replaced. Hunt did approve Fresh Meat, and Peter Kosminsky’s The Promise was about to air. Campbell’s team also commissioned Skins, Misfits and the gang drama Top Boy. Naked Apes, an ambulance drama, and Beaver Falls, about three British graduates who teach at a US summer school, were lined up but flopped. A view subsequently grew up that much of this first wave of new programming to replace Big Brother initiated by the Lygo/Bellamy regime was wasted cash. But This Is England ’86 was a success with 3.79 million viewers. Campbell, and her deputy, were another of the powerful commissioners destined to walk out, and found a drama production company. As Hunt started, Channel 4 ran The Big Fish Fight, a campaigning three-parter. This was seen as a successor to a programme three years earlier about the treatment of chickens: when viewers saw male chicks gassed after hatching, and The Independent ran a front-page story about the programme headlined as “The Campaign That Changed the Eating Habits of a Nation”. In The Big Fish Fight, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall investigated the world’s diminishing stocks of cod, salmon and tuna, along with the Channel 4 chefs, Gordon Ramsay, Heston Blumenthal and Jamie Oliver, plus the new eco chef Arthur Potts Dawson. The macho Ramsay swam with sharks to expose the cruelty of shark fin soup. The series was chiefly memorable for recording that 50 percent of fish caught in the North Sea were being thrown back dead, and very little of the British catch was reaching local supermarkets. This led to EU policy on discarded fish being changed. When Hunt saw it in the schedule she was said to have observed that fish did not have the same crowd appeal as animals. Quite rapidly a chill descended on relations between her and Fearnley-Whittingstall, who switched his allegiance to the BBC. Cheap factual programmes, often scheduled against the big soap operas, were the profitable money-spinners, in part because they could be recycled on More4. Location, Location, Location and Grand Designs were on a virtual production conveyor belt, with as many as eighteen houses on the go at any one time, and would

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outlast Hunt’s regime. Property and feature programmes had a key asset: there were no actors or residuals to pay. The main Channel 4 slipped further in 2011 to a 6.8 percent share of audiences, and so did its share of advertising. But the portfolio viewing share, adding in the four digital channels, rose a little to 11.6 percent. The increase in spending on original content would be followed in 2012 by an extra £30 million. And at least the top team had better luck at the 2011 Los Angeles Screenings, where the in-house acquisitions expert Jill Hay did a two-year deal for Homeland for a very reasonable price. It would tuck nicely into the Sunday night schedule at 9pm, and as a huge bonus featured the British actors Damian Lewis and David Harewood. Channel 4’s commercial director, Martin Baker, also picked up that the BBC was reducing its commitment to horse racing, which allowed Channel 4 to swoop and cement its hold as the only place for racing, supplementing their regular Saturday afternoon coverage with the Grand National, the Derby and Royal Ascot – the crown jewels of horse racing that had formerly been the preserve of the BBC. George Dixon, the BBC1 scheduler whose hiring Hunt had made a condition of her joining, arrived in March 2011. The chief scheduler sits next to the director of programmes/content, and is in constant communication, even sometimes by text in the early hours after a live programme has gone out. They have to get on well. Dixon recalled that the cupboard was barer than he might have liked, but it was not all bad news. Hunt, by contrast, counted at least fifteen new shows that she inherited and didn’t work in 2011 including three from Jamie Oliver and one from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and pointed out she had to run The Killing, the acquired US remake, at 9 pm to fill slots. In her judgement the previous 2010 schedule had creaked with failure. “Channel 4 had no entertainment or factual entertainment on at 9  pm except Big Brother, Embarrassing Bodies and The Event. Sundays at 8 pm was predominantly Come Dine with Me, when it wasn’t on at 8 pm on Friday.” It was tending to pull other daytime formats, including A Place in the Sun into the evening at 8pm. Overall, the 8 pm features slot, according to her critique, was too full of makeover shows. He remembered one of his early tasks was watching with Hunt and a new scheduler, Richard Brent, the first programme of the next new rig series, 24 Hours in A&E, and feeling relieved. “Thank God it was heart-warming, Casualty with moments of tenderness.” It did worry Hunt that the opening started rather slowly, and so the run was divided into two, with eight episodes apiece, but it provided some welcome underpinning at 9 pm that the channel needed. That year also saw the start of another eventual hit strand using fixed-rigs, Educating Essex, with insights into life inside a comprehensive school. Dixon summed up the confusion that independent producers and some staffers experienced in that nervy time: “Jay is like a lighthouse. You are in the beam,

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perceived to be the best thing in the business, and then the light swings away and you are in darkness.” In all TV channels the controller and schedulers and business affairs executive (concerned about the budget and deal) meet regularly to discuss pitches for new ideas and programmes. It is an interactive process involving in-house lawyers, too, as required. Conversations go back and forth until a show is commissioned and entered into a schedule maybe as far as two years into the future. Rough cuts are viewed by the commissioner. Eventually the controller gets to see it and the final scheduling decision is made. Commissioning is always done on an optimistic basis because, if a show does not come up to scratch, that creates the problem of what to replace it with. Things do go wrong in the translation of an idea or a sizzle tape into an hour of television. When running a suite of channels, it is important for the controller to trust the commissioners; but at this point Hunt by and large did not. So in that first year the embattled commissioning team became nervous about when to show Hunt the incoming rough-cut programmes, and that feeling of anxiety, even fear, never really went away. Seasoned independent suppliers found work, especially on new titles, tossed back at them. If it was early in the rough-cut stage it at least meant changes could be made, but that created tension and extra costs. If it was too late the schedule was subject to last-minute changes, which became a regular feature of Channel 4 life. Programme titles might be in dispute until the last possible moment. One executive explained: “You would know when relationships had broken down. There were the most excruciating meetings.” This anxiety would eventually boil over into a semi-revolt – just not yet. The Abraham/Hunt version of the revolution remains a hotly disputed subject among the Lygo/Newell camp, who call it a self-interested rewrite of history. Rosemary Newell said: ”That’s what new people say. That was David’s mantra. He was here on a ticket of change and he needed to say we haven’t got enough in the cupboard. It does a disservice to all the people who were pretty frantically developing and piloting during that period [2009/10]. Quite a lot of new shows were born then. We were not ordering little things, we were trying to find the big new things. But the strike rate for new shows on TV is not high: you have to try a lot before some stick.6 Julian [Bellamy] ran the whole creative renewal process, with all departments. There was a huge amount of piloting from 2009 when the decision [to cancel Big Brother] was made. We were not trying to replace Big Brother. We were having to go back and rethink the schedule in smaller chunks. It was going to be a mix of comedy, drama, factual entertainment and maybe acquired programmes. But we never had the facility to commission a lot of stock, we commissioned for [specific] slots. We could not have created a whole lot of series and then picked from them. The cupboard was never going to be full of options.

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As far as the money-making E4 was concerned, they had already purchased The Big Bang Theory, which was ready to replace the two hours left empty by the loss of Friends in September 2011 and continue until 2018. A detailed plan to overhaul Channel 4’s schedules was drawn up by September 2010, with an overview of the tasks for the eleven genres of Channel 4 programming.7 Stand-out features included rebooting Hollyoaks, and considering all options for its future, such as replacing it with a potentially better-rating and more profitable soap. It identified the key role of comedy and entertainment in filling the Big Brother gap, with audacious factual entertainment and features, all expected to provide commercial returns to the channel, with programmes about health, bodies, money, sex, shopping, food, travel and homes areas. Documentaries would also have to take on a bigger role, capturing younger viewers, and news was in for a shake-up. “There were no empty slots in the schedule,” Lygo insisted. They just wanted to get rid of everyone. I remember David at my leaving do, sitting on his own. I was sitting on the throne (part of a full-throttle event in Notting Hill). I thought: “You are looking at a bunch of people, commissioning editors and all these people who have worked together for years and had success, and are proper working comrades.” David wouldn’t have met a celebrity in his life. He had run a bunch of old channels. Suddenly he was there with the crème de la crème of talent – Gordon Ramsay, Jon Snow, Terry Wogan, Alan Carr. And he had chopped off the head.

Abraham saw it quite differently. “I had questioned an editorial decision and he decided to leave of his own accord. With Kevin installed at ITV we developed a clear sense that our main commercial competitor was attacking Channel 4 from the sidelines. I remember being shown detailed charts from ITV which set out the impact of Big Brother coming off air. They really doubled down on trying to undermine us. Which given the broader shifts in media now looks short sighted.”

Notes 1 Jay Hunt CV. Education: Lady Eleanor Holles School, Hampton, Middlesex; St John’s College, Cambridge. Career: 1989 Researcher to output editor Breakfast News. Output editor Newsnight, senior producer Panorama. 1999 editor One O’Clock News, editor Six O’Clock News. 2003 senior commissioning editor BBC Daytime 2005 controller BBC Daytime. 2007 director programmes Channel 5. 2008–10 controller BBC1. 2 Murphy joined Optomen, experts in food programmes, including those with Gordon Ramsay, as creative director, then ITV.

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3 Jay Hunt in interviews, August 2016/17. 4 Channel 4 annual report 2010, p. 84. 5 Broadcast on 16 December 2010. 6 Rosemary Newell/Kevin Lygo interview, July 2016. 7 Genre overview, drama, comedy, entertainment, documentaries, features and factual entertainment, specialist factual, news and current affairs, education and older children, daytime programme acquisition and Film4.

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11 ATTACK THE HUNT – ADVERTISING REVOLT QUELLED

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n Jay Hunt’s second year, 2012, tensions rose and then erupted in public as she was accused of micromanaging projects, ordering last-minute changes and … well, just behaving badly. She was clearly under pressure. With all power over content concentrated in her hands, as she supervised a changeover in the top tier of 225 programme-related staff with a budget worth an annual £608 million, she had become a focus of the dissatisfaction of independent producers. They felt, quite simply, they were not being treated with the same respect and understanding that they had enjoyed from the previous regime. The veteran producer Stephen Lambert described a period of coolness and distance in 2011/12 that had upset regular suppliers – he was one – and disrupted their assumption of easy access. Since he had supplied the channel with Faking It, Wife Swap and Undercover Boss, and was about to provide Gogglebox, he had some reason to expect a warmer welcome. “It did feel a bit brittle. Previously, people at Channel 4 were very keen to talk to us. It was easy to have lunches with them. The new regime with Jay, you couldn’t get to her very easily. And you heard a lot about commissioners having a tough time. The way they were told things were not happening did not do a lot for their confidence.” It was not entirely Hunt’s fault. She was being pressed to ensure the programming catered for the right mix of viewers and, in the absence of Big Brother, it also had to be a schedule delivering a target share of commercial impacts to advertisers. This was so different to the BBC, with a guaranteed licence fee, a commercial arm able to pump in extra funds for big budget programmes with global sales potential and a comparatively risk-averse culture. One of the most persistent criticisms of her style of running 4, introducing a ruthless style of scheduling, stemmed from this obligation. She showed a willingness to take programmes off after one transmission or pull something forward suddenly because she spotted an opportunity. She would sometimes rip up agreed plans that had been fed into the computerised scheduling system and make changes to the running order on Wednesday afternoons, the press day.

Broadcasters exchange and confirm their schedules on Wednesday for the week starting ten days later, on Saturday. These have to be nailed down by 2.30pm, and the 11am to 2.30 pm period can be fraught if there are last-minute clashes. Sometimes programmes have to change on a deadline because of news events, but with Hunt it became a frequent source of tension and stress, as she dismissed agreed programmes and came up with alternatives. There were even last-minute changes to a programme’s title to make them more flashy. This way of working made her no friends and was seen as an expression of a controlling personality. A member of her team said: “I think she ran things like the 6 pm [BBC] News. It is all a great deadline: it has to be done now. Things are much better if there’s a crisis, even if it is manufactured, because the only person to solve that crisis is … you know who.” But it was her name over the door. Hunt explained: “A massive difference between BBC1 and Channel 4 was we needed every small tiny incremental gain in audience share it could gather, we were desperate for share, a decimal point mattered. Over a series we could add several million views, these incremental additions have commercial value to a small broadcaster. I make no apologies for it. It is not silly tinkering. Come on titles were part of it.” The difference between Poverty in Britain and Benefits Street – the changed title under which the 2014 controversial reality show was screened – could be 4 million viewers. The clearest outward signal of a potential revolt came at the farewell party for Shane Allen, the head of comedy, in October 2012 – appropriately held in London’s Comedy Club. Allen had landed a dream job at the BBC, running its far bigger comedy slate. Though he had benefited from extra funds released by the cancellation of Big Brother and appeared to be more than rubbing along with the new regime, in reality he and Hunt were incompatible – there was a personality clash. Here he openly mocked her, distributing hats and other props urging fellow revellers to “End the Hunt”. Her predecessor Kevin Lygo was acclaimed as “the glorious leader”, the exile over the Thames at ITV. This exuberant event was gleefully reported in Broadcast magazine. In less fevered times it might have been shrugged off as what you would expect from a smart comedy kingpin with The Inbetweeners, Peter Kay and Charlie Brooker on his CV. But it clearly expressed in dramatic terms what many of his guests had experienced. One of them, an established comedy producer, reflected afterwards: “I could see both sides of it. Shane is in the great tradition of champions of comedy who like to create trouble. He’s talent – a magnet. But it’s not very clever slagging off people: at that point Hunt could have been in line to become the first female director-general of the BBC [and Allen’s boss all over again]. But he was motivated to become an agent provocateur, overplayed his hand and went over the edge. His target audience was the chief creative officer of Channel 4 – but unfortunately for him she wasn’t there.” To another veteran, Charlie Parsons, a creative force behind “yoof ” TV of the 1990s, this assault, crude though it might have seemed, was consistent with the

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heartfelt tales of woe he was hearing from his producer friends about a culture of fear that had soured the atmosphere at Horseferry Road. Parsons was a founder of Planet 24, which had supplied hit shows such as The Word and The Big Breakfast. By now he was wealthy – thanks to Survivor, the money-spinning desert island castaway format invented in 1994, running on CBS in America. He loved Channel 4 and was sad because to him things had gone hideously wrong. His friends there could not speak out for fear of causing offence in this fraught world of personal relationships, where just one successful commission can lead to fame and riches. Parsons read the gossipy article in Broadcast and decided to intervene. He knew Terry Burns socially from the time the board chairman had called in for tea at the country house near Tenterden in Kent that Parsons had shared with his former partner Lord [Waheed] Ali, the Labour life peer. “I sent Terry an email copy of the article and dropped him a note, then went to see him at his Santander office in December. His reaction was smooth, friendly, decent, nice. I was extremely careful not to personalise it. The heart of it was micromanagement. I told him I had no agenda, I owe Channel 4 a lot, I am free, I don’t expect anything in return from them… . You should be concerned about the things people are experiencing. Channel 4 is treating its suppliers badly.” Burns said he would talk to Abraham, who agreed to see Parsons. The meeting, a few weeks after Christmas, did not go well, each blaming the other for the impasse. Parsons’ argument was that if you trust creatives to make programmes you have to trust them to get on with it, and this was not happening. “It was hilarious,” he asserted. “David listened, humouring me really. His response was pathetic – he palmed me off with research about the independent sector, showing how Channel 4 is loved by everyone, as the best place to deal with, and how brilliant Jay Hunt is. He implied I was the old guard. He talked in jargon, very patronising. It was as if I didn’t know what I was talking about.” By contrast, this was the Abraham version of the confrontation: ”Patronising? I felt the same about him. He jumped to too many conclusions. He barracked me. It was one of the most unpleasant meetings I have had. He had basically decided I had to sack Jay Hunt and he dismissed the research I had produced.” Parsons had no more contact with Channel 4 but in February, now back in Los Angeles, he returned a phone call from Broadcast. Chris Curtis, the news editor, had been tipped off about his attempted intervention. “Jay Hunt’s management style and micromanagement was the topic on everyone’s lips,” Curtis recalled. “It was latent, bubbling away under the surface. The thing that lit the fuse was this relatively big Channel 4 supplier who said to me: ‘Of course you must know what Charlie has done, don’t you?’ I had no idea, but I played along and then it became clear.” Parsons was interviewed by the then editor, Lisa Campbell. He said some producers did not want to work for Channel 4 because the atmosphere was one of dictation, not collaboration; and he spoke of finished programmes that were entirely different from what was commissioned due to constant changing of minds during

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and after production. The article ran as the cover story on 28 February and was followed up a week later as independents vented their complaints. The debate would chunder on all summer. Around twenty-four independent producers, some major suppliers in the factual and entertainment areas, had spoken to Broadcast on terms of strict anonymity. Hunt said Parsons had thrown a metaphorical brick through the windows of Horseferry Road. There followed a notably awkward spring and summer programme launch at Channel 4 on 19 March. Hunt, strained and pale but, as always, carefully groomed, was dressed in a prim black dress with a white collar as she rattled through a preview at her usual machine-gun pace. Her recently-hired corporate affairs executive James MacLeod stood like a guard dog by her side. Her scheduler George Dixon, who had come with her from BBC1 and was arguably a comfort blanket booking for her, was a shadowy presence because he was about to leave after a serious falling-out. He had once lodged briefly in her Clapham house after a 17-year relationship had broken down; but the failure to hit audience and commercial impacts targets in 2012 – the main channel’s share had fallen to 6.6 percent, when the board had wanted it raised to its former 7 percent – led to a confrontation at which he was blamed for under-performance, not keeping her informed. He would later ask to see Abraham privately to tell him how badly he felt he had been treated. Shane Allen was a guest at a Broadcasting Press Guild lunch in July and declared: “At Channel 4 it is all being focused through one person’s taste, and it is very much about trying to please the head honcho. Clearly something has gone wrong. Audience share has dropped for seven consecutive months. Staff exits in the last two years are a Who’s Who of those who are now running the best of the industry – ITV, ITV Studios, Discovery and National Geographic.” Yet everyone working in television, including the ousted executives, knew that renewal takes time. Introducing new programmes requires piloting and researching. First series, especially comedy, rarely arrive in perfect pitch. Life would have been easier for Hunt if the dithering over whether to cancel Big Brother had been ended well before the summer of 2009. Abraham reacted to the storm by asking aggrieved independents to contact his trusted director of creative diversity, Stuart Cosgrove, as a confidential point of complaints. There was no avalanche. By May only eighteen indies had approached him, of which half were making observations on how to do things differently. Parsons observed: “What was the point? He [Cosgrove] works for them. There was no chance of an investigation: it was a whitewash.“ It crystallised his view that Channel 4 was unaccountable and the board out of touch with programming. “The creative heart of Channel 4 is its schedule: nobody scrutinises it.” What makes Channel 4 unusual and crucial to programme-makers is that it has no in-house production. It was set up to work with independent companies and does not compete with them. Hunt estimated that she dealt with 460 indies during 2012, from small-scale operators to international studios. The channel wants

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its commissioners to sift the best programmes to air, or identify areas of interest fitting its remit to experiment and innovate. But all the while it must generate sufficient advertising to keep the enterprise afloat, predominantly from spot ads in commercial breaks, usually but not exclusively from safer stuff and acquisitions, which are only allowed if advertising income exceeds buy-in costs. For example, it prefers not to run adverts in Channel 4 News because it can move those nine commercial minutes to more lucrative slots. But small independents can be vulnerable, so the channel has a free legal compliance service provided by a team of ten in-house lawyers which ensures consistency and avoids self-censorship. They collaborate with commissioners from the inception of a project, attend edits of the shows, respond fast to phone calls. In the crudest terms it is a risk management strategy, since the broadcaster is accountable to the regulator, but it is also designed to avoid waste, and get the content ready and out to audiences as efficiently as possible. David Abraham addressed the PACT Council, the producers’ trade body, in May, just days before the channel unveiled its first loss in a decade – £27 million for 2012, and static advertising revenue. He admitted to problems on both sides, but not “Charlie Parsons’ war crimes”. He said there had been three years of increased programme budgets, which had been distributed more widely, beyond London and the top ten independent producers. The terms of trade covering business and rights ownership had been renewed with PACT in 2012, in time to allow the start of the final digital channel 4Seven, a catch-up service of popular programmes from the past week. This was the brainchild of Dan Brooke, chief marketing and communications director, benefiting from the fresh agreement allowing a second free transmission of popular programmes, with commercials sold at the standard Channel 4 price. It cost £9.5 million a year to run, broke even in year two and played a modest but useful part in buttressing, with a precious few extra decimal points, the all-important portfolio audience share. Abraham stressed that the relationship with independent producers “is our lifeblood”. The Broadcast story had prompted another level of examination. “The good news is we are investing in innovation, not cutting origination. Seventy percent of our top-rated shows in 2012 were new, there are forty new returning franchises and 7 million people are registered online viewers. The Film4 budget is maintained at £15 million.” But he rebuked the production sector, too, accusing some independents of overselling a project to get a deal, or under-staffing a production to save money; and there was a lot of late delivery. “We have been under tremendous pressure to fill 200 hours of former Big Brother in the past two years, non-negotiable gaps in the schedule. That is not the way Channel 4 used to work – it was more laissez-faire. Our biggest problem is being forced a run a show that needs more work.” There were, too, issues linked to suppliers overspending or not delivering an agreed editorial format. Commissioners had expressed anxieties about disappointing programmes and the editing

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process. “We cannot abnegate our duty to our board and Ofcom and the Department of Culture, Media & Sport to maintain standards and quality,” he reminded his audience tartly. The chairman, Lord Burns, aware of the criticisms of Hunt’s leadership style, reasoned that he could not object to a top executive whose aim was to improve the programming and stood for the highest standards, and who was still learning the ropes. He also understood that new programmes rarely arrived perfectly crafted, needing analysis and work. “One of the things I love about Jay is she never takes no for an answer,” he said. “She keeps working at it. It is necessary in this kind of world to keep trying. She has high standards – finds it very difficult to put up with second best – so how do you deal with people who don’t meet yours? … The 2012/13 criticism came to the wrong person, because unless you shoot for the very best you will not be remembered.” Jay Hunt, as he saw her, was a real talent with good values. But he detected that she was plagued with a basic lack of confidence, which he put down to her awareness of those things she did not do well. That probably explained her tactlessness in dealing with some producers. His response was to support her, to advise her to tone down a bit, display more patience. Throughout the five years they worked together he assumed the role of a father figure. “Of course I got worried,” he admitted. “Creative renewal wasn’t happening. But I was brought up in a world of long lags between pulling the lever and a result. It’s no good panicking. You trust you have the right people to pull this off. Asking people to chop and change is a sure way of making it fail. TV just has long lags.” 1 He weighed into the debate in May, observing that while he was monitoring the broadcaster’s relationship with the independent sector, much of the recent criticism had been blown out of proportion. The Edinburgh International Television Festival that August was an uncomfortable arena. In a packed and emotive session called “We need to talk about Commissioning”, it was disclosed that a Broadcast/GfK survey of independents showed that six out of ten had experienced cancelled meetings with Channel 4, and one in four rated the experience of working with it below four on a scale of one to ten. Contributors to the debate maintained that areas outside of documentaries suffered from inexperienced and nervous commissioners, with unclear guidance. One described the situation as hopeless and inexcusable, another asserted that no decisions were arrived at in meetings because everything had to be referred up to Hunt. Others maintained that changes in personnel led to a lack of continuity, slow responses to cuts and frequent changes of mind, leading to unnecessarily long and expensive edits. Some suppliers supported her, though. One such was The Garden, fixed-rig pioneers, which benefited from increasing orders for runs of up to forty episodes of 24 Hours in A&E. Broadcast’s Lisa Campbell concluded: “Channel 4 does not come out well compared with its rivals ITV, which performed well overall, and the BBC. It is true this

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survey represents a snapshot of the suppliers [460] but the reality is that the bulk of its output comes from indies in the top 100.” Channel 4 argued, with some reason, that the complaints were partly sour grapes, because it was trying to refresh its supply base, which meant that some long-established production houses lost out. Chris Curtis, who had first broken the story, said: “What happened in 2013 was a culmination of those first two years. Jay inherited a slate that was not her own. You must not underestimate the size of the task facing her. Relations with the creative community were at a low ebb. I am not saying they were the worst they had ever been, but Channel 4 was not in a good place.”

The new sales director, Jonathan Allan, arrived in September 2011. His predecessor Andy Barnes had held the post for two decades, during which he had developed 4’s advertising sales strategy: a golden formula of targeting the young adult audience of 16–34s and upmarket ABC1s. In 2010 Barnes had negotiated a twoyear advertising sales deal with the biggest agency, Group M, owned by Martin Sorrell’s WPP, with the express aim of protecting the channel as it wrestled with the Big Brother gap and the loss of Friends and Glee to E4. Group M bought the commercial slots for clients representing about 32 percent of the British TV market. As Channel 4 expanded its operations as an agency for UKTV and the smaller American PBS network, Group M would account for more than a quarter of its advertising sales business. Plans for a joint C4 sales house with Sky had been dismissed in 2009 and a crucial member of Barnes’s founding team, Matt Shreeve, had left in 2010, as Abraham arrived. The channel’s fortunes were more dependent than most on thirty-second spot advertising, so getting the right sales director, one who understood both the current market and digital challenges, was crucial. Allan, 37, had handled sales as managing director of a major London media agency, OMD UK. It was not common for an agency director to move across the tracks into a broadcaster’s sales house. He represented a shift away from hardened sales chiefs. He was one of a new generation in commercial television looking for innovation and partnerships with brands, rather than sniffing out a weakness or staring out a buyer on the opposite side of the table. Brought up in Yorkshire, educated at a comprehensive school before graduating in economics at Newcastle University, he was energetic and personable, able to turn on a streak of noisy laddishness for agency sales reps when required. His favourite Channel 4 programme was The Inbetweeners. When news of the hire broke, Campaign reported that jaws had dropped among media agencies, “very quickly followed by a brisk rubbing of hands as they – and some commercial rivals – contemplated how they could get one over on him in the negotiation round”. Allan mused: “It was quite a brave decision of David to hire me. He probably knew the reaction. He wanted someone with no baggage,

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someone with a digital-data-driven background. As a former agency executive he wanted that client focus. I had been through change at OMD, I understood his Big Data strategy, or perhaps more accurately the direction of travel, and my understanding of how to commercialise that was one of the reasons I got the job versus a more traditional choice. “Channel 4 was going through a big inflection point. I wanted to help get it back on its feet, in an extremely competitive market. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter were driving changes, Channel 5 was under new ownership, ITV had an effective new management. The UKTV deal was a big, bold move – difficult culturally for a small public service broadcaster.” 2 He reorganised the 200-strong sales team into five groups, each directly handling all sales to their assigned media buying agency, from the staple spot adverts on Channel 4 to the digital portfolio, 4oD/All4, sponsorship and product placement. The longerterm outlook was that television advertising, worth £844 million to the channel in 2012, was about to see a change in its base, from fast-moving consumer goods and supermarkets to online digital ads. This fostered a new breed of advertiser, some in the shouty comparethemarket.com style. By 2016, for example, Nielsen data showed online businesses – headed by Amazon, confused.com, Facebook, Google, Just Eat, Netflix and Purple Bricks – equalling food companies in TV advertising spend. “The first two years were bloody hard,” Allan recalled. “Our audience was going backwards. All our agencies wanted to take money away: our job was to stop them.” The most serious setback was a testy dispute with Group M. It began in autumn 2012 as the agency refused to accept Channel 4’s proposed rates for a 2013 deal. Allan had anticipated trouble because of the weakened schedule, and had gone to the board in September, asking them to approve the limits at which he would not do a deal, and for how long they were prepared to sit it out. The clutch of non-executives with advertising industry experience provided valuable support. Their concern was that Group M’s pressure could drive down rates across the board, and so reduce the amount the channel had available to invest in programmes. Allan was aiming for a deal by Christmas but both sides broke off negotiations on 21 December, after Group M refused Channel 4’s improved offer. The stand-off threatened to cost 4 almost £5 million a week – the largest airtime trading dispute ever seen in the British TV market. “It was a big moment. They have to tell clients they will not be advertising on Channel 4 from 1 January.” It made for an uncomfortable Christmas. “I couldn’t sleep well, I walked up the stairs here on 2 January thinking I had just turned away a third of our revenue. You are basically gambling that they will want to come back, but we were fairly certain they would.” Group M – which handled brands such as Ford, Barclays, EE and the Government’s health campaigns – pulled all its bookings and switched to rivals for January 2013. But the Channel 4 board remained behind its sales team. There was a long night of negotiations on 9 January, and the two sides finally thrashed out a two-year deal, done swiftly in the end so as not to hurt the channel materially.

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The new terms were on a par with previous terms, and it was generally agreed by industry observers that Group M’s strong-arm tactics had not worked. But the agency drew up an interconnected opaque deal through its Group M Entertainment co-production and finance arm, to put money into some programmes in exchange for rights. Allan summed up the lessons: “As a young team it was a brilliant learning experience. Because we were new in, and they were testing our mettle, and that positioning had led to a lack of dialogue early on. We learned the importance of an ongoing dialogue, and of recognising what the other side wants and needs, to work in both our interests. You also have to stand your ground when required.” Another outcome was that the board began to moderate, though never entirely lose, its appetite for stressing audience ratings and commercial impacts targets, which could be used by advertisers and the press to beat it with. All advertising sales teams are motivated by generous bonuses directly linked to income which in turn influenced all Channel 4 salary levels. Burns still insisted on monthly updates on key performance indicators such as audience share, presented in the same template right through his six-year chairmanship, to make sure he was not just fed good news; but he became more prepared to accept nuances. “I was very anxious about paying bonuses for ever-sinking market shares,” he stressed. “I wanted to keep their eyes on these numbers. I was aware the digital channels had filled a hole, and without them Channel 4 would have been in difficulty. Maybe we put too much emphasis to begin with on a 7 percent audience share.” The key point was that Channel 4 was not so out of line with the stresses and declines that were affecting all the legacy broadcasters, especially in daytime and in the area of news. For example, Channel 4’s afternoon audience share was badly hit when the BBC removed its children’s programmes from BBC1 and BBC2 after digital switchover happened in 2012, and replaced them with programming, including popular drama repeats, for stay-at-home adults, since children had the dedicated CBBC and CBeebies channels among others to watch. Allan observed: “When I arrived David was quite focused on key performance indicators. Actually, we have got away from that a bit now. We tell the commissioners to just make some great programmes – if you do, people will watch them. We don’t want to limit their creativity by making them think about share all the time. The commissioning team is still driven by creative excellence and innovation as much as by ratings. I wouldn’t want to change that.” After the two-week January stand-off, Channel 4 Sales landed the BT Sports contract in May, contributing a useful £30–40 million annual turnover. In December 2015 Group M signed an estimated £500 million new two-year deal, avoiding a repeat of the 2012 dispute. The annual autumn Upfront sales events were where media buyers, advertisers and hundreds of young and hungry media sales reps congregated for cocktails, champagne and canapés, before sitting down to a show headed by Allan and Hunt,

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who talked up forthcoming programme schedules. In 2015 Allan arrived onstage at Old Billingsgate on a Harley Davidson motorbike. The next year he clambered down a rope, SAS-style. And as it was the year of The Great British Bake Off coup, Paul Hollywood was in attendance handing out cupcakes on the stage of The Roundhouse, as a silver-foil shower wound up proceedings. “Even when ratings were going down on the main channel, even if no one has time to watch it much, the smoke and mirrors effect was evident,” observed one former Channel 4 executive who helped prepare for the event. “The buyers were in the presence of Channel 4 and that is really powerful. It’s about selling Tag Heuer watches associated with Naked Attraction, not old lady documentaries presented by Penelope Keith.” What he meant was that 4 is a sexier brand than ITV, it was not behind a pay and pin wall, and advertisers want to be part of that. It was clear that the two sides of the business, programming and advertising, housed on separate floors and inhabited by different tribes, with different decibel ranges, were starting to interact in a more open and collaborative relationship than a decade earlier. But no one had any doubt that it was Jay Hunt’s call when it came to programming and control of the schedule. She was, as one head of department put it, “the Monarch”.

Notes 1 Terry Burns interview, 11 May 2017. 2 Jonathan Allan interviews, 24 February/22 March 2017.

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12 GOGGLEBOX

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y 2013 Channel 4 was desperately seeking success. Three years later Jay Hunt would recall the hostile reception she had suffered at that year’s Edinburgh Television Festival and quip: “I was perilously close to execution.” Some thought she was about to be fired, but this was never on the cards. The criticisms and protests were largely about her personality and management style, not her ability to do the job. Her senior colleagues retained confidence in her and had privately nicknamed Abraham and Hunt “Chris and Gaby” – as in Chris Evans and Gaby Roslin, the presenters whose pairing defined The Big Breakfast’s success at Channel 4 in the 1990s. Then Gogglebox happened. This was a turning point, an example of how a hit can transform the atmosphere and restore a team’s confidence. In time it would become one of Channel 4’s highest-rated shows and its most commercially valuable while injecting energy and topicality into the schedule and acting as a launch pad for new programmes. Embodying what Hunt was battling to achieve: programmes that combined aspects of the remit – in this case reflecting the nation’s diversity – while also having a broad rather than niche appeal. It was a textbook example of the unpredictability of the television business; but required polishing and attention to detail before it caught on. The idea germinated when David Glover, Channel 4’s specialist factual commissioner was in a meeting with the top team of a key supplier, Studio Lambert – the trio of Stephen Lambert, Tim Harcourt and Tania Alexander. Lambert, who had provided many successful formats, from Faking It to Wife Swap, had in 2008 launched this production company under his own name. He and his two colleagues were anxious to recover ground after the failure of the Seven Days documentary soap opera about residents of Notting Hill. Channel 4’s Simon Dickson had invited 50 producers to pitch for the “first living breathing docu-soap, where the directors were out in the community filming while the broadcast was going on”. Seven Days was tipped as one of the great hopes and marketed a bit like Big Brother – but viewers did not respond.

Glover was regarded within Channel 4 as a creative treasure. He was the mastermind of some eye-catching projects, including four series of Inside Nature’s Giants, launched in 2009, in which 17 large dead animals were dissected, starting with an elephant and ending with an emu. It was long remembered for a sequence in which an expert comparative anatomist, Joy Reidenberg, climbed into a dead whale washed up on a shore in Ireland, brandishing a carving knife to try to cut out its voice box, because she was interested in how whales sing to each other across the oceans. The show included expert contributions from Richard Dawkins, a brilliant explainer of evolution, and it was sold on internationally. Another of his brain waves was Plane Crash, a programme aired in 2012 that deliberately crashed a Boeing passenger jet in the Mexican desert. As a result of its findings, passengers rushed to book seats at the back of aircraft, which were found to give a slightly greater chance of survival. He commissioned, too, the 2010 Blitz Street history series presented by Time Team’s Tony Robinson, which included building and blowing up houses to illustrate the Luftwaffe’s bombing of Coventry. Other credits included a Live from Space season in March 2014, which broadcast the 94-minute lap of planet Earth from the International Space Station. Now he wanted something lively. So when Harcourt, the creative director of Studio Lambert, suggested a weekly television show where viewers watch people watching television, he found a receptive ear. Glover recalled the night of the London riots in 2011, when he experienced from his flat in Camden the intensity of living in the middle of a news story. “The whole country went home and watched Britain on fire on TV and were probably having really interesting conversations about what was going on, but no documentary-maker was scooping it up,” he said. More pertinently, he remembered an early show – made by Michael Jackson, who succeeded Michael Grade as 4’s third chief executive – called Open the Box, and asked a researcher to dig it out of the archive. In 1985 a box on top of the TV had recorded people watching television, singing along with the Match of the Day theme tune, knitting jumpers, kissing, arguing, eating TV dinners. It flickered with the comedy of life accompanied – since this was 4 in its most educational phase – by a media studies book about the role of television in people’s lives. Channel 4 was meant to be about the new and experimental: but could this idea of Harcourt’s be one of those good old ideas whose time had come round again? Studio Lambert was given £40,000 of seed money to film a taster tape and find out. Lambert was good at sizzle tapes. He had launched his company on the business model of selling their paper ideas to British networks, who are usually less risk-averse than US networks, then using the video tape of the realisation to sell the concept in America. In this he was taking advantage of the revised terms of trade in 2003, which swung ownership of intellectual property rights to producers. Lambert used the technique to great effect in 2008 with a successful pitch for Undercover Boss, sending a company boss among the workforce to discover what was really going on with the business. The five-minute sizzle tape cut from the first

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programme had led to a rapid order from CBS to make a US version, which ran after the Superbowl in 2010 and was watched by 38.6 million people. It became an oft-quoted example of the way a Channel 4 commission can spawn a global hit – though with scant financial return for the channel, which cancelled Undercover Boss in 2014. It had never been as popular in Britain as in the USA, probably because the British are more sceptical about business leaders than Americans. The tape for the trial that became Gogglebox cut between real programmes and the reaction to them. The chosen viewers displayed a distinct lack of reverence, seasoned with strong views and humour. Lambert, a veteran of formats carefully constructed for repetition and copyright ownership, wanted it to be a show built around a list of programmes, like a TV review column. Glover vetoed the list. The alternative then seemed terrifying: a programme without a beginning, middle or end, and with no organising principle bar a narrator. The follow-up pilot had similarities to watching a focus group at their deliberations. The original title was to have been Watch With Britain. Ralph Lee, later to be made deputy to Jay Hunt, came up with Gogglebox: it was what his mother had called their television set when he was a child. The rule for casting the viewers was that they should be people you would not normally see on TV, who did not answer an advert to take part and were sharply defined, so as to be recognisable as an authentic household, a character or loving friends. They had to be funny, sharp and spontaneous, without ambition to become stars of reality TV. Glover initially wanted the programme to include more information about the contributors’ lives but lost that debate, though in time it was to happen. Tania Alexander was Studio Lambert’s factual entertainment executive in charge of making this deceptively simple show to exacting standards. Her researchers indefatigably hunted down recruits, visiting high streets, pubs, even a bridge club in Liverpool (where one of the nation’s favourites, the retired teacher Leon Bernicoff, was approached). “We were looking for stand-out characters with witty, spontaneous opinions,” she said. They took along cards, with photos of people in the news and provocative Daily Mail headlines and watched families and close friends comment, to see how quick they were to react. They analysed depth of knowledge, the dynamics of the family and which member spoke with the loudest voice. Participants had to be prepared to sign away two to three evenings a week for a fee of £1,500 a month … and free takeaways. Lambert was impatient to get started but Glover insisted on fine-tuning the concept before it was aired. He was unhappy with the first pilot, which he said was flat. “Gogglebox teeters,” he reflected later. “At its best it can be sublime, at its worst it can be hammed up. If it’s just people watching TV and commenting, there is nothing more boring. So you have to have the juxtapositions and make tiny tweaks in the cutting. It’s like a soufflé: it can collapse into nothing more than a worthy observation documentary. Gogglebox is the emotional reaction of people at home watching.”

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Gogglebox: June and Leon (Jude Edginton/Channel 4)

Editing the programme was a race against time. Glover stayed in the editing suite, polishing the first seven shows. “I think I did the fairy dust on the show. It is one of my happiest experiences, being inside a programme taking off like that.” To add an extra touch of familiarity they turned to the late Caroline Aherne, of the sofa-based BBC comedy The Royle Family, as the first narrator. The budget was around £200,000 per show and it was made by two fixed cameras and a production team of four, including a researcher sitting discreetly outside each of the contributors’ sitting rooms. They are told what to watch, to ensure they all watch the same thing at the same time. “They moan about watching the news,” said Alexander, “but we love them watching the news … We dump packages if they are not reacting in an interesting enough way.” Gogglebox arrived on air at 10  pm on 7 March 2013 without much fanfare. There were four programmes in the first series. The audience was a disappointing 750,000 for the first of them, but inched up to end at 1.1 million. Glover knew it was working and would improve. “The first series was like a band’s first album, interesting and weird. I was gutted when we came off air the week Mrs Thatcher died.” Bringing it back for 13 episodes that autumn was a bit of a gamble (though the ambitious Lambert had asked for 20) and while it was not a universal favourite within the commissioning team, Jay Hunt had backed it from the pilot stage. An early classic in series two focused on a Coronation Street episode that raised the issue of assisted suicide. All the Gogglebox couples started talking about how each

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would feel if the other was terminally ill. It carried just the emotional charge that Glover was seeking. Ralph Lee observed: ”We could see young people liked it: it was a unique way of looking into people’s homes. We wanted to make sure all the tribes of Britain were there.” The staple characters were Steff and Dom, who ran a bed-and-breakfast business on the Kent coast and were enthusiastic wine drinkers; Leon and June, retired teachers from Liverpool; Scarlett Moffatt, a super-confident teenager; and the boisterous Siddiqui family from Derby. All were hits from the start. Audiences trebled to 3 million that autumn and celebrity fans from Boy George to Ant and Dec combined with word-of-mouth to turn it into the entertainment hit of the year. For the third series in 2014 it was moved to Friday night, which was being transformed under Hunt to an entertainment zone, and suddenly was injecting the topicality of the BBC’s Have I Got News for You. Gogglebox has a great deal going for it. The cast is potentially the whole of Britain, the content anything watched on screen that week, which draws in millions of viewers who watched the same thing. The producers can ruthlessly drop contributors who fail to make the grade. It is, essentially, a fast-edited comedy using short free clips – testing the boundaries of the established “critique and reviewing” arrangement that allows access to other people’s content under certain circumstances, without clearing copyright. (Prash Naik, Channel 4’s general counsel, explained that the format conformed to the notion of fair dealing – i.e. the clips are covered if the contributors are genuinely criticising, if theirs is a free voice and if the roster includes 4’s own programmes but shows no bias in their favour. It was patently not a marketing tool to promote the channel’s shows.) The programme is not always celebratory. Glover recalled: “We were out of control at first, saying whatever we wanted, slagging off some stalwart Channel 4 talent. There was a very awkward thing with Kirstie Allsopp of Location, Location, Location. She’s a fan of the show and was upset when she watched it with her family and one of the Goggleboxers said: ‘Oh look, Nigella … Oh no, it’s Kirstie … she has put on weight!’ She hadn’t been warned, so a system was put in place. Ralph had to phone up to warn them: ‘Someone says you look old.’ Difficult calls, but we’ll take the risk. Gordon Ramsay didn’t want to be covered on the show – another awkward one. I thought that was a bit rich: he’s spent his life on TV shouting at ordinary people. The idea, that ordinary people might give back a bit …” There was a moment in 2013 when this frank criticism devastated Glover himself. Another of his more oddball commissions, Sex Box, from the production company ClearStory, was demolished by the sofa critics. This followed couples wishing to enhance their love lives as they retreated to a private frosted glass box on set to have sex before emerging to discuss the detail of the experience with the presenter. The Goggleboxers asked what idiot had made it, and some even walked out of the room in disgust. Glover was so stung that he gave up oversight

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Gogglebox: The Siddiquis (Jude Edginton/Channel 4)

of Sex Box, which was re-jigged then cancelled. The frank full-frontal nudity of a 2016 dating programme, Naked Attraction – another Studio Lambert commission – was more in tune with Channel 4’s ethos and, although the panel expressed some initial shock at the nudity, some grew to like it. (So did viewers. Naked Attraction averaged 1.7m across its second series, 119 percent above the average for the 10 pm slot, and more than doubled the number of 16–34s. It was also a strong repeat performer on All4.) One editing cut to Gogglebox was allowed, when the panellists were watching the 2013 British Comedy awards screened live by Channel 4. Steve Coogan had just made the Alpha Papa movie and was asked to fly in from Argentina for a lifetime achievement award. The producers begged him to attend; but the live ceremony overran and the transmission was cut off just as Jonathan Ross was introducing him. The Goggleboxers all responded in the same way, “Oh no!”, describing the decision to cut off the programme idiotic. To save the host channel’s face, that clip did not survive into the show. The stars of the sofas enjoyed spin-off television careers. Scarlett Moffatt emerged from her family in County Durham to feature in ITV’s I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! She was crowned Queen of the Jungle in December 2016, then chosen to present a hapless live entertainment pilot, Host the Week – not taken up by 4 – before successfully hosting Streetmate on E4. The pensioners Leon and June Bernicoff were firm favourites over ten series, until Leon died in December 2017.

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His passing was marked by a tribute programme at the start of the eleventh series in February, and a book about their life together under June’s name. The Tapper family, there from series one, saw their son Josh leave the show after series ten for a job at 10 Downing Street. George Gilbey and Sandi Bogle featured in Channel 5’s Celebrity Big Brother. Dominic Parker made a brief appearance in 4’s ski programme, The Jump, and was injured. When he recovered, he and his wife Stephanie landed a daytime Channel 4 show and newspaper advice column. The programme is a classic example of how 4 profits from relatively inexpensive factual entertainment: the return on investment has been estimated at around 3:1. “Gogglebox stemmed from a time we really needed larger, longer runs of shows that could generate good ratings over time,” said Lee. It was the first of the Big Brother replacements to work and run for 40 weeks a year and was the harbinger of a growing dependency on returning popular formats, stretched for longer runs and variations. The creative dangers were similar to those inherent in Big Brother, in particular that it could block fresh ideas. At its peak it drew 7 million viewers. By 2018, when it was a mature strand, it could still attract 3.8 million to a March show, the biggest non Bake-Off programme. It also turned out to be a bellwether of popular opinion. The contributors correctly called the 2015 election, when the Conservatives won an unexpected outright majority, and they forecast that Ed Milliband would resign from the Labour leadership. In the 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union, they again defied the opinion polls by correctly predicting a victory for Leave. As for Studio Lambert, they made money out of every episode. By 2017 they were fourth in terms of Channel 4 spending and eighth in terms of hours when the daytime programme Four in a Bed, rating bed-and-breakfast establishments, was added in. Even better, the format sold to more than thirty countries. With the profits pouring in, the company gave up its brief trial as a talent agency managing the new stars it created. In 2015 came a junior version, Gogglesprogs, a Christmas special that led to a full series the following summer. Like most programmes that rely on children these were trickier and more expensive to make, and when economies were forced on 4 in 2016 a planned Christmas special was dropped. The following year the producer came a cropper with an attempt at a brand extension too far: E4’s VoggleBox. This tried to apply the format to social media content on smartphones and tablets, for a youth audience. They simply rejected it. Studio Lambert, though, renewed its Gogglebox deal in 2017 and developed another social media format also specifically aimed at young adults, called The Circle, for 2018. This was backed by Ralph Lee after Jay Hunt left and, because it required a big crew, cost £450,000 an episode. It enjoyed only a modest success over three weeks in the autumn and once again Channel 4 had acted as a test bed. Netflix snapped up the international rights. It was tweaked for Channel 4’s second 2019 series.

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Educating Essex Studio Lambert had stood aloof from the stampede into fixed-rig programmes after 2010. Not surprisingly by 2018 Channel 4’s top factual executives were wondering what public institution they could rig next, when hospitals, schools and prisons had all been covered successfully. 999: What’s Your Emergency?, from the production company Blast!, was another reliable variation that prospered from 2012 onwards, observing close up the emergency services as they attended to all manner of call-outs and human frailties, from drink and drugs to hoaxers. The opening series, filmed in Blackpool, drew protests from its respectable citizens because of the dark side of the resort that it depicted. Blast!, a supplier to Channel 4 since 2004, had extended its presence with popular series at 8pm, The SuperVet and The Secret Life of the Zoo. The success attracted Sky, which bought a majority stake in the production company in 2015. That other thriving production house, The Garden, responsible for 24 Hours in A&E, increased its grip on the fixed-rigs format in September 2014 with 24 Hours in Police Custody, following detectives as they investigate cases, mixing a dash of documentary camera techniques alongside the rigs in spaces such as the custody or interrogation desks. They had conducted a trawl of police forces to see if any were prepared to allow them access. The only one to respond positively was Bedfordshire, centred on Luton, a small town with big problems. This programme was ordered in batches of up to twenty at a time, then played out in shorter runs. It presented legal problems, because if the accused is acquitted by the court their consent is usually needed to screen it, which led to spiked programmes, though there may be an overriding public interest warranting broadcast. It was a success from the start, a returning strand that increased its audience from 1.8 million to a high of 3.76 million in February 2018 – when viewers were treated to an extraordinary tale of sex, corruption and blackmail, committed by one of the force’s own detectives. One of the most potent reservations about rigged programmes is that they require the consent of the institutions and people allowing access and tend to adhere to a format that can present an unduly sunny upbeat portrait of say, a maternity ward, whereas conventional observational documentaries are not so constrained. But this episode of 24 Hours in Police Custody was a sensational exception. Educating Essex, opening up Britain’s troubled secondary schools, was inherited by the Hunt regime. Originally titled Classmates, it was set in Passmore Academy in Harlow, and first broadcast in September 2011, for seven episodes. A team spent six weeks observing the school, then did an intensive seven-week shoot. The first director, David Clews, drove the launch for the production company, Twofour Group, founded in Devon (and shortly to be snapped up by ITV Studios). The decision was taken originally to make it every two years, to allow the featured children the space to complete their GCSE exams. The first series included teen-

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age pregnancy, bullying of the head girl, the effect of a marital split on a previously successful boy and the arrival of a boy with Asperger’s syndrome. It averaged 2 million viewers over seven episodes. In 2013 Educating Yorkshire bustled in for a longer run. Filmed at Thornhill Academy, Dewsbury, it won over 4 million viewers for the first episode, directed by David Brindley. (He was snapped up by Channel 4 as a specialist factual commissioner, then hired by the BBC.) This series caught fire with the story of Musharaf Asghar, who stammered and had been bullied. “How I am going to do the speaking exam when I open my mouth and nothing comes out?” he asked, when facing an English oral test. His teacher answered by watching the film The King’s Speech, adapting the technique used for George VI to overcome his stammer. In a meticulously edited sequence in front of the school, Asghar managed the reading and pupils and teachers cried. There were cheers at the end and the clip became a YouTube hit. It depicted teachers as heroes and pupils as supportive. The average audience doubled to 3.46 million across the run, and in 2014 it was named best documentary programme at the National Television Awards, voted by viewers. In true Channel 4 style, Asghar subsequently appeared in a Celebrity First Dates episode. From that high point, the series sagged. The audience for Educating the East End in 2014 deflated to 1.44 million over ten episodes. The 2015 series, Educating Cardiff, followed Joy Ballard, head teacher of Willows High School, in a mission to turn the school around from one of the worst performing to one to be proud of. It opened at 2.1 million but audiences fell away. After this the strand was rested until 2017 when Educating Greater Manchester was filmed at Harrop Fold School, a community school in Salford once called the worst in the country. It was cut back to eight episodes and attracted an audience of 2.54 million. A change in the format had been decided on: instead of moving on to a fresh school, the cameras and cabling were to stay at the same school for two new series, in 2018 and 2019, reducing stress and cost. This created an unexpected problem. The head teacher, Drew Povey, had a high public profile and had given evidence to a parliamentary select committee saying every child deserved an education; but he was placed under investigation over the alleged removal of some children and disputed record-keeping. After working at the school for twelve years he was suspended with three colleagues in July 2018, an event captured on camera. A petition to reinstate him was signed by more than 600 people but he resigned as the 2018 series was being edited and due for broadcast. This was not supposed to happen: fixed-rig programmes are designed to take the risk out of documentaries and to be reliable factual components in the schedule. The series was suspended. It again pointed to the problem with these shows: they were not designed to accommodate newsy disruptive events. It was estimated by commissioners that at the height of the rig and its adaptations boom in 2016, Channel 4 was spending around £100 million of its annual

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budget on these keystone series. But Nick Mirsky, head of documentaries, warned that they could sometimes distort reality: “If you were a Martian and you landed in Britain today and you had to form an impression based only on Channel 4 documentaries, you would think you had landed in a golden age of public services. And I think that is only half true. For me that is the weakness of some of these shows.” That view was gaining traction. The Secret Life of 4, 5 and 6 Year Olds was an unexpected hit, driven by the experienced commissioner Sarah Ramsden, a pioneer of Big Brother. Ramsden had studied human sciences at Oxford and kept in touch with a former colleague there researching whether iPads damaged or enhanced young brains. They discussed the marshmallow test – how a 4-year-old reacts to being told they can have not one but two marshmallows if they wait ten minutes. Those exhibiting self-control were destined to be life’s achievers. A ten-minute taster tape was made in 2012, then a pilot, a charming one-off programme with small children playing and socialising in a bright playground: echoes of Teletubbies crossed with Children Say the Funniest Things. The marshmallow test was to be replaced by a chocolate cake temptation, with educational psychologists directing activities and commenting. Made in 2014, it was shelved for a year because Jay Hunt and the scheduling team were uncertain what to do with it. A watchful press officer reminded the top channel team of its existence, and it was broadcast in February 2015. The overnight viewing figure was 2.6 million, a million more than average for its 8  pm time slot, beating ITV, BBC2 and Channel 5. It hit a sweet spot, as 20 percent of viewers were the coveted 16–34s and 15 percent were ABC1, so it was upmarket and young – bullseye. It went on to win industry awards and the first series was commissioned for autumn 2015, plus a Christmas special. The Wellcome Trust put in £30,000 for scientific research and All4 video shorts. Series two was broadcast in 2016, plus a Secret Life of 5 Year Olds, Boys and Girls. In one of the tests it showed their different reactions to a home-made special recipe lemonade, which was too salty. The boys spat it out, the girls more diplomatically said it was quite nice. This led to another unexpected breakthrough: Old People’s Home for 4 Year Olds, which explored the positive experience of the two age groups mixing and mostly bonding at a care home in Bristol. The channel also launched Child Genius, an intense competition for Britain’s cleverest pre-teen child, which in 2017 drew accusations of exploitation from educational experts. These programmes, depending as they did on fly-on-the-wall techniques, made the house lawyers ever more alert to the danger of crossing the line into exploitation. They were concerned at the ethical issues raised by filming with children, vulnerable adults and often pushy parents. The channel had already learnt lessons the hard way from its social experiments with children fifteen years earlier in Boys and Girls Alone, when it appeared to allow bullying to go unchecked after adults withdrew from the scene. Protocols were added to its producers’ handbook, insisting that children themselves have to be happy to be in a programme, even if the

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parents have given consent. Prash Naik said that the task of managing the aftercare of contributors had ballooned. The widespread use of smartphones complicated the issue. “Social media is the bane of our life,” said Naik. “Vitriol is directed at programmes that are benign and harmless. Vindictiveness towards all broadcasters has increased. We have to advise our contributors to come off Twitter and Facebook, because they will get negative reaction; but there is nothing we can do. We have social media briefings with production companies, advising them on privacy settings. With Child Genius, for example, the vitriol directed at parents of the contestants by some of the viewing parents is extraordinary. With Naked Attraction the big issue is duty of care to contributors: if you are going to show your genitalia on air, be aware. “The approach with access programmes is that we go in with a very long list of requirements, based on trust that we are not going to stitch up the participants. The standard policy is not to allow people to view before broadcast, but this is relaxed for access programmes. Usually Channel 4 holds restricted viewings: designated people from the organisation come in, and if there is anything we have got wrong we will correct it. This is not ceding control. It is a collaborative process, us working together.” When the programmes involve children, it is usually true that parents are shown films with their children before they go out, but it is not an absolute rule. Parents shown the cut before it goes out give the producers their feedback. Channel 4 is primarily a factual channel, relying on a constant flow of new ideas. Says Mirsky: “Nothing lasts for ever. If anything starts to falter, what have I got next? That’s the thing that keeps me awake at night.” First Dates was a factual reality show he backed when it was first broadcast in 2013, but it took two years to fall into place. The channel’s commissioners worked together with the producer, Twenty Twenty – owned by Warner Brothers – to massage the format pitched to it by a former 4 commissioner, Meredith Chambers. When it started it was an experiment in which applicants could pick from photos who it was they wanted to date. Viewers were then invited to apply to date unsuccessful participants a few days later and to have dinner at the restaurant, to a limit of £25. A key to production and the format were the confessions in the cloakroom. It ought to have been a natural fit for Channel 4’s young audience but when the ratings came in at only 700,000, alarm bells rang. Hunt was willing to give it another go but the second series was judged to have a cruel edge. The classic tease was a short man who asked to be paired with someone who was not taller than him, being presented with an Amazonian woman. The restaurant had no guiding theme at first, so it was transformed into a more glamorous dating environment. Series three in the Paternoster Chop House near St Paul’s Cathedral was fronted by a French maitre d’, Fred Sirieix. Having a presenter was a departure from the usual rigged show formula, but the production team was asked to find an exotic European to oversee events. Siriex worked at the Park Lane Hilton, and turned out to be an inspired choice, who could play the role of a philosopher of love and also quote

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Shakespeare. He was joined by a personable cast of waiting and bar staff, recruited for the programme. A key further addition to the format was an interview with the couple together at the end of the date, to see if they wanted to meet again. The relaunch, overseen by fixed-rig pioneer Simon Dickson, made the show warmer. Applicants were selected more carefully, so that there was a real chance on a blind date that they would get on. Contributors are drawn from an ever-expanding database of more than 100,000, and are first interviewed and then may be invited to a second face-to-face filmed chat. This worked to the extent that the number of dates per show dropped from seven to five, as there was a higher rate of usable encounters. The initial six episodes were increased to nine. Two thirds of the audience for First Dates is female. In 2015 it was roped into the Stand Up To Cancer fundraiser (which Abraham and Hunt championed as a way to do good while softening the channel’s image and raising staff morale) with a celebrity version featuring Anthea Turner. The concept was followed up in a fourpart Celebrity First Dates, with Esther Rantzen making a touching lonely heart in July 2016. Then came First Dates: The Proposal, reporting the first marriage proposal from the dates so far, followed by special episodes for Christmas and Valentine’s Day. The 2017 Valentine’s Day special featured dates for widowers, the disabled and same-sex couples, attracting an audience of 2.3 million, an 11 percent share at 9pm, when the average is 1.6 million. First Dates Hotel, initially located in the South of France, got off to a hesitant start in January 2017, but returned more assured in 2018, having shifted to Campania in Italy. Continental glamour was all very well, but 4 needed to attract more male viewers to balance their offering to advertisers. Hunt and Jonathan Allan had explored in 2011 the possibility of launching another digital channel aimed at men but realised that they did not have enough suitable programming. Instead Dan Brooke, with his marketing experience, was tasked with studying the existing digital channel line-up for potential gaps, which led to 4Seven, home of popular repeats. The response was to fill slots at 9 pm and 10 pm with a range of male-skewed programming. The first was Survival: The Island with Bear Grylls, introduced in May 2014. Participants were left on an uninhabited Pacific island off Costa Rica and challenged, after training from Grylls, to deploy their survival skills, assisted by basic tools including a machete. Grylls’s underlying belief was that modern masculinity was in crisis. “Men want to know if they have what it takes,” said the Chief Scout. In series one this included two islanders with bowel problems undergoing an enema using a rubber tube, a cut-off water bottle and sea water. The ham-fisted contestants and self-filmed footage caught viewers’ and critics’ imagination from the start. Averaging 3.1 million per episode for series one, it was assuredly a fixture. Responding to protests from women that this was all a bit sexist, in the second series the format was varied. There were now to be two islands, fourteen men on one, fourteen women on the other. The stay was extended to five weeks and

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the run increased to thirteen episodes, with the extra challenge of coping with the rainy season. Some 40,000 people applied to be victims for that series, which averaged 2.9 million viewers over the run. The fourth series in 2017 introduced a fresh twist, focused on age, with two tribes; one made up of under-30s, the other of older people. The fifth series contrasted groups on different income levels, earning above and below £100,000 a year. Reality only went so far, though. Water was topped up, extra animals added to be hunted and eaten. There was controversy when, in series two, a crocodile of a protected species ended up in the cooking pot. Five series had been broadcast by 2018. They were made by Endemol Shine, overseen by Kelly Webb-Lamb (who was recruited by Channel 4 in 2016), and commissioned by the head of factual entertainment, Liam Humphreys, who described the strand as “visceral, authentic and unpredictable”. Its added value to the makers, as with Gogglebox, lay in international adaptations – by NBC, Dutch Net5 and Spain’s LaSexta. Humphreys was not infallible, though. In 2016, seduced by the idea that surviving the great outdoors was a theme that could hardly fail, his team were responsible for an embarrassing and expensive flop, though it did appeal to men. Entitled Eden, it sent 23 youngish adults for a year to set up a new community on a forbidding Scottish shoreline, fenced off and surrounded by cameras. It had echoes of a previous BBC experiment, Castaway, but in this case the miserable experience added little to the sum of human enjoyment or knowledge. It was heavily criticised for importing English talent rather than using native Scots, and the downbeat conclusions made little impact when broadcast in August 2017 as Eden: Paradise Lost. There is always internal competition at 4 and the factual commissioning wing came up with another slice of derring-do in 2015 with SAS: Who Dares Wins. Former Special Forces trainers recreated the real-life selection process, putting 30 men through tough physical and psychological tests. It made a star of Anthony Middleton, a compactly-built instructor with black hair and piercing blue eyes, who had joined the Special Boat Service in 2008 after a career in the Royal Engineers and Royal Marines, and as a section commander in Afghanistan, hunting down Taliban fighters. In autumn 2018 it returned as an extended series; but before that came Mutiny, in which the adaptable Middleton led a team who recreated the story of Captain Bligh and his loyal sailors, cast adrift from HMS Bounty in 1787, surviving the perilous 4,000-mile journey across the South Pacific from Tonga to safety in Timor. At the Channel 4 programme launch in January 2017 the modest 23-foot opentopped wooden sailing ship replica, equipped with cameras and microphones, was positioned outside the doorway of the Admiral’s House at Greenwich Royal Naval College. The series, co-funded by Group M Entertainment, took fourteen months from conception to delivery. It was an extreme travel/adventure show mixed with history that went over budget – overrunning meant £30,000 a day of extra costs for the support vessel alone. And it was not a huge success with audiences, who could

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not decide whether they were watching an adventure programme or a history lesson. There were uncomfortable moments not just for the participants – exposed to the elements and living on a diet composed mainly of ship’s biscuits – but also for sensitive viewers. “When ships were made of wood, men were made of steel,” was Middleton’s riposte to that. At least, unlike on the original journey, no one died. In June 2015 there was a distinctive new documentary series to savour. Tribe used a mix of fly-on-the-wall techniques and more traditional handheld filming to follow the life of an extended tribal family in pastoral Ethiopia. Made by Renegade, it was a challenging, expensive jewel and a brief return by television to the once thriving genre of anthropology, but a one-off. Hunted was another format that sprang from the specialist factual area, an attempt to demonstrate how difficult it was in everyday British life to evade CCTV and electronic and digital tracking. It set a group of contestants – the fugitives – the challenge to escape a group of hunters. For series two in 2016 the channel decided it had to add a prize of £100,000 for the winner, – or why, without an incentive, would people continue for an uncomfortable twenty-eight days? It, too, spawned a celebrity version that turned it into a hybrid factual/entertainment show. This was happening frequently – a blurring of lines between different genres. Pure documentary formats, constructed reality and entertainment were coming together, creating hybrids, especially for big series or seasons. Hunted averaged 2.18 million viewers for series one, peaked at 4.26 million in series two and settled down to 2.74 millon in series three.

Benefits Street Nick Mirsky wanted to show lives that were more anarchic. It was important to him to portray poverty and divided Britain – hence the channel picked up what became Benefits Street, developed for the BBC in 2012 but not commissioned. Richard McKerrow, who ran The Great British Bake Off company Love Productions, pitched it to Hunt and the channel aired five episodes, the first in January 2014 without much promotion. There was a logjam in programme delivery and a slot had to be filled. Crews had documented the lives of a handful of residents living in small Victorian terraced houses in James Turner Street, Winson Green, Birmingham, where 90 percent of residents were said to claim benefits. The opening episode followed two of them going off to shoplift: they explained how they stole clothes and removed security tags. Another, nicknamed Fungi, enterprisingly took free magazines from a hotel lobby and sold them on the street for £2.50 each. A reformed ex-convict sold 50p sachets of goods to raise money for himself. A group of Romanians clashed with residents as they tried to collect scrap metal, and children whose parents struggled to raise them were heard swearing and misbehaving. The channel was accused of airing “poverty porn”, a jibe that rankled. The pro-

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gramme drew 1,700 complaints and was investigated by Ofcom over whether it breached broadcasting regulations but found not to have done so. The ruling observed that the programme-makers had taken care to limit the amount of screen time children were on screen, and that as an observational documentary portrayal was fair. An online petition launched after episode one to cancel the remaining episodes had 60,000 signatures by the time the series ended. This was a provocative series that opened a debate about the left-behind underclass and welfare reform. The series unexpectedly gave 4 its highest viewing figures since 2012 and was raised in parliament by Iain Duncan Smith, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. He suggested the programme justified the controversial changes being made by his Welfare Reform Act, introducing universal credit. John Bird, founder of The Big Issue – a magazine sold by the homeless – said it showed what could happen to those forgotten and caught in the poverty net. Deirdre Kelly, known as White Dee, the most articulate resident by far, became a media star for a time. She thought it was one-sided and focused on only four people who lived there, whereas she had expected it to be about community spirit. Hunt called Benefits Street “a perfect Channel 4 show because it got millions of people thinking about the welfare state and people at the bottom of society”. It also had a perfect impact on audiences, opening at 5.42 million, a 14.4 percent share, peaking at 6.48 million and 18 percent. The experience created a bond of respect between Hunt and McKerrow that would in due course come to influence the negotiations over The Great British Bake Off transfer. It proved hard, though, to make a second series, as residents rebuffed the producers. Love finally made a four-parter in Stockton-on-Tees, but it was Studio Lambert that came up with the next revealing format around this theme – How to Get a Council House, which ran for four series. It was anchored within local authority housing departments, depicting people made desperate by the lack of social housing, the pressure of immigration and the squalid state of part of the private rental market. Another revealing and moving series in 2013 was Bedlam, made by The Garden, which had begun its series 24 Hours in A&E at King’s College Hospital and was able to exploit the relationship of trust built by Amy Flanagan, the executive producer, with a rising star, Dave Nath. This took viewers inside the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust mental health centre, and across four episodes illustrated the challenges of treating the mentally ill, covering conditions of extreme anxiety, crisis, psychosis and breakdown in people over 65. There was a last-minute debate when the word came down that it would have the title of The Mad House – in line with tabloid come-ons – but a more fitting Bedlam was eventually backed by Hunt. It won a BAFTA for best factual programme, inspired people to talk about mental illness, raised the profile of psychiatry and was praised by Martin Baggaley, medical director of the Trust.

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Hunt had cooled on personality-led formats and features, as Ralph Lee explained: “We don’t work much with individuals who have built programmes around themselves, the lifestyle indies.” But the potter Grayson Perry’s success in drawing out people and making art which expressed their lives made him and his colleagues aware of the power of the right sort of expert presenter. They wanted the rare people who were right at the centre of a creation or event, not a detached observer or noisy self-publicist. They sought personalities such as Levison Wood, the explorer, writer and ex-army officer. He was adopted for film versions of his expeditions – though the first, Walking the Nile, was hit by tragedy when a companion, Matthew Power, died of heatstroke. The series continued with Walking the Himalayas, Walking the Americas (Mexico to Colombia) and Crossing the Wild Frontier (Russia to Iran). This was lightly formatted, with locals popping up along the route to demonstrate a rare skill or invite Wood to a special celebration. The sympathetic trained architect George Clarke, who specialised in property and interior design formats, including Old House, New Home, became a key presenter. One of the casualties of the new regime was Time Team, the long-lived archaeology programme fronted since 1994 by Tony Robinson, best known for his role as Baldrick in the comedy Blackadder. Time Team had survived four regime changes but perished under Hunt and was cancelled in October 2012. A regretful phone call to Robinson from Ralph Lee, and an email to the rest of the team, announced that after 20 seasons, 230 programmes and 17 years, it was all over. “The perfect example of a Reithian show in a Channel 4 guise,” said Robinson. He had been grafted onto it as “the turn” and graduated to an associate producer. Four years before the death of the series, production had been transplanted to Cardiff, to boost 4’s regional quota by 17 hours a year. “That was a disaster, the whole centre of Time Team disappeared overnight. It coincided with a lot of contributors getting old. I was very pro a makeover: we all thought it was beginning to look old-fashioned. I was keen for more female faces. But it was not done in a sensitive manner.” In 2008 it had attracted 2.5 million viewers. By the end it was down to under 1 million, as it was pushed around the schedule and back into daytime, where it was not justifying the primetime factual tariff of around £180,000 a show. “This fee paid for the original excavations, which had won over archaeologists and ensured the programme got good tip-offs for its 17 episodes a year … It was killed by its success, because at its height it could be accessed over 60 times a week – repeats on More4+1, sold on to Discovery … it was ubiquitous.” Longevity lay in its modest attachment to the local and the everyday – finding an Anglo-Saxon cemetery in someone’s backyard in Nottinghamshire, rather than a slave capital in the West Indies. A notable History Live event was broadcast in February 2013. Richard III: The King in the Car Park was based on the discovery of a skeleton in Leicester. The issue was whether it could be the remains of Richard, the last English king to die

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in battle, felled at the Battle of Bosworth that ended the Wars of the Roses in 1485. The king was thought to have been buried in an abbey that once stood on the site of the car park, and the programme made by Touching the Void producers Darlow Smithson established beyond much doubt that the remains were indeed his. The event, watched by nearly 5 million people, was presented by the actor and writer Simon Farnaby. If Robinson was wounded by being overlooked he did not confess to it. Indeed he continued to appear on the channel at weekends, in three series of Walking Through History, hikes in places such as Brontë country, Dorset’s Jurassic Coast and Stonehenge. Then came Tony Robinson’s Ancient Tracks and a flirtation with another approach, using drones to map old sites. After that, he was then kept very busy by Channel 5, starting as the presenter of railway journey series. Nick Mirsky was eager to explore daring new approaches. Nick Holt, a pioneer of factual TV cracked it. In June 2013, after three years of negotiation, remotely-operated cameras were placed inside a Scottish High Court for what became Murder Trial. Factual commissioner Mark Raphael and Channel 4 lawyer Dominic Harrison did the majority of the work setting it up, including meeting judges, alongside producers and director. Nat Fraser had been tried in 2003 for the murder of his wife Arlene, whose body has never been found. Despite appearing to have a cast-iron alibi, he had been found guilty. His conviction was quashed in 2011, and the case retried. Holt was not allowed to film meetings between lawyers or the jury’s deliberations; but the court proceedings were filmed and carefully edited. Fraser was reconvicted. Many had hoped that the case would set a precedent for televising courts, but it was not to be. Holt followed this in 2017 by A Murder in the Family, an experimental hybrid stripped over five nights. This was a fictional murder trial and plot – a man was accused of murdering his wife. Real QCs – Max Hill and John Ryder – presented the case for the prosecution and defence before Brian Barker, a retired judge in court in Newbury. Apart from them, the main characters were played by actors. The wife’s last moments were revealed after the jury got the verdict wrong, provoking a caustic debate about the quality of jurors and justice. But another innovation in this area was brewing under Mirsky’s watch, “verbatim drama”, which used the exact words by suspects recorded in police interviews to create a simple television play, which led to a breakthrough in 2018 called The Interrogation, focusing on the case of Norfolk farmer Tony Martin. Factual programmes whether for entertainment, information or education are the foundation of the business. In 2017 a total of £254 million was spent on factual programming, according to the annual report, making it the biggest single genre by a considerable margin, accounting for more than a third of the £663 million spent on all programming. Investment in factual rose by 21 percent in that year, the biggest single increase of any genre, in which The Great British Bake Off played a main part. (The next most expensive was drama at £87 million, then entertainment at £86 million and film at £81 million.)

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By the time Jay Hunt left 4 in September 2017 she could claim around sixty returning series on the main channel, many recycled on E4, More4 and 4Seven. Ralph Lee, her deputy, said: ”Between 2010 and 2018 there was a step change in the volume and scale of documentaries on Channel 4. I don’t think documentaries commissioned in very big batches have ever been made on that scale before.” In particular he pointed to those aimed at youngish viewers. “That is the specialism that has made us ultimately strong and has differentiated us from other broadcasters, why we can get out of bed in the morning and not be depressed about the audience figures. It has brought audiences to us.” But there was a real concern that overuse of the rigged static cameras was stunting a new generation of programme-makers. “One result of the rigs is that talented directors do not want to work for Channel 4 after their experience of doing something, if they have a choice. These are intensely depressing and annoying to work on” observed one factual commissioner on leaving to return to programme-making. But they are also credited with training and producing brilliant editors, who can piece together the finished programme from hours of humdrum footage. One Born Every Minute was selected for review and cancellation in 2017, even before the new team of Alex Mahon and Ian Katz arrived to replace Abraham and Hunt. The range of rigged shows was put under review, for either refreshing or retirement, and the exception was the most difficult to make – 24 Hours in Police Custody. But the reality was that strands such as 24 Hours in A&E were popular and broad, vital stalwarts. In all television broadcasters there is tension between securing a targeted range of audience ratings and making space for new things. That is especially acute at Channel 4, because experiment is part of its DNA, and younger viewers are usually keen to sniff out something new. But on the other hand 4 relies almost completely on advertising. The judgement lies in offsetting the security bestowed by established popular series against switching resources to new proposals, which might not flourish in an intensely competitive environment. Hunt battled hard on both fronts, commercial and creative. In the case of factual she largely succeeded in finding new returning factual shows, reflecting the obsession with performance in the audience ratings. But there were very real concerns that the channel had moved into industrial scale commissions of formatted and formulaic programmes in peak times, which were telling heart-warming human interest tales from schools and hospitals, rather than depicting society’s inner workings and problems. It was courting, if not succumbing, to the danger of being stale, safe and predictable and concentrating spending on the big independents. Arguably, though, trickier challenges lay in comedy, entertainment and drama.

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13 PARALYMPICS

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hannel 4 promised to deliver significant changes in attitudes to disability after snatching the rights to the 2012 London Paralympics from the BBC. This was brave talk because it was the biggest sporting event it had ever covered. The enthusiasm sprang from years of persistent internal pressure to involve more disabled people in its programmes. There had been isolated successes. In 2003, the hunt for amateur singing stars in Operatunity ended with victory for a blind soprano, Denise Leigh. An outstanding documentary, The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off, featured the final days of the charming Jonny Kennedy – wheelchair-bound and dying from a rare disease – and won 5 million viewers. Make Me Normal followed boys with autism. Big Brother in 2006 had a winner, Pete Bennett, with Tourette’s syndrome, while Secret Millionaire featured a blind female benefactor. A disabled actor was cast in Hollyoaks. The producer of She’s Got To Have It – a weekly show in which three people went shopping – was instructed by its commissioner Ben Frow to include a disabled woman. “This is non-negotiable,” he said. In 2009 six disabled actors and Jack Thorne, who later wrote the Harry Potter theatre adaptations, created Cast Offs, a strange, boundary-busting late night comedy drama. And in April 2012, six months before the Paralympics started, came The Undateables, the first of a long-running and often touching reality documentary series, following people with disabilities or learning difficulties on dates.1 The channel’s track record caught the eye in 2009 of the International Paralympics Committee (IPC), whose vision to “inspire change” dovetailed with one of Channel 4’s core purposes – helping people see the world differently. They approached Martin Baker, director of commercial affairs, asking if the channel wanted to pitch to be the host broadcaster in competition with the BBC, the games’ usual outlet. The aim, opened up to all broadcasters including ITV and Sky was to make the Paralympics an event in its own right, covering twenty sports, not just tagged onto the London Olympics. Although the games had been in existence since 1948, the 2000 Summer Paralympics in Sydney were the first to be broadcast to a global audience.

The IPC had been disappointed with the BBC’s scaled-back coverage of the 2010 Winter Games, and wondered whether another company might do better. Baker spoke to Kevin Lygo and Julian Bellamy. They were excited and raised it with Alison Walsh, the doughty head of disability, persistently pushing programme commissioners to do more. As an Oxford zoology student she had been a keen rower, before rheumatoid arthritis affected her. She always regretted that she did not then know about Paralympic sport. She had moved into television, contributing to BBC travel shows, after gathering stories from disabled travellers for the Rough Guides series of guidebooks. She arrived at Channel 4 in 1996, working part-time. “When I started talking to commissioners they were always worried about showing disability in a negative light: it had to be a positive portrayal. I told them to be honest, let people be themselves; if they are having a shit time let them say it. Much of my role was bumbling into people’s offices, having a cup of tea, asking them what they were doing.” She became involved in the Paralympics bid, and helped set the Channel 4 tone within a wider team including Stuart Cosgrove, Deborah Poulton and Jamie Aitchison. 2 Nigerian-born Ade Adepitan, who contracted polio as a young child, was involved from the first. He was enlisted as a consultant because of his experience as a wheelchair basketball competitor, winning a bronze medal for Britain in the 1984 Paralympics. In 2009 he was close to giving up a faltering television career and thought he might compete as a wheelchair tennis player. “I had a call from my agent – it was very hush hush. I thought it was a joke at first. If someone else was going to do the Paralympics, Channel 4 was not the one I would expect. I was taken aback, I wasn’t sure they were serious.” 3 He was summoned to Channel 4 to meet Lygo and Bellamy, who had only weeks to prepare their bid. “I said the challenge here is that on the BBC it is quite boring,” Lygo recalls. “Ade explained just what these athletes have to do, and what the people around them have to sacrifice, just to compete. They are not Mo Farah. It can take half an hour to get people into the pool. I said we have to create some heroes.” Adepitan was delighted to be approached and bemused by the realisation that the two executives thought it might be hard to persuade him to join. “Julian and Kevin spoke for thirty minutes, with passion. It just blew me away. They said what the Paralympics stood for was in the very DNA of Channel 4. It would be the biggest sporting event Channel 4 had ever done. I went from non-believer to believer in thirty minutes and I left the room stunned but excited. “They wanted me to help with the bid, to write a speech to lead our whole bid, and to come with them to the offices of LOCOG [London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games]. It was top secret, cobbled together in a few days. We did a rehearsal of questions the day before – I dealt with the emotional and sporting ones. It was a whirlwind.” Adepitan, Lygo, Bellamy and Walsh made their presentation at LOCOG’s office in Canary Wharf. It involved a massive commitment to 500 hours of cov-

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erage, all day, for eleven days, enlisting their digital channels and 4oD and their website for live coverage, with the crucial promise to have 50 percent disabled presenters and reporters. The key driver for change on the Olympic side was Chris Holmes, Britain’s most successful former Paralympics gold medal swimmer, a member of LOCOG and director of Paralympic Integration, leading the team planning and integrating the Olympics and Paralympics, for the first time. “We wanted to hardwire diversity, access and inclusion into the games,” he said. “We knew if we were going to bring to life the vision we had, we needed to do stuff differently. Attract bids from broadcasters to see what they could bring to the table. And if you are thinking about driving the difference, well, Channel 4 was the first obvious port of call.” He was on the crucial interviewing panel. “We interviewed all the major broadcasters including ITV and Sky, in an open competitive process, we were looking for a game changer, this wasn’t just nudging the dial.” 4 Walsh wrote a book documenting the experience: “In our final presentation to LOCOG we said that Channel 4’s Paralympics campaign would take what started as a ripple and turn it into a tsunami of change in attitudes to disability in 2012 … We wanted to create a nation at ease with disability.” 5 But money was important, too. One of Holmes’s key points was that the broadcast rights to the Paralympics were not going to be given away. “Absolutely revenue mattered. By the same token we would not give away one ticket free. Value had to be recognised”. The £8 million bid, just for the London games, was the biggest ever negotiated for the broadcast rights, plus an additional marketing budget backed by the board in December. This won the event from a shocked BBC – who had belatedly asked Adepitan to join them as a presenter. On 6 January 2010 Bellamy was told of the verdict. He immediately called Adepitan, who was driving: “My heart was beating so fast I nearly crashed the car. I knew this was a massive moment that was going to take everyone by surprise. Quite a few ex-Paralympians had contacted me and said they didn’t think it was a good idea, but I knew the organisers were up for something new.” Holmes said: “The reason Channel 4 got across the line was they really understood our vision, putting the Paralympics in the mainstream. I had to do a heck of a lot to convince colleagues not to go with the BBC, the safe option.” He also knew the broadcaster required an event to springboard it from the Big Brother years. As he saw it, “The Paralympics were it. What is the purpose of Channel 4? How do you deliver the remit? The P of Paralympics is not a bad starting point.” Walsh was given a senior editorial role preparing for the event. She organised regular strategy meetings with first Bellamy and then Dan Brooke, who joined Channel 4 later that year to become a board member for marketing and diversity, and thought the decision to broadcast the games was a bullseye. The overall commissioner who carefully organised the event was Deborah Poulton, with Jamie Aitchison, the sports editor.

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The Rio Paralympic presenters line up (Hal Shinnie/Channel 4)

Adepitan pushed for top athletes to be made household names. “We needed to start introducing people to the athletes in 2010, so people could connect and care about them, turning the medal winners into household names: Ellie Simmonds, David Weir, Jonnie Peacock, they were our success stories. After Sydney 2000 if you asked one person to name a Paralympian they wouldn’t be able to do that. Secondly I wanted people to understand the sports and classification, to demystify that.” Stuart Cosgrove, the head of nations and regions at Channel 4, was handed the executive board responsibility of overseeing the Paralympics. Sunset+Vine and IMG, the two big beasts of independent sports production, were on board by February 2010, and the teams went off to the Winter Paralympics in Vancouver in March to observe. The channel backed an innovative technology, the Lexicon Decoder – Lexi for short. It was like a horizontal traffic lights, green for no disability, red for severe, created by Giles Long, a Paralympic athlete and TV presenter who approached the channel soon after they won the contract. It was used in seven of the main sports: swimming, athletics, cycling, table tennis, wheelchair rugby, basketball and volleyball. It helped explain the disability classification system – why a swimmer with dwarfism is racing against someone with no arms. The award was signed as the last act of the Johnson/Lygo regime, backed by incoming chairman Terry Burns. But it now faced an unsettling period as Lygo quit in April for ITV and Julian Bellamy was replaced nine months later by Jay Hunt. “Jay was negative about it when she arrived in 2011,” said Walsh. (The two did not hit it off). The new chief creative officer was horrified at the number of

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broadcast hours that were to be devoted to the games. Holmes said she called the Paralympics “the problem”. “No question about that, you can understand it, from her perspective everything is seen through the lens of ratings. In that role you think, how do I make this rate massively, in the millions. I didn’t need to cross swords with her”. But from the start David Abraham was positive. One of the key issues was how to deliver the commitment to 50 percent disabled presenters. “It was a mad two years: getting those presenters on the air was a battle every step of the way,” Walsh said. Sunset+Vine and IMG were hard to convince, particularly the two highly-experienced executive producers, Gary Franses and Mike Wilmot. They were concerned about standards. Adepitan, now a consultant, added his voice. “I said I was fed up, and I am sure most Paralympians are, with seeing our sport presented by able-bodied people. We felt there was stuff they didn’t do and didn’t have the licence to talk about. We needed to find a way.” He wanted to be a presenter, but initially Sunset+Vine thought he should be a pundit instead. He had a decision to make: whether to compete as a tennis player or to present. He chose presenting. Channel 4 launched its approach in August 2010 with a feature-length documentary, Inside with Incredible Athletes – a mix of science, sport and human stories celebrating the Paralympic athletes who would be competing in 2012. Walsh got a text from Abraham saying: “This is exactly what we should be doing.” Four series of That Paralympian Show took up the baton to give viewers a breezy romp around the sports. In all, six new programmes were devised in the run-up to London 2012, to spread knowledge and anticipation among viewers and to give the presenters experience. But to unleash new presenter talent on a huge global live sports broadcast was unheard of. In August 2010 Channel 4 launched a nationwide hunt for disabled talent to train up, and 350 applicants responded. One tape that particularly interested them identified Alex Brooker, later to star in The Last Leg. To assist in the search Walsh hired a disabled producer, James Ballardie, and the training company ThinkBIGGER!, run by Edi Smockum. They selected two groups of twelve for presenter boot camps with the National Film & Television School. This eventually resulted in a squad of a dozen people selected for further development. Tutors and coaches moved in. The approach was complicated by the 2011 World Athletics Championship in South Korea, used as a training exercise by Channel 4. Ortis Deley, a young black presenter of Channel 5’s Gadget Show, was brought in as a co-presenter and was criticised in the press for his inept performance. He had done no live presenting previously and had not been fully briefed. He was dropped. It was an unfortunate example of diversity casting gone wrong. It stiffened the concerns of the two contractors, Sunset+Vine and IMG, who wanted experienced presenters, using the new disabled talent as reporters and pundits. They secretly held a joint meeting a year before the games, to air their concerns. Mike Wilmot said: “The side effect was a realisation at Channel 4 that we

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should support them with professionals. That was our viewpoint all along. You can take people through training sessions; but there is nothing like being there when the red light comes on and you are live. The experienced person could always take over. 6 “It kind of fell into place. Clare Balding, who would become the star of the main Olympics, had done the Paralympics before. She is quite aggressive in getting work, and she was not contracted to the BBC. We were quite surprised that Channel 4 was so enthusiastic about her taking the role. Equally, she was a fantastic professional: we could put her alongside anyone.” The parties held meetings at Channel 4 every two weeks. There was a debate over the titles of the special programmes taking over the eleven-day schedules, dividing up the day. A representative from the commercial side counselled caution, saying that research showed that people would just turn off if the word Paralympics was used. They wanted non-descriptive titles such as The Morning Show and The Afternoon Show. Wilmot recalled: “I understood that after the opening ceremony on Wednesday we were guaranteed all-day coverage Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. But depending on how it was unfolding, Channel 4 were potentially going to go back to their regular programming from the Monday if it didn’t work. The Simpsons would be going in. I don’t think they would have pulled the major evening programmes, but they were that nervous.” In the event that contingency plan was not needed. The Paralympic warm-up event, the BT World Cup, held in March 2012, provided the first chance to give the presenting teams a live try-out. Some Channel 4 executives were distressed by what they believed was the lack of encouragement from still sceptical production teams, who suggested there had to be a cull of the first-time presenters. “It was a constant battle,” said Walsh. When Jay Hunt started to get involved in the discussions she backed the sensible compromise of pairs, an experienced presenter working with a disabled one: Rick Edwards and Kelly Cates; Jonathan Edwards and Daraine Mulvihill; Georgie Bingham and Arthur Williams; and Clare Balding and Ade Adepitan for peak time. It was groundbreaking. The select group of presenters had by 2012 been through four months of intensive training, working eight-hour days on their presenting skills in a mock-up studio hired from ITN. They made a weekly show, which was sent to relevant executives who could monitor their progress. The marketing and production teams were invited to an away day in 2011 to help them strike the right tone. A document called “Mental 4 the Paralympics” stressed that the principal purpose of the undertaking was to shift Britain’s 10 million disabled people into the mainstream of national life. A part of that was to focus on the reality of disablement: the cameras would linger on the athletes’ bodies, stumps and all.7 This influenced the dazzling 90-second promotional film made by Tom Tagholm, director of the in-house 4Creative unit. Called 2012 Meet the Superhumans, it showed members of the British team in action, backed by Public Enemy’s

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rap song “Harder Than You Think”. It was one of the most talked about adverts of 2012, a YouTube hit, a perfect expression of what the new approach aimed to do. But it emerged only after considerable debate between the different factions on the steering committee. At heart it was whether the promotion and coverage should include images of how the athletes came to be disabled. The British Paralympic Association (BPA) did not want back stories, saying it had to be all about the sport. Walsh said: “The BPA used to say they wanted the athletes to be seen as Olympic athletes, but my view was that the pendulum had swung a little too far. Lee Pearson, one of the equestrians, walks very badly but on that horse he is amazing. It is the contrast which is inspiring. He said he wanted the contrast and we put it in the marketing trail so that presenters didn’t feel you could not talk about how someone got their disability.” Adepitan wrote in an email that they had to keep the back stories in. “It was real, true, warts and all. The focus was a two-second sequence of one athlete in wheelchair rugby which had a picture of him being blown up on military duties, another one featured a car crash, and a third showed a baby being born and the mother being told it was disabled. I said keep it real. Life is tough. Having hip hop music from Public Enemy was a perfect marriage.” Holmes said: ” There was no sense that we were pushing on an open door. Only three people out of the fifteen wanted it in, but that two seconds made the point. There is no separate world of disability, it is people like you and me, it was radical, bold and different”. The sequence stayed in. But as the games got closer, so did the anxiety. “I would wake up at 4am in a cold sweat, incredibly nervous. We had this gem in our hands.” But would the new approach work? Meet the Superhumans was launched on Channel 4 at 9 pm on 17 July, and everyone relaxed. Nerves were on display again as the games began. Wilmot was producing the opening ceremony. Alex Brooker was apprehensive as he prepared to interview Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, in the hour before the ceremony began. Then with just twenty minutes to go the Prime Minister’s press team informed Wilmot that David Cameron wanted to be interviewed, too. Jay Hunt, Stewart Cosgrove and Jamie Aitchison said it had to be done – and Brooker, although by now truly terrified, duly rose to the occasion. Adepitan recalled his jitters on day one: “You have this wish, this dream, and at the moment it is about to come true you are really nervous … Clare had had an unbelievable Olympics – everyone was calling her the national treasure. So I was going to be sitting next to one of the best presenters in the country … She would take over when she sensed I was nervous, but as she saw me get more confident she relaxed and let me do more and more. She said I connected better with the athletes, so I would do the interviews and she’d do the links.” The opening ceremony did not go altogether smoothly. Jay Hunt became increasingly tetchy, finally instructing her scheduler, George Dixon, to drop some planned advertising breaks – to the annoyance of the sales team.

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“The truth is I was sitting in the gallery for the opening ceremony as the most experienced producer of live television the channel had at the time, Channel 4 didn’t really do live, it was all hands to the pump. While David Abraham and the board were in the stadium. I was dealing direct with sales.” It led to some lost revenue but avoided criticism for cutting away from the athletes’ parade at key moments. “This was make or break time for Channel 4’s reputation, I am incredibly proud of my time in news. It is probably one of the most useful things I have ever done.” Although the disabled presenting talent had trained as hard as the athletes, there were inevitable glitches. Arthur Williams on his first day got stuck in a racing chair while demonstrating how to get into it, and one of the reporters on the poolside live two-way exchange could not hear anything. She smiled and got over it. “Jay was very nervous. But we got an 11.6 million audience on the opening night and she suddenly loved it. And to her credit she said we had to contract some of these presenters afterwards. We took Alex and Arthur and each Channel 4 commissioning team was asked to see if they could use the disabled talent. Ade was judged not to need a contract, and Dorothy Byrne picked him up as a current affairs presenter, to do two Unreported World programmes a year. The thing that was wonderful about the Paralympics was that the whole channel was energised around disability. Previously it was always hard work, trying to get a spark,” Walsh recalled. There was more to come: the event won a BAFTA award, beating the BBC’s Olympic coverage. The marketing campaign was widely acclaimed. Meet the Superhumans won the Cannes Lions Grand Prix, a first for Channel 4, and was named as Campaign magazine’s Campaign of the Year. Tom Tagholm moved on to become a film director.

Last Leg Another highlight of the coverage was The Last Leg at 10pm, which was to grow and develop after the Rio Games in 2016 into the ultimate bonus, a major Friday night entertainment show. Its star, Adam Hills, had caught the attention of executives by doing a riff on the Beijing Olympics, about a swimmer with no arms. He understood immediately that Channel 4 wanted him to use the structure of the highlights show to bring in some humour. Without him it would not have happened: it would have just been highlights. But he had grafted for years as a stand-up comedian before he started to incorporate jokes on disability and his prosthetic leg. His on-screen team included Alex Brooker and the able-bodied Josh Widdicombe. Originally Channel 4 planned to broadcast The Last Leg on E4. Jay Hunt was wary about the project. But Holmes pushed successfully for it to be on the main channel: “I thought this is fabulous, even if someone doesn’t care about the sport, we can get to them by this route.” Hunt then assigned the commissioning editor

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Adam Hills (Ian Derry/Channel 4)

for entertainment, Syeda Irtizaali, to The Last Leg, and production was switched to Open Mike, specialist entertainment producers. “At its heart was admiration of the athletes,” said Walsh. “Through the day the editors would send in funny clips, like the blind long jumper running into the umpire’s chair. It was a riot. We didn’t need to bring in celebrities. Research showed that it was seen as refreshing and original, in part because of the way disabilities were talked and joked about.” London 2012 was a calculated gamble for the channel. The total cost was £24 million, embracing programming, marketing and online, only a couple of million less than year-round Channel 4 News. The programming consisted of the build-up features and documentaries, the ceremonies, the live coverage, the breakfast show and The Last Leg. The cost of finding ten new disabled presenters and reporters was £600,000. Unprompted awareness of the Paralympics at the end of July 2012 was 16 percent; but by the end of August and the start of the twelve-day event it was 77 percent, aided by Channel 4’s biggest ever marketing campaign. The Meet the Superhumans trailer was seen by 86 percent of the population. There was also the cheeky post-Olympics poster campaign, Thanks for the Warm Up: all helped drive ticket sales. The opening ceremony peak at 11.6 million viewers was the channel’s highest audience in ten years, and across the 11 days, 40 million people watched the event on television, a 251 percent increase on daily viewing compared with the

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2008 Beijing Paralympics. Each day a quarter of the British population tuned in. The website attracted 2 million unique users, 11.8 million page views, and 2.2 million views of videos. There were acres of press coverage. Research showed that 82 percent of viewers enjoyed the fact that there were disabled presenters. The closing ceremony peaked at 8 million. The greatest social media buzz was created by Jonnie Peacock and David Weir winning the 100m gold and 5,000m gold respectively. The Paralymics provided Channel 4, More4 and their time-shifted channels with a handy boost to overall ratings, a 76 percent increase in audience share against the period in 2011. It increased the 2012 full year ratings by an additional 0.13 percent: without it the main channel share would have been 6.36 percent instead of 6.49 percent, at a time when only Channel 5 of its terrestrial rivals saw an increase in its audience (due to acquiring Celebrity Big Brother). Channel 4 had an agreement with commercial advertising partners for rates based on the actual audience numbers, so the Paralympics were far more lucrative than they had dared anticipate. The audience for The Last Leg grew from 746,000 to 1.36 million, with an average 7.5  percent share, and was heavily weighted towards upmarket ABC1 viewers. As for recognition of the athletes, only 18 percent of respondents were able to name a British Paralympian before the games, but this rose to 41 percent afterwards. The stars were invited onto other popular Channel 4 programmes: Alan Carr’s Chatty Man talk show, Sunday Brunch and Come Dine with Me. Channel 4 had enhanced its image by defining itself as the place for Paralympic sport, demonstrating that the London games were not an afterthought of the Olympics. Yet although the 2012 event did better than expected and made a commercial return – primarily due to its being in London and at accessible times of the day – the long-term commitment was an overall cost. When the 2012 games finished, with the 2014 Sochi Winter Paralympics coming up, the presenters’ contracts were extended. But this time the channel had miscalculated, scheduling too many hours – seeing that there were only seven sports, all relatively new to viewers and never extensively covered before. Wheelchair curling, ice sledge hockey and cross-country skiing failed to excite audiences, and the figures were disappointing. When it came to the 2016 Rio Paralympics a red-carpet crowded launch took place at Horseferry Road, unveiling the next trail, We’re the Superhumans set to a cover of Sammy Davis Jr’s “Yes I Can”, which rose to the challenge of how to follow Meet the Superhumans. This time Channel 4 executive Ed Havard, in charge of live events was responsible and there was a well-organised new programme for twenty-four disabled off-screen trainees, though not all made it to Rio de Janeiro. Two thirds of presenters were disabled including Breaking Bad actor R. J. Mitte, broadcaster Sophie Morgan and ex-commando J. J. Chalmers as first-timer additions. But there was a view they were downplayed and put into daytime and late-night slots. Ade Adepitan, an ambassador and no longer paired with Balding, did the

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afternoon show with Arthur Williams. This was down to the time difference, with the UK four hours ahead of Rio, which meant the main events tended to be on late evening, with spikes between 11 pm and 2pm. So the Channel 4 peak evening slots after a curtailed 7 pm Channel 4 News were devoted to a 7.30 pm highlights show with Clare Balding, running into The Last Leg Live from Rio between 8 pm and 9pm. And then onwards into 9 pm and live sport. Adepitan said: “Yeah, it did annoy me. TV is all about viewers, Clare Balding was one of our most popular presenters and The Last Leg was extraordinarily successful. So they felt the combination would attract most viewers, given the time difference. I did raise it, before they ended up deciding where I fitted in. I had fun working with Arthur, but all the big finals and big events were in the evening, I would have liked to do that.” The partnership worked despite misgivings, and Adepitan and Williams went on to co-present the World Athletics event in July 2017. Ade Adepitan was invited by the BBC while he was in Rio to present Children in Need alongside Graham Norton , a text arriving during a commercial break! “What C4 needs to take care of in the future is not to underestimate the power of sport. People tune in to see athletes competing against each other, they are the most important part of the Olympics, we are just the conduits, gatekeepers, to open the door to the public, come in and watch,” he said. Walsh, a critical friend who had felt sidelined by Hunt and was now working for the BBC, agreed: “I thought they lost a bit of confidence in the sport. They packed it with celebrities, took comedians out there. The trail was a bit flabby, lovely, but not so pure or groundbreaking as the first.” A lower percentage, 73 percent, said they enjoyed the fact disabled presenters were on-screen. But Rio presented other serious problems. The International Paralympics Committee, noting the breakthrough achieved by LOCOG, which had increased the value of the rights, decided to take back control and sell the TV rights direct. Then Brazil, the host nation, was found to have spent all the money on the Olympics, and had nothing left over for the Paralympics. It was touch and go for some weeks whether it could go ahead. Holmes said: “What was disappointing about Rio was they treated the Paralympics with no respect at all. There was no legacy for the disabled people of Brazil, it was a crying shame.” Given the time difference and the fact it was not London, there was always going to be a smaller audience. The 2016 Paralympics were watched by 27.2 million, compared with 40 million in 2012, across Channel 4 and the digital channels. However, the proportion of young people watching Channel 4’s coverage grew. Because of the time zone difference C4 was the most viewed across 11 pm–1 pm, when the big events were on. All4 had 2 million views, divided into half live, a quarter catch-up and a quarter highlights. Every programme slot was up by 50 percent on the average of the previous year. Jay Hunt said, “Rio improved our 2017 audience share by 0.11 percent, helpful, but not game-changing.”

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The big winner was The Last Leg, which grew its audience to a 1.9 million average, an 8.5  percent share, peaking at 2.3 million, a 68  percent rise on its 2012 debut. It was immediately awarded an extended Friday run after Gogglebox, and became a key entertainment programme from that point. It was doubled to forty episodes in typical 4 overkill, almost running year round. The event was the largest Channel 4 overseas broadcast in its history to date in very difficult circumstances. Assisted by a new broom at the top of the Olympic Broadcasting Services team, it battled successfully to provide live and edited programmes. Havard said: “We worked very hard with the IPC to make sure it was Channel 4-friendly. The audiences were down, but not as much down as for the Olympics. We used the Lexi system, but in 3D and voiced by Julie Walters.” It also learnt from 2012 and worked very closely with the advertising sales side: over the 700 hours of broadcasts Channel 4 did not drop a single commercial. “The opening ceremony is very difficult. In 2016 we spent a lot of time looking at schedules, rehearsing, to make sure the timings were right. People don’t understand how unbelievably complicated it is,” reflected Havard. The overall impact was to drive home a message to other broadcasters around the world that they were missing out. The Paralympics had enhanced Channel 4 and it had cemented the chance to make a splashy statement with one of the rare international events it owned. Afterwards Channel 4 held its customary “wash up”. The considered view was that the challenge of doing it on foreign soil was considerable. The audience had reacted well to the mixed economy of entertainment and sport. The question was how to dial the formula up further, perhaps with additions such as a jockey cam attached to an athlete. Overall, so far so good. Then they knuckled down to preparing for Tokyo in 2020, and negotiations for a further four-year extension to the 2024 Paris Paralympics. At the 2017 World Para Athletics Championship held at the London Queen Elizabeth Olympics Arena on 14–23 July ratings hovered between a 3-and 4.5 percent audience share. It was mostly live, a key part of Channel 4’s Summer of Sport, and it had a prominent sponsor, Müller Corner yoghurts. But with a backdrop of half-empty stadium seating in the first few days, there were prompts to the public to come and spectate, “you can still get tickets on the door”. This harked back to the days before the London Paralympics, when no more than 40 percent of seats were expected to be sold. The crowds did start turning up with the prompts and attendances exceeded 20,000 for the final weekend, with more than 305,000 tickets sold overall, more than the amount sold for eight previous Championships combined. Team GB came third in the medal tables, with Jonnie Peacock, Aled Davies, Hannah Cockcroft and Sophie Hahn winning golds. Clare Balding was occupied elsewhere, presenting Channel 4’s Women’s Euro football tournament, poached from the BBC,

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which bounced the Paras off to More4 on one night, and won up to three times more viewers at 1.5 million. It was clear Paralympic sport was still on a journey, observed Baroness (Tanni) Grey-Thompson, a Paralympic wheelchair racing champion, recently appointed BBC board member. The system of classification still needed improvement. Holmes said that the winter games and international games which ran in between still needed to be cracked. There were hopes that London might host the World Para Athletics Championship again in 2019 and 2021 but Dubai took it on after a combination of scheduled football matches by tenant West Ham and events at the London stadium and funding issues. Rio 2016 was a challenge, expensive because of the location, and because the big events took place outside of prime time. Tokyo, delayed until 2021 due to the pandemic, presented a similar problem, but the next venue, Paris, should be easier.. Yet, in the words of Cardinal Newman, virtue is its own reward. It does not necessarily ensure profitability. On the other – more worldly – hand, the Paralympics boosted Channel 4’s standing in political and opinion-forming circles, very useful as privatisation reared its head in 2015. Arguably it was a world-class sporting event, alongside the Olympics and Football World Cup, which the broadcaster had helped into the mainstream. Jay Hunt, in a final farewell interview at the Edinburgh International Festival, cited as the key thrill of her reign observing a mother and her disabled son who had decided to attend the 2017 London championship to cheer on athlete Jonnie Peacock, who was by now a household name.

Notes 1 The title stirred controversy during the sixth series in 2017, after criticism at the British Medical Association conference in 2015. 2 Alison Walsh interview, 31 May 2017. 3 Ade Adepitan interview, 6 June 2017. 4 Chris Holmes interview, June 2018. 5 Out of the Shadows into the Light? The Broadcasting Legacy of the 2012 Paralympics for Channel 4. 6 Mike Wilmot interview, 13 June 2017. 7 “Mental 4 the Paralympics”. Marketing document 2011.

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orse racing first cantered onto Channel 4 in 1984, performing a useful function as a filler for some midweek afternoons. It expanded into Saturdays in 1985, as ITV ditched it. By 2010 Channel 4 ran racing on eighty days a year, delivering male viewers to advertisers and cash to Channel 4’s coffers from betting companies. In 2007, when the 2005 Gambling Act came into force, bookmakers were allowed to advertise on TV for the first time, transforming the economics of broadcast racing – which also contributed handily to increasing the quota of regionally-made programmes the channel was required to screen. From the 1980s it had built up its array of specialists ranging from a flamboyant showman, John McCririck, who over 29 years played an eccentric, colourful but increasingly dated role, to the authoritative Nick Luck, the main presenter of The Morning Line – the preview of the day’s main races, broadcast on Saturday mornings. Yet although it had acquired the rights to the racecourses that accommodated most of the year’s important fixtures – such as Cheltenham, Goodwood, Chester, York and Newmarket – the glittering prizes of Royal Ascot, the Grand National, the Derby, plus British Champions Day from Ascot, remained for some years with the BBC. Gradually, though, the corporation was staging a retreat from a variety of sports, due to a squeeze on its income. “We were frustrated that we didn’t have the crown jewels and it felt like we were carrying the rest, almost being a bit of a marketing arm for racing and the BBC,” noted Martin Baker, 4’s commercial director. “So when the next renewal came round in 2012 the head of sport, Jamie Aitchison, talked to me and we agreed to go to racing and say that if they put everything in one place, all year round, they would do better.” Relations were cordial. Channel 4 had attracted nearly 5 million extra viewers to racing from its domestic TV coverage (42.2 million in 2011 compared with 37.4 million in 2010), while attendances at racecourses had grown to a record 6.15 million in 2011 according to the Jockey Club. Another handy piece of timing was that Channel 4’s director of programming, Kevin Lygo, no fan of racing, left for ITV in May 2010. So Baker and Aitchison went to successor David Abraham and

said they thought there was an opportunity to take the whole thing. Abraham was non-committal but when Jay Hunt arrived in 2011 she said the BBC would never allow the Grand National to be lost, adding: “I’ll eat my own hair if you are able to do that.”1 (When she learned that the deal had been done, she responded: “Would you like to pass me the salt and pepper?”). Negotiations were headed by the Racecourse Media Group, alongside the Jockey Club, Ascot Racecourse and British Champions Series, which ran thirty-five premier flat races a year. They bought the line that racing would be easier to follow in one place. The decision to refresh the coverage to interest a younger, hipper audience – while holding on to loyalists – led to a shake-up and a hotly-contested tender process for the initial four-year period of the rights, from 2013 to the end of 2016. Five suppliers competed. Four of them had experience of racing, including the long-standing incumbent, Highflier; the fifth, IMG Sports Media, did not. IMG had already been contracted by Channel 4 to co-produce the Paralympics, and Graham Fry, its managing director of sports production worldwide, had struck up a good working relationship with Jay Hunt. He decided to plunge in. IMG spent nearly £100,000 on its effort and pitch. “We did all sorts of things, including a thirty-second clip of Frankel that cost £5,000,” said Fry. “We put in a really nice hardback document. We did a questionnaire of 700 people, a cross-section of racing viewers and people on the trains going to Royal Ascot, asking what they liked and disliked about Channel 4 Racing.” An IMG team sat outside Royal Ascot two days before the pitch, asking questions. Fry even suggested buying a racehorse, to be owned by the viewing public and filmed through training up to its first race. “I went up to Weatherbys [the company that administers horse racing] and one of the films we showed at the pitch was me going there to register the name of the horse. But they decided it was a step too far.” Still, the contract went to IMG Sports Media, beating off Highflier and prominent sports specialists such as Sunset+Vine. The popular presenter Clare Balding, whose father and brother were successful racehorse trainers, was engaged to front the coverage and a senior BBC sports editor, Carl Hicks, who had also been involved in the London Olympics, was brought on to the team. The extent of the challenge faced by IMG innocents swiftly became clear. Fry said: “One thing we found out was the relentless nature of racing coverage, the amount of work on the contract. We did not lose money but we did not make as much as we would have liked. Racing is super-demanding, fifty-two weeks a year. We had hardly got the contract when we had calls from Goodwood, York, Newmarket, asking when we were going to see them. When is the first meeting to discuss the Grand National? When are we going to talk about Royal Ascot? We were pulled from pillar to post by the racecourses. We had to hire two more people to help with the admin side.” Then Highflier, run by John Fairley, a former Yorkshire TV director of programmes, proved to be bad losers – understandably, because they were facing

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wipe-out. Said Baker: “We ran in my view a rigidly fair tender process, but Highflier objected by using all available means open to them, though no legal proceedings were actually instituted.” They complained because Baker had worked for IMG before joining Channel 4 and because a key stakeholder, Racecourse Management Group (RMG), was run by Richard Fitzgerald, who had also worked for IMG. Highflier alleged collusion between IMG, RMG and Martin Baker. Their protest involved writing to all Channel 4’s non-executive directors to complain that the process was an inside job. Baker stood back and Anne Bulford, deputy chief executive, carried out an investigation. John McCririck was also bitter. He was on holiday in Las Vegas when Aitchison phoned to tell him that his £90,000-a-year contract was not being renewed. On the day IMG took over, full-time staff were transferred to IMG but that did not cover presenters with contracts. McCririck, who was 72, accused IMG and Channel 4 of ageism and took them to the Central London Employment Tribunal. The hearing started on 30 September 2013. IMG’s research had shown a lot of viewers did not like McCririck, with his trademark deerstalker hat, muttonchop sideburns and gold jewellery. According to Channel 4 he was seen as unappealing and irritating. Some of those involved thought he should have been asked to moderate his performances at an earlier stage. Instead, he had lost credibility as a serious sports presenter with ill-judged appearances in Wife Swap and Celebrity Big Brother. Fry, in a witness statement, said he found McCririck’s stints on reality shows disgusting and shocking. He insisted that age was never a factor in the decision not to renew his contract. 2 McCririck could have left gracefully, accepting he’d come to the end of an era. Instead he claimed a £3 million age discrimination pay-off, remortgaging his house to pay for his barrister, and providing plenty of bombastic quotes for the newspapers. On the opening day of the tribunal he defended his on-screen persona as a “pantomime villain” act. He described his humour as “a very public school thing, a bit immature, but it lightens up the programme”. The loss of his job had left him depressed, condemned to watching daytime television. The affair took nine months to play out in 2013. It was an expensive piece of litigation, with high-maintenance lawyers involved. Whether it distracted the new team from introducing innovations in the first year of the new contract is debatable, but it surely did not help. In fighting the case – which he eventually lost – McCririck reminded the tribunal that Jay Hunt had form when it came to ageism claims. Just before she joined C4 she was involved in the high-profile industrial tribunal with the Countryfile presenter Miriam O’Reilly, who won a £110,000 case against the BBC. McCririck used that to accuse Hunt of being a “serial age discrimination offender”, throwing in the removal of Moira Stuart, the newsreader, and the Strictly Come Dancing judge Arlene Phillips for good measure. “Lowering the age of presenters is endemic in Channel 4,” he asserted.

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Hunt insisted she had learned lessons from the O’Reilly case and had apologised personally to the broadcaster. There was a problem with this, though, because O’Reilly stated precisely the opposite and took to Twitter to declare: “Channel 4 boss Jay Hunt destroyed my career. Now she tells the McCririck tribunal she learned from the case and apologised – not true.” Hunt had spoken in July 2011 about learning lessons from the case in a newspaper interview: “You can’t live through something like that without it causing you to think very deeply about the role you play … I am very mindful now that decisions you make have a very deep impact on people’s lives. I absolutely regret it, the distress I caused Miriam.”3 The McCririck tribunal said her evidence that she had made a personal apology was “disingenuous”. There was better news on the commercial side, where 4’s sales director Jonathan Allan added a fresh dimension to sports and gambling advertising by introducing the first real-time auction for the prime commercial slots coveted by bookmakers. This was their first opportunity to place TV commercials in a national “listed event” race such as the Grand National, until then shown on BBC1. The auction took place on 3 October 2012. Allan, who had studied auction theory at university, instituted a two-stage process, for five packages of airtime minutage in eighty-seven races for the year. Channel 4 set a reserve price, which was not revealed. The first round took place between 9 and 10 am. After feedback between 11.30 and 12.30, the second bids, increased in multiples of £10,000, were put in between 2 and 3 pm, overseen by an independent adjudicator. One media agency missed the deadline by two minutes and had to be excluded, despite pleading to be let back in. The most coveted packages A & B, for the most prominent places, were won by William Hill and Ladbrokes, with Betfair and Paddy Power left out in the cold. The auction was reported to have netted around £6 million. “We did the racing auction every year after that,” said Allan, “with nine advertising packages offered in 2014. We probably got twice as much return on it than the business case had suggested. It was acash buy unrelated to daytime advertising deals. The return on investment was massive; it surpassed our expectations.” The auctions raised around £30 million over this £20 million racing contract. The procedure was later adapted for BT Sport, which became a client of the Channel 4 sales house now named Sonar. A key aspect of IMG’s pitch had been to broaden the audience – easier said than done. In the Daily Telegraph Jonathan Liew, summing up their first year, noted that “there is no available evidence the audience tuning in is any younger than it used to be”. Nonetheless his view was largely favourable: “Channel 4’s first year in sole possession of the nation’s racing rights has seen modest but tectonic change – with its swanky Dubai adverts, frequent references to prize money on offer and Nick Luck presenting The Morning Line in jeans, there is very much a New Racing feel to the coverage now … Yet there is only so much shiny tinsel you can add to a race meeting. It is, if we are going to be honest, a sport which has only one genuine

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variable. How fast do you think the horse will run? It is not a sport crying out for tactical innovation, demystification or jazzy repackaging. Channel 4 has largely recognised the truth: it is what it is.” The channel excelled itself on the marketing, with an eye-catching promo for the Grand National showing horses racing and jumping over urban ground. Around the race itself they ran Alan Carr’s Chatty Man, Saturday Kitchen at the Grand National, a film – How To Win the Grand National – ending with the low-budget feature film, Dark Horse, a true story about villagers in the valleys of South Wales clubbing together to buy a horse which went on to win the Welsh Grand National. Fry said: “If I had a gripe with C4, it was that they wanted innovation – and it costs. But they were outstanding in their commitment to us and put their hands in their pocket when we had a good idea.” Among those costly innovations were a camera attached to one of the jockeys and radio frequency high motion cameras used in replays, which could be moved anywhere. Stewards’ inquiries into possibly suspect tactics by winning jockeys were shown live for the first time. Yet it all came to an end for Channel 4 in January 2016. The racing authorities decided it was time for a change. Said Martin Baker: “I think we did a good job and it was very disappointing that we weren’t able to hold onto it. I felt that there are so many stakeholders in racing, it was a very difficult process to run. I will always feel that we didn’t in the end get a fair crack at it, because some voices around that table decided that they wanted a change… . They said they were a bit unhappy about the audience ratings.” The channel increased its original bid of £20 million to £26 million and indicated that this wasn’t necessarily the final offer – but they were given no chance to increase it because racing’s powers-that-be declined the chance of a last-ditch meeting with David Abraham. They had already decided that they wanted to switch to ITV. On 1 January 2016 it was announced that ITV would have exclusive free-to-air rights to racing from 1 January 2017 for four years. The reason was ratings had dipped for most of the big meetings that used to be shown on the BBC. The racing industry wanted big audiences for the crown jewel events but the transfer of these races from the BBC to Channel 4 was bound to result in reduced audiences because it had a lower reach. The Derby used to get 3 million viewers, but it was down to 1.8 million on Channel 4, while the Grand National was down by 2 million. Under the new deal, a minimum of forty days of racing would be on the main ITV channel, with a further sixty days live on ITV4, the digital channel aimed at men. ITV Sport would produce the coverage in-house, rather than using independent producers. Baker said: “I don’t believe ITV paid materially more than us. I don’t think they [the racing industry] realised that ITV4 is much smaller than Channel 4.” So there were better audiences for racing on ITV1 but smaller ones on ITV4. As a result, in 2017, ITV’s first year, racing coverage reached 2 million fewer viewers than on Channel 4 the previous year.

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Fry said: “I think they naively thought they would be back to the old days on ITV. They had not taken on board the fact television has moved on. The nature of TV viewing has changed. I do the snooker for the BBC. We used to get fantastic ratings in the afternoons, 2.5–2.6 million five years ago: now they are really pleased with 1 million. We walked into this with our eyes open but they needed to be even wider open. Racing is a sport in which it is impossible to please everyone. So many interests – owners, trainers, the Jockey Club, Race Course Association, individual racecourses, the bookies – they all had a totally different perspective. We went to the racecourses saying we want to make this better, that there had been too much betting in the coverage. But the bookies wanted more betting. “There were huge rivalries between racecourses. York would note it didn’t have such and such a camera [which other courses had]. There was an issue over Gok Wan, the fashion expert. He was at Royal Ascot and wanted to do Goodwood, but Ascot wanted him exclusive. We had so many calls: racing was 3–4 percent of what we did but I was on it almost full time for three months. Then there was the difficulty of the racing year. What sports event do you go into where the big things are at the beginning of the year, not the end like the FA Cup Final and the Premier League? We had the Cheltenham Festival two-and-a-half months into the contract in the first year, the Grand National three months, Derby June 1st, Royal Ascot end June – and by then the big racing events Channel 4 had got from the BBC had all gone.” The story of racing shows how contracts can be lost or won at lightning speed. Loyalty is seldom a factor. Channel 4 had screened Test Match cricket played in England between 1995 and 2005 introducing new technology including the snickometer and Hawkeye, until the cost led to a retreat. In the case of racing it illustrates how larger broadcasters can swoop on a smaller operator once it has demonstrated the potential for innovation, improving the production values and spotting the lucrative growth in advertising flowing from deregulation. Channel 4 would shortly experience the same sense of disappointment with Formula 1, where a persuasive trio of Abraham, Hunt and Baker directly negotiated with owner Bernie Ecclestone a fruitful three-year shared deal with Sky Sports for a proportion of live races plus a highlights package, as a direct replacement for the audience lost by horse racing. Though it was never as lucrative as the betting-driven horse racing, this was a good fix, and there was commercial dismay when it had to face losing them and their upmarket male viewers at the end of 2018, when Formula 1 changed ownership and Sky Sports went for exclusivity. Formula 1, said Ed Havard, the executive overseeing live events, “had been electrifying for the channel, it performs so well across important periods of the year,” lifting share, often on weekend Sunday afternoons thanks to the different time zones, for as long as five hours at a stretch, with audiences as high as 4 million beating all other channels, while boosting the inheritance into other later slots. And while horse racing was watched by older downmarket men, motor racing

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Alex Mahon (Richard Ansett/Channel 4)

is watched by upmarket men with busy lives, so the profile is different and very attractive to advertisers and sponsors. “There is a very strong commercial case for it,” said Havard. With Britain’s Lewis Hamilton riding high, Britain was going through a golden period. The Channel 4 growth fund had invested in the new production company called Whisper set up to provide the coverage, and with David Coulthard, Suzie Woolf and Mark Webber they were assured of good access to the drivers. Then, in September 2018 Channel 4’s new regime, with Martin Baker in place and Alex Mahon the new chief executive, won a reprieve, and renewed the access, as part of an eye-catching new era collaboration deal with Sky. Mahon had run the production company Shine owned by Sky. In the deal Sky shared some of Channel 4’s original drama, headed by the third series of No Offence, the lively black-humoured policing series, and foreign-language box sets from Walter Presents. In the 2019 Cricket World Cup Sky shared with Channel 4 highlights of the cricket and the live free-to-air final won by England. The channel always needs to hunt down sports rights, partly to boost its appeal to young men, and in 2018 began dipping its toe into international rugby union. But it was clear that the battle for live sports rights was over. “The issue now is broadening reach,” said Baker. Free-to-air highlights were looked at askance for thirty years. Now Channel 4 was keen to facilitate them. Sharing by offering universal access to a broader audience was the new normal.

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The postscript is that there was a farewell-to-horse racing party at Horseferry Road in January 2017. Jay Hunt said thank you and wrote morale-boosting notes to the losing team. Baker said: “Racing had been part of Channel 4 for 32 years. We did love the sport, we did make money out of it, but not all the time. We invested a lot in production but in that final year, 2016, we did make money. It’s a footnote in our history: we always did it, then we got all of it, and then we lost all of it.”

Notes 1 Martin Baker interview, 7 June 2018. 2 Graham Fry interview, June 2017. 3 Jay Hunt interview with Maggie Brown, Media Guardian, 18 July 2011.

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15 HOW 4 OD BECAME SMART

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y 2010 the 4oD service was well established in the minds of users as the access point for Channel 4’s catch-up and classic archive programmes. By 2011 it was serving up 380 million programme views a year and contributing a handy £24 million in advertising revenue. The challenge was to refashion the service to provide live television and to persuade people to register their personal details so that they could be targeted more accurately by advertising, then tempted to watch more. A critical factor, though, is that people who watch programmes on devices with small screens – which All4 especially catered for at this point – are less tolerant of commercials than when watching on TV sets. All the same, it was argued, if people saw ads that matched their interests, and it could be proved that some went on to buy the product, Channel 4 might even be able to charge a higher price. The project was sensitive because, at a time of accelerating change, enforced registration – sign up to get free access – was thought to drive irritated users away unless they valued the service highly enough to go through the rigmarole. If 15 percent of users opted out, Channel 4 calculated, the case for charging an advertising premium disappeared. So began a long and troubled journey towards launching a robust registration system. The traditional television model is based on one channel broadcasting the same thing to as many viewers as possible. By contrast the new challengers, the digital giants – YouTube and Facebook, with Amazon, Netflix and Apple at this point in the wings – were evolving with personalised delivery driven by algorithms and, if advertising-funded, with targeted messages. So while it was clear that Channel 4 could benefit from adapting its model, would enough viewers be persuaded to register? (The BBC1 iPlayer did not require registration until 2017.) Some programme commissioners were suspicious of the concept. One of the big changes in 2011 was that Jay Hunt was given control over all programme content areas and set about ending online’s stand-alone status, integrating its operations into her channel management team. Channel 4 had to maintain its public service patina: one of trust, albeit it with a commercial overlay. David Abraham

wanted to create a more direct, even emotional contract with viewers, allowing the channel to tap into their aspirations as social media was doing, but with a distinct Channel 4 style. On the plus side younger people – Channel 4’s main target – had become accustomed to blithely offering up data on themselves. The challenge to the broadcaster seemed to loom larger from social media than from subscription video services tapping users around the globe at this point. Abraham had won the role of chief executive partly because of his knowledge of the advertising market, now developing nicely after the recession; but he regarded his sales force and their approach as out of date. “It was absolutely clear David wanted to collect, crunch, analyse and drive Channel 4 using data,” said Bob Harris, chief technology officer.1 “From day one he asked for levels of data we just did not have, which Andy Duncan never asked for: more and more insights and reports.” As a result, the in-house expert providing breakdowns of the TV schedule performance felt overstretched and left. In May 2011 Abraham declared: “Data is the new oil, or soil, of television.” In a speech introducing himself to members of the Royal Television Society, he warned that unless public service broadcasters acted they risked being “enveloped” by social networks. The use of the word “enveloped” was interesting, implying restriction, containment, but not necessarily an out-and-out threat. He said that while traditional TV advertising and the pricing mechanism (of setting a cost per thousand of viewers) would remain the “core trading currency”, Channel 4 was also working on major innovations that would provide additional and complementary data about audiences, strengthening its long-term position in the market. He also argued that a forthcoming Ofcom review of airtime trading should consider the issue of who controlled and had access to audience data – a dig at Sky’s huge customer database that it would not share, and the cable TV networks that had their own feedback. Knowledge was commercial power.2 Channel 4 already had a competent business intelligence side, reporting data about who was visiting 4oD and what they liked watching. It collected information about what had been requested and played by viewers, for the practical reason that it had to reimburse the owners of programme rights based on clicks. It also had an experienced economic strategist in Keith Underwood, who had joined in 2009: but it was now greedy for more information which it could ultimately monetise. Bob Harris, in an article in Computer Weekly, revealed: “The call from David was to optimise content [programming, advertising] delivered to them [the viewers] and at the same time maintain and improve revenue. It could be as simple as allowing viewers to resume a programme where they had left off, no matter the device, or offering a viewer a menu of programmes likely to be of interest based on previous choices. But to make the vision of a data-led broadcaster a reality, it needed a fresh approach to information technology.” 3 Two experienced people played and then took over critical roles in drilling for the elusive “oil”. They were Sanjeevan Bala, a data scientist, and Gill Whitehead,

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who had joined in 2008 from BBC Worldwide, where she had been in charge of Worldwide’s version of iPlayer. One of Andy Duncan’s smartest hires, she combined a first-class analytical brain with an entrepreneurial work ethic formed by her upbringing in a Midlands family manufacturing business. She was admired by all who worked with her and was eventually poached by Google. Her first task when Abraham arrived would be to lead the (failed) attempt to buy Channel 5. In January 2011 she was redeployed on this next front line, in a newly-created role – director of audience, technology and insight, reporting directly to Abraham. “David arrived very prepared and very clear that he wanted to focus on creating a strong team, drive creative renewal, deliver a world class advertising sales function and put data at the heart of the broadcaster,” she recalled. “But we had a gap.”4 The gap was that there was no data department at Channel 4 capturing information; so consultants were hired. During 2010 Boston Consulting Group was contracted to look at the advertising market while Frontier Economics, experts in behavioural economics who had advised on the Tesco reward card, were asked to help devise a policy on viewer relationships. A third consultancy, Oliver & Ohlbaum, advised on shifting viewing patterns. The person to whom it fell to execute this was Bala, hired to head a data planning and analytics unit. His brief was to define the strategy, map the vision, build the capability and lead the team of data scientists as they hunted down ways to exploit the insights to Channel 4’s financial benefit. Prior to joining he had studied management and computer science at King’s College London and was a PricewaterhouseCooper consultant on projects at eBay, Paypal and Sky. “Channel 4 was a greenfield site, incredibly exciting and exhilarating,” he observed. “They didn’t have a data scientist or analyst, there was no notion of who the end user was. We would get BARB (audience ratings) reports, but that’s a mass collection system: it didn’t know it was you who was watching. There were so many things Channel 4 did not know.”5 His most recent project before joining had been to help Sky reach its target of 10 million subscribers by 2010 through using data to figure out the most promising front doors for sales teams to knock on. Once installed in every credit-checked subscriber’s home, the Sky box provided information about them. Thus Sky was way ahead of other broadcasters in understanding viewing behaviour and feeding the data into an interactive Adsmart system. But it was a business dependent on subscriptions and pay-per-view, focused on retaining customers and cutting churn rates, with lots of small niche channels whose audiences often showed up as zero on BARB. The smaller free-to-air Channel 4 lived and died in the advertising market, which rose from 85 percent to 95 percent of its income through the decade. This was a major factor in all decisions. It also meant that the channel threw itself behind a programme to modernise the BARB’s measurement system through Project Dovetail, to capture and include laptop viewing and connected television programme requests.

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Bala worked with Harris who, after joining in 1999 from Marks & Spencer, had made an impact with the first live streaming of Big Brother. Harris knew Channel 4’s IT systems were not powerful enough to deal with the multiplication in the volume of data to be processed to achieve Abraham’s goal. Big data, the term used, is a collection of data sets so large and complex that they are difficult to process comfortably – but that is what needs to happen if the treasure trove is to be used for fresh insights. “We are sifting for pearls,” Harris observed: as opposed to just hoping to strike lucky. In 2010 Channel 4 warehoused one terabyte of audience data. By 2013 this had jumped to twenty terabytes after its data scientists got to work. Storage costs plummeted and data storage would continue to soar exponentially. The long-term aim was to move from analysing what people had watched, after the event, to serving up what they might like to watch now; shrinking the reaction from weeks, to days, to hours – to split-seconds eventually, in what was called real-time prediction. Harris compared it to looking in the rear-view mirror, spotting what is coming from behind rather than chasing the vehicle that has overtaken you. For example, if someone liked comedy, the theory was that data could be used to spot a way of working with their tastes and serve up offers of, say, satirical comedy through the online site, in the expectation they would be tempted to spend more time with the Channel 4 family. The advertisements placed in programmes on demand would also evolve: by 2016 not only were they different from those in broadcast channels, they were usually shorter, as were the breaks. The aim was to deploy insights from crunching data to target segments of the audience, then eventually move on to exploit, through automatic content recognition, the brief moment, the split-second between the viewer’s demand for a programme and its delivery, to screen ads matched to that viewer.

How They Did It Back in 2010 Channel 4, guided by Harris, chose to go for open source software tools and then Amazon Elastic Map Reduce cloud service, which was trialled in 2012 and could be adapted to interrogate data from the existing desktop computers at Horseferry Road, in which it had invested heavily. By using the new open source technology and an existing relationship with Amazon, it also saved millions of pounds, although in the longer term this penny-pinching approach was questioned. An Amazon team from Silicon Valley went to Horseferry Road to train 4’s IT teams in the system, because engaging staff experts was thought too costly. This was risky: if you design your own system and then have a problem there are no support helplines, it is DIY time. “We have had a few troughs of disillusionment when we could not make this stuff work,” admitted Harris in 2015. Building the system and recruiting experts cost £10 million. The payback time was three years.

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Bala had the foresight to set up a scheme of annually funding six university students in data science courses at University College London, through master’s degrees and doctorates. Channel 4 was granted access to their research, and it could recruit from the graduates and ensure a flow of experts who understood the channel’s needs. When the new sales director Jonathan Allan came on board in September 2011, one of the first things he did was restructure the advertising sales teams, so they were now focused on media-buying agencies. This meant they would in future sell advertising on the broadcast channels and the separate digital side together. “That was a big win for us,” said Bala. The results were announced at the 2012 Autumn Ad Sales Upfronts – the champagne-fuelled annual event for media buyers hosted by Allan and his sales team – with the promise of targeting the 16–34 age group in 2013. The registration system was in place in June 2012, after the first trials with advertisers. Viewers were asked to enter their name, date of birth, gender and email address. The postcode was an optional extra in the early days. Channel 4 was cautiously shifting towards compulsory registration but took it slowly, step by step. It also set up its own 8,000-strong panel of viewers, named Core4. (The BBC by comparison had a panel of 25,000 by 2017.) Between 2012 and 2016 registrations rose from 6.3 million individuals, and 450 million video-on-demand views, to 14.9 million registrations and 620 million views. By 2016 half of those registered were in the 16–34 age group, the commercially valuable demographic. It was essentially a service aimed at and used by youngish adults, watching the shows they liked best, and it needed to keep growing to outpace the loss of those viewers from its broadcast channels. Hollyoaks was a top request. There was a single connecting theme in the years ahead. Those driving the online service were constantly experimenting, embarking on abrupt changes in tactics and searching for effectiveness as 4oD morphed from a catch-up and streaming service into what was designed to become an integrated All4 platform by March 2015. One of the most sensitive dilemmas was deciding at what point people should be made to sign up – when they start a live programme, or when they ask for a classic archived programme? The decision was to first make registration compulsory for catch-up. And how do you execute the notion of loyalty and reward to drive behavioural change in a television environment … a club card, a dongle, a points system? In the end they backed off from a Nectar-style approach and settled for simplicity. Users had to register in exchange for benefits closely associated with Channel 4, led by free access to programmes, some premières, recommendations and exclusive programmes. For the most sought-after viewers there might be treats: invitations to join the audience for live events and recordings. In the event there was an initial drop in requests because of the process of registration. Up to 10 percent had been deemed acceptable, but it soon settled into single figures. The advertising rate though was the same for any programme.

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“A view is a view is a view” said Sarah Rose, the executive who had launched 4oD back in 2006, now driving the project commercially. “We have broken down any prejudice between live and a repeat.” 6 Harris explained in 2013 that there was a caveat: “The starting point was more philosophical than commercial for Channel 4. It was an organisation owned by the public, so we should have a more direct relationship with the public, one to one, or with interest groups, as well as one broadcaster to many. It wasn’t necessarily conceived as a route to cement our advertiser relationships.” But the commercial heart of Channel 4 was bound to take priority in most respects. This distinction, seized on by the marketing department, led to the Viewer Promise, Channel 4’s pact with the audience, based on being open about the data it was seeking and what they would do with it, as well as enabling the viewer to opt out or delete their account easily. It included a pledge not to sell data to other parties, though insights were shared with advertisers from the start: that was its commercial purpose. In retrospect it seemed ultra-cautious, and some believe that those in charge could have been more ambitious, in both sweating the data and recognising more quickly that Netflix was tapping into an appetite for box sets, controlled by the viewer. But the tougher rules demanded over the use of personal data, motivated by growing distrust, vindicated the lower-key approach and arguably placed Channel 4 in a relatively advantageous position when the European General Data Protection Regulation, devised by the European Commission, was introduced in May 2018, though it still absorbed a lot of expertise. Alan Carr, the Chatty Man host of sixteen series and Channel 4’s closest thing to a court jester, was brought in to front a short explanatory film, still in use in 2017 – though Carr’s exclusive contract was ended. As the data strategy evolved, the “Alan Carr test” became a guiding principle. “If he couldn’t explain what we were doing we would hold off from doing it,” said Rose. This was picked up in 2015 in an article in Harvard Business Review, headed “Using Humour to Teach about Data Privacy”, which recognised Abraham’s prescience in putting Channel 4 ahead of the market. “Britain’s Channel 4 does an excellent job in educating its viewers about its data collection and privacy policy. Comedian Alan Carr summarises the policy in a short entertaining video as he deadpans: ‘We’ll ask for your name, email and a few other details. I know what you’re thinking – why should you give us your name and inside leg measurement?’” Of the 11 million who had registered at that point, 80 percent had volunteered their address and fewer than 0.01 percent opted out of targeted advertising.7 These were heady days. From 2011 onwards the one-step-at-a-time roll-out had spread across twenty-six platforms – tablets, smartphones, smart TVs, streaming devices and games consoles, as well as the Sky and Virgin networks. The rapid acceleration, the spikes in people joining and surges in popularity, were gratifying for its creators. Being able to use the programme breaks on the TV channels to publicise online was a huge advantage. Said Bala: “We used television to encourage

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registrations. The marketing people would say go online now to get some extras – or we would use competitions, and this would result in huge numbers coming to the site, 100,000 a day, spikes of 200,000 and 300,000.” Registration management was outsourced to a security specialist called Janrain. “The last thing I wanted to read on the front page of the Daily Mail was that we had been hacked,” said Harris. Meanwhile he was beating a gradual retreat from the demand for “second screen” applications which were supposed to deepen the viewers’ involvement while they watched a TV programme and voted or played along. Real-time interaction, games, tweets and online portals were expensive to operate with little commercial return, and after a while the penny dropped: they distracted viewers from the big screen. Jay Hunt pointed out that when she arrived Channel 4 was winning a near clean sweep at digital awards ceremonies, but for innovations that often reached tiny audiences. Programmes that promoted them – including The Million Pound Drop and The Vault – were seen as the harbinger of changes in entertainment a few years earlier but were now retired. The once hugely popular Embarrassing Bodies, with its offer of a live diagnosis, was killed off in 2015 by a TV disease called overuse of a hit. Perhaps the zenith of this fad was The Singer Takes It All, a talent game show hosted by Carr in 2014. Contestants performed on a moving stage, a travelator, that could be manipulated by viewers using a special app, steering a contestant towards a Gold Zone for winners or back out and off the stage. It was a folly but a wonderful one-off.

Name Change to All4 In September 2014 Abraham announced that the name 4oD would be scrapped and replaced with All4, as the improved online hub and aggregator of services, allowing live streaming of 4’s TV channels alongside catch-up and bespoke programmes, clips of new shows and promos, primarily to exploit viewing on tablets and mobiles. If it had to change it might have been wiser to call it 4All. This came into effect on 31 March 2015, when users were asked to start signing up for all programmes, not just archive. In January 2016 the sign-on became compulsory: Rose believed, in retrospect, they could have enforced this sooner. As an essential part of the moves, Martin Baker’s commercial team had been in tense negotiations with PACT. The switch was accompanied by a change in programme rights agreements stemming from 2012 with producers and suppliers, to a direct relationship of pence paid per click, with a free week during transmission followed by a second week on catch-up. In 2014 the BBC iPlayer started to extend the time programmes were available from seven days after first transmission to thirty days. This coincided with another milestone in viewing habits, when downloading and streaming pro-

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grammes overtook the silvery DVD. In mid-2016 Richard Davidson-Houston, who had taken control of All4’s editorial the previous year, said publicly that All4 had tipped from being mainly about catch-up to becoming a destination in its own right, and its future lay in becoming a well-used platform. Demand for catch-up was falling. “The reason was that all the things driving catch-up were slowing down: everyone’s linear channels were seeing audience declines. So you can’t expect to be growing.” In his refashioning he took money that had been invested in what he saw as “weird and wonderful” online 4oD/All4 projects and apps and refocused it on short, bespoke programmes. Only the pre-existing comedy “blaps”, which were open pilots used to test new talent, carried on unchanged. The standard order was for series consisting of six five-minute programmes. The £4–5 million pounds freed up was spent on 120 of these series, mostly documentaries, including predictably popular LA Vice, a seedy side of Californian life, Disabled Fight Club – people with disabilities engaged in bare knuckle/cage fighting – and a few staples such as Dom Joly’s Trigger Happy TV, sponsored by British Gas. A good proportion of the short programmes were backed by advertisers. The reason this sort of original material was commissioned in this quantity was that Davidson-Houston wanted to prime the pump to encourage more advertisers to fund branded short programmes. This was identified as a potentially lucrative new revenue stream. In the event it raised about £10 million a year – useful but not game-changing riches for a company sales force raking in close to £1 billion a year in advertising. The bespoke All4 programme budget was increased by a third in 2016 to £8 million compared with 2015, and Ralph Lee, deputy to Hunt, started to oversee the creative pitches. Some independent producers, tempted despite modest budgets to make original shorts, were bewildered by the swift U-turns executed by the online side and complained about an inconsistent approach, as commissioning objectives changed and finances once again grew tighter in 2017. Several were asked to make a short All4 programme as fast as possible, only to be stood down suddenly. At best all of this was a learning process. “The truth about commissioning shorts for All4,” declared Davidson-Houston, “is that, unless it is pretty odd – about fetishes, say – people don’t see it. It took us to places to be proud of and places to forget. They don’t really cut through. I looked at the difference they made and it was not a particularly great use of money. It ran for a year. It was so important to Channel 4 that All4 became big. Juxtaposing shorts, about a funny little hobby say, looks a bit odd next to dramas like The Handmaid’s Tale and Humans. They were infecting All4 to its detriment.” So it was all change again. In November 2016 All4 gained a redesigned home page, refreshed apps, a release of programmes on a theme and a multi-million pound investment in exclusives. Demand for catch-up programmes had fallen to 50 percent of requests and was about to go lower, with archived programmes and box sets pulling in 30 percent. It was becoming abundantly clear, too, that a grow-

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ing section of viewers wanted to watch series, especially drama, as a continuous experience, in the stylish manner introduced by Netflix. So in 2017 the policy was revised further to making bigger budget “mid-form” bespoke programmes, with each fifteen-minute episode costing around £50,000. Only Channel 4’s overall positioning remained constant: it was a contemporary broadcaster with edge. All4 could not just be a library – it required fresh programming.

Walter Arrives One of the more original developments to address this challenge was Walter Presents, a curated service of subtitled foreign-language dramas offered as box sets, spearheaded by Deutschland 83, a coming-of-age series about life in divided Berlin before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It built on the appetite for foreign drama (whose rights could be bought at very low prices) first whetted by BBC4 with Denmark’s The Killing but until then largely ignored. The concept was developed over twoand-a-half years by two sparky former Channel 4 commissioners, Walter Iuzzolino and Jo McGrath, joined by Jason Thorp from FoxTel. In that development time Iuzzolino watched around four thousand hours of foreign-language television, much of it languishing in archives, to select the gems for the new venture. The original intention was to call the service World Drama, offering box sets behind a modest paywall. The first business plan was based on people paying for foreign-language drama. The team had optioned programming but needed a funder and distributor, so it was logical to talk to Sky, BT and TalkTalk. With their close ties to Channel 4 they also talked it over with David Abraham’s top team and the idea grew that it could survive and function as an advertising-supported free video-on-demand service that people would stream after sitting through adverts. This was in line with Channel 4’s free public service access, and in 2015 the channel put a modest £1.7 million into the venture, called Global Services Network Ltd, effectively buying it with a majority holding. “They [Channel 4] decided to make it focussed on curation,” said Iuzzolino. “They analysed it and Jay called me and said it had to be personalised. It was a product born out of passion, and World Drama sounded corporate.” So it was named after the person who devised it. The Italian-born Walter Iuzzolino, with his lilting accent, became the screen face, personally making enthusiastic recommendations from an armchair – a technique famously pioneered in Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the long-running American mystery series screened by ITV in the late fifties and early sixties. Iuzzolino wrote and recorded an introduction to each “new” series, and Channel 4 tended to run the first episode at 10 pm on Sundays, with an 11 pm weekday slot for the darker stuff.

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So we do it in a retro way, almost back to the 1950s, very old-fashioned, me sitting in an armchair, but speaking to a very streamy audience. Walter Presents is an amphibious brand, like a frog. Our ultimate home is All4 but we jump onto Channel 4 or More4, then it all converges back to where the box sets are – phone, Google Chrome. All4 used to be a catch-up place but Channel 4 saw Walter Presents as a piece that could accelerate the move to online linear programming. What it has created is a marriage. It demonstrated at a time when Netflix, etc. were eating into scheduled TV that you could tie the two experiences together.

The idea at launch was a modest two shows a year. All4 changed that with the success of Deutschland 83. The first episode was broadcast on Channel 4 on the same Sunday as the BBC’s War and Peace, ITV’s Endeavour and Channel 5’s Celebrity Big Brother. It won 1.5m viewers that night and by the end nearly 4 million had caught up with it . A second experiment in April 2016 came with Locked Up, a Spanish prison series with sexy scenes, launched with the broadcast but at the same time as all episodes were released on the Walter Presents All4 platform. “Our biggest experiment to date,” Iuzzolino recalled. “It proved the marriage of linear and video-on-demand worked together.” Walter Presents has kept from year one the same drama sponsor, Lexus, attracted to a pure niche middle-aged audience, split roughly between men and women. (The founders are paid a percentage of the advertising income.) All4 signed up 150,000 Walter Presents fans in the first year, and by 2018 this had grown to 2  million, some of whom go on to discover other Channel 4 drama repeats, such as Indian Summers. The over-45s dominated registrations. It was a handy middle-aged counterweight to the early and continued adoption of All4 by younger people, broadening its appeal as Netflix had done in 2016 with The Crown. Half of the 21 million views in 2017 were for programmes that had been released for more than thirty days, suggesting people were actively searching for something interesting and different. It proved that older upmarket viewers will adopt technology if there is something they really want to watch and was an example of a vertical interest channel – vertical because fans will go deeper into an area that interests them. Data for logged-in views for the six months to September 2018 revealed that 53 percent were women, 47 percent men, 58 percent were over 55 and 32 percent 35–54. Only 9 percent were in the 16–34 age group. The founding trio attend international festivals, getting to know the writers and producers as well as the distributors, to find out what is coming up. “There wasn’t a market for much of this content,” said Iuzzolino. “No one bothered about an Israeli or a Polish or Brazilian show. We are championing the un-championed. Until 2017 Belgium was untouched; now it supplies big hits. Often distributors come to us. We are an echo chamber. We push a show, I create those introductions, then Channel 4 cuts a trailer with a twenty-second take. Channel 4 owns this: it is in their interest

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– bringing more people to All4 is their aim. Probably it is the best placed organisation in this country to respond with speed to this.” After it was featured on Walter Presents, Locked Up sold to fifty territories around the world and to Amazon. The channel now takes rights for three years and options on any future series. If it has worked, it extends those rights, to ensure it benefits from a hit, not someone else. Walter Presents launched in the USA in 2017, as a $6.99-a-month subscription service, resulting in 250,000 takers a year later, before adding Canada and Australia and then a September launch in Italy with Discovery. The New York Times described the strand as “a chic TV boutique with a foreign accent” as it began its modest global roll-out. Jay Hunt said: “Walter Presents is brilliant; but the genius it represents is that it is at a relatively low cost, content bought cheaply. What you cannot do with the tariffs we have available is to say we are making The Crown.” Channel 4 could never compete with a lavishly-funded global company carrying huge loans. The presence of Netflix was now bearing heavily on everyone’s minds, especially as it had made off with Black Mirror, one of the broadcaster’s most distinctive programmes. It had launched in Britain in 2012 and the release of The Crown in 2016 had been a turning point, appealing as it did to heartland Britain. It also threw a challenge down as a modestly-priced subscription service uninterrupted by commercial breaks, flowing beguilingly from one episode to the next, the addictive slickness of Netflix.

Wooing Youth The success of Walter Presents prompted Davidson-Houston to think about how to attract viewers with other programmes that could play across platforms. In April 2018 the channel ran a 10 pm Friday night comedy, Lee and Dean, about two builders who had been childhood friends in Stevenage. This was specifically aimed at young men. This comedy was recommissioned. When the second series began it released the complete box set on All4 at the same time as the first episode. The pressure to hold onto younger viewers mounted, especially as ITV2 doubled its share of this key audience, assisted by Love Island driving viewers to the ITV Hub. It overtook E4 in 2017. All4 needed to find a way to retaliate and hold onto young female viewers who started to watch Hollyoaks on Channel 4 at 6.30pm, then turned over to E4 for the next day’s episode at 7 pm or also caught up with it on All4. It wanted to tempt them to staying. With this in mind Davidson-Houston decided to buy the rights to Dawson’s Creek, the teenage relationship soap opera first broadcast in 1998–2003. That worked, so he began to expand All4’s content further by buying in entertaining factual series. Foreign versions of some Channel 4 series worked well – for example, The Island USA and Married at First Sight Australia – and were much cheaper than fresh programmes. In 2017 he invested in fiction specifically aimed

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at 16-to 24-year-olds. Not everything came off. Kiss Me First, a story about a lonely 17-year-old girl who escaped to a virtual reality existence, was a flop on Channel 4 and All4. On the plus side, The End of the F***ing World, about two disturbed teenage lovers, rejected as unsuited to E4, was a breakthrough and recommissioned. Its launch was assisted by screening the first episode on Channel 4. The top ten programmes requested from All4 remained remarkably consistent between 2012 and 2017. Hollyoaks was the most popular, heading four of the seven annual tables and coming second in the other three. It vied with Made in Chelsea, E4’s reality show about the wealthy Sloane set, launched in 2011 and spawning spinoffs in New York, Los Angeles, the South of France and Ibiza. Made by the production company Monkey Kingdom and rarely out of the tabloids, it was a consistent top performer, with E4 ratings rising from 655,000 in 2011 for series one, to peak at 1,138,000 for series seven in 2013. By 2016 it was steady at around 800,000. Box sets of The Inbetweeners (which celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2018 with the release of a full range of series and films) plus Misfits became another reliable All4 staple, while catch-ups of popular shows as they launched – Gogglebox, First Dates and Naked Attraction – were heavily requested. Humans and Shameless were the only original dramas in these lists, along with the comedies Friday Night Dinner and Catastrophe. Channel 4 did not publish regular tables of requests in this era, unlike the BBC’s iPlayer, which had cemented its position as the UK’s biggest and most recognisable video service. By 2016 testing had shown that 16-to 34-year-olds were so used to registering for Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and almost every retailer they visited that they were relaxed about giving personal data for a “free” service. They were, though, impatient with long commercial breaks and All4’s propensity to repeat adverts tediously. Viewing of All4 rose by 21 percent during that year, despite the fact that the ITV Hub, a late starter in the video stakes, began to soar in popularity and overtook All4 (although ITV was not yet analysing and using its audience data in as keen a manner as 4). Channel4 then started to focus on tailoring services to sets of individuals, as did iPlayer, (relaunched) as My BBC. Hunt, reviewing the way audiences were moving towards controlling their viewing, said: “As the audience changes All4 has become more important and significant in terms of audience management. We have migrated from commissioners making a collection of accompanying videos for Channel 4 programmes to it being a destination in its own right.”8 As the broadcast side struggled to get younger people to watch, All4 views were continuing to rise by 10 percent year on year.

Advertising The most eye-catching commercial development was Ad4You, which produced two examples of personalised digital campaigns. One inserted the first name of

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a registered viewer on a Coca Cola bottle, trumpeted as a world first: 59 percent of users so engaged claimed to take action as a result. Burberry went further, as the models Cara Delevingne and Kate Moss launched a new perfume, shown as a monogrammed bottle with the registered viewer’s initials. It could be bought by a single click and delivered the next day, or a map would direct buyers to the nearest store. Burberry said the campaign contributed to a 55 percent uplift in sales. These campaigns, trialled in 2014, were one-offs, still being quoted as the best examples four years later. By spring 2017 advertisers had the offer of another faddish feature – audio personalisation, using the viewer’s name in the voiceover of a commercial. It had adopted pioneering advertising technology from Freewheel, including Dynamic Ad insertion of live events and ad targeting data. For Channel 4, experimentation was essential as it tried to protect its place in a British market increasingly challenged by the digital giants. By 2018 Netflix had 8.2 million subscribers in Britain and Amazon Prime Video had 4.3m, according to BARB. They were unnerving the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 and tying up established stars and programmes with large fan bases in expensive productions – Channel 4’s Black Mirror had become a bellwether. Bob Harris, now an independent adviser, observed that while Big Data is a useful tool to support revenue optimisation and cost reduction, it was only one of the many techniques required to compete with the likes of Netflix. Some 10 percent of Channel 4’s annual revenue, £101 million in 2016, came from digital advertising, rising to £138 million and 14 percent in 2018. Three quarters of this sum was derived from targeted advertising based on data obtained from its registered user base of almost 20 million. (4.9 million of them used it in a month.) In July 2016 David Abraham had told Matt Hancock, the minister for digital and media in the Department of Culture, Media & Sport, that his channel was successfully converting analogue advertising pounds into digital ones. The share of viewing to Channel 4 contributed by the All4 service was between 3 and 4 percent at this point, according to Jonathan Lewis, head of digital and partnership innovation, who handled the advertising side. The big question was how much of the advertising on All4 was new money coming in, and how much was being simply switched away from traditional thirty-second spot advertising in what was a flat, and then in 2017 a declining, market (C4 saw a 3 percent drop) with 2018 stagnant. Channel 4 remained a tiddler when set against the advertising being sucked up by social media digital rivals. But it could take comfort from the fact that it had carefully built its own defences with a bespoke database. Abraham, as he prepared to leave, estimated that it was two to three years ahead of ITV in this respect. He had reason to be proud. The channel’s data-crunching innovations were becoming internationally recognised. One of Whitehead’s last proposals before joining Google was to set up Project Passport, to flog the knowledge and systems to overseas broadcasters as a

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means of reaping extra revenue and reducing dependency on advertising. But with the Government threatening Channel 4 with privatisation during 2015 and 2016 this initiative was shelved. In the days before she left Channel 4 for Apple TV in 2017, Hunt pondered what was the positioning for a broadcaster video-on-demand service, seeing that it cannot enter into the arms race against Netflix, Amazon and Apple. Her answer was that it could play a part in curating, picking from the huge choice available, and offer a short-cut hand-holding presence. The next question, given 4’s niche scale, was whether it should redirect all of its programming budget into an on-demand service. It was only to be expected that in the background the established British broadcasters tentatively revisited the idea of a combined venture to tie their different catch-up and on-demand programme hubs together on one British platform. This was along the lines of the 2007 Kangaroo video-on-demand model, but expanded to accommodate a mix of free, advertising-funded and paid-for viewing services. Abraham said that during his time the parties were in constant dialogue, always exploring partnerships, which for Channel 4 encompassed UKTV, digital rights, equity stakes and how a platform marketing all the channels would work. It would clearly be more complex for commercially-funded channels than for the BBC, but the talks had resulted in the BBC and ITV starting a Netflix-style service called BritBox launched in the USA but not Britain. With new management at both ITV and Channel 4, the discussions resumed in 2017 to create a UK BritBox version, led by ITV with a minority BBC stake.

Looking Ahead At this point Channel 4 embarked on another big step, to further reshape All4’s service into useable, thematic strands, or “topics” in clusters around its most important and popular shows, led by Hollyoaks, First Dates, Made in Chelsea and others that would première on the main Channel 4. The science behind it was one familiar to streaming services: the programmes each person has watched were identified with data-driven algorithms, and then the viewing patterns noted. For example, a chart of ten sets of viewers matched with ten programmes showed the following frequent choices and a variant. Topic 1: Made in Chelsea, Hollyoaks and Mating Season, with a variant: Gogglebox. Topic 2: Peep Show, Toast of London and Father Ted, with the variant: Deutschland 83. Topic 3 Acquired drama: Fargo, Homeland, Deutschland 83.

This was shared with advertisers in a presentation called “Let’s Get Personal” led by Rose in June 2017. It confirmed that there had been 109,578,413 hours of

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views made by 15 million people of 1,835 programme brands in the previous year. Viewers matched by topic and groups were divided into larger segments to assist in targeting advertising. The segments always included a year’s worth of viewing, updated weekly for new programmes, and insights were gained on whether dormant viewers had returned to using All4 and into the viewing patterns of newly-registered people. Viewers of All4 would not know they were being assigned to a taste segment when they entered the site; but they were offered different collections of programmes. The largest segment was called Voyeur (viewers of Naked Attraction, and risky/sex programmes). The youngest was Hollyoaks (soap, fashion), followed by Sloane Ranger (Made in Chelsea). Other segments included Culture Club (highbrow drama, National Treasure), Indiana Homes (Location, Location, Location/ homemaking nesters), Lovemakers (First Dates and romance). Two other mainstream taste segments were Inquisitive Minds (factual/documentaries), and Yank Bang (The Last Leg, Peep Show). The theory, explained in the 2016 annual report, was that these “science-based, but human-centred developments are aimed at striking a balance between human editorial curation and data-driven algorithms, and will vastly improve the experience for every viewer”. Recommended programmes based on themes were for a time displayed to the All4 user on a loop on a rotating carousel at the top of the site. Channel 4 tested what a good recommendation to sample a programme would be. Rose explained: “The first two or three recommendations are the most important, the fourth can stretch a bit, the fifth can be a wild card. But don’t surprise people too much.” Combined with predictive advertising, the theory was that this opened the way for online commercials that would exploit, for example, a moment to celebrate in a programme, cueing an ad for chocolate. Devising a personalised linear schedule for viewers, leading them from one programme to a next using All4, was seen as the inevitable next step. Rose’s presentation asserted that the mandatory registration and identification system had led to doubling the efficiency and effectiveness of on-demand ads, resulting in a 30-to-50 percent rise in the advertising tariff. It was the most successful outcome of Abraham’s original “data is the new oil” strategy. The data could allow interest-based targeting, identifying individual viewers’ interests in food, technology, doing deals, DIY, fashion, beauty, domestic products and the environment. The largest group, 5.55 million registered viewers, were bracketed as interested in technology. A longer-term assessment suggests that the relaunch of All4 as an opportunity to house all that Channel 4 offered did not go completely to plan. The first flaw was that it meant abandoning the established 4oD brand. “People remember 4oD,” said Davidson-Houston. “I think we can all agree it was a very powerful brand. There are still questions raised about it. For good or ill people still use it.” The channel also failed to invest enough after 2016 in improving the quality of the ser-

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vice for users which varied according to method of delivery, and did not allow easy near-automatic binge viewing. This was blamed on the board and its reluctance to spend more of its cash cushion. “All4 is cumbersome,” explained Quicksilver Media Productions, which supplied Unreported World. “The software only allows the oldest programmes in a series to be watched first. It is set up for drama not current affairs.” Current affairs viewers wanted the most topical ones first. It also found that younger adults were not that interested in using All4 and that some programmes were far better suited to YouTube. It also was unclear whether the advertising industry was fully prepared to abandon its traditional approach of buying audiences by demographic group, and move to something called tastes, however insightful the pearls of wisdom. There was scepticism within the 4 sales force – which traditionally depended upon the impact of TV adverts reaching larger audiences – even though the rapid spread of smart televisions created the conditions for a nimble one-to-one service. There was, too, some audience resistance to the way recommended programmes were pushed at them. The biggest problem was simply the model: All4 is advertising-funded with programmes that are interrupted, unlike its subscription-model rivals and the publicly-funded BBC. Channel 4 initially stood firm against letting All4 users pay to opt out of the adverts, as Sky and ITV did, despite constant mutterings from programme commissioners. Abraham contended that the opt-out feature that had been introduced on the ITV Hub option was little used, but his successor introduced a pilot. “Paying not to have adverts, it is always on the agenda,” said Davidson-Houston. “We look at it frequently. It is tricky because we would have to change our business model because we don’t own the commercial rights. The economics of it don’t stack up. The heaviest viewers of All4 would be the ones most likely to subscribe and we would be much less well off because of losing their exposure to the targeted advertising.” Another weakness is that Channel 4 did not publish regularly how many of its registered viewers are actively using it until 2019 or how it defines active use. Meanwhile the increase in the registered base was naturally slowing. The ITV Hub overtook Channel 4 with 20 million registrations in 2017. It showed that young viewers were prepared to turn to live programmes when they appealed, and that demand then flowed through to online spin-offs. Channel 4 remained in continual experiment. In 2017, for example, a social media campaign around the long-running Shameless drama drove it into the top ten All4 requests again. And it launched a system of promoting links to All4 programming on the core channel. So, when launching the ISIS drama called The State in August 2017, it reminded viewers of the availability on All4 of Britz, the creator’s previous programme on the related theme of Muslim radicalisation and suicide bombing. After The Great British Bake Off launched with 6.5 million overnight viewers in August 2017, All4 the next day promoted favourite programme recommenda-

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tions from Paul Hollywood (Father Ted), Prue Leith (Deutschland 83) and Noel Fielding’s previous experimental E4 Luxury Comedy, (“psychedelic, half filmed, half animated. Totally loop”). Rose said: “When something does well live, it does well on video-on-demand. It’s as simple as that. You also like it in your own time.” The data strategy could affect decisions to renew or cancel programmes. It had implications for the delicate arts of scheduling and channel management, especially for the repeats channel, 4Seven, and More4. If you can use actual viewing behaviour to decide what programmes to select to rebroadcast, which ads to serve up and suitable sponsors for programmes, why not make more comprehensive use of the insights? Back in 2013, when the technology wizards were transforming 4oD, they had felt bold enough to produce a huge universal mind map of programmes, showing the patterns and tastes that drove viewing, according to their new data discoveries. “It was a massive brain, a spider’s web of connections,” Jay Hunt recalled. “It showed you, say, a Made in Chelsea viewer also watched this. At that level of granularity it was fascinating – but almost completely useless.” Nonetheless she put the map on her wall for a time, but she was not prepared to write experienced television executives like her out of the picture. She insisted that you needed humans to make the decision to commission something. So despite the progress made by 2017 with segmented “tastes” she had no intention of handing over to an algorithm. “I am not sure you can ever take the human component out of it. Right now, and in my time, conventional scheduling is still playing a really important part in decisions.” But findings from the Big Data trove began to be drip fed via the sales side to the commissioners. It was a deviation from the customary practice of their being presented annually with a tally of how their programmes had performed in terms of financial return, whether the level of advertising had secured a profit or loss on their content investment. “Now we have started mining the oil we intend it to flow not just through our internal operations but also through our future strategy and vision for Channel 4,” wrote Rose, while conceding that “a totally targeted world could break the things that make Channel 4 unique.” Meanwhile a wider industry backlash from advertisers against the powerful digital disrupters was building. In 2017 debate raged about fraud, accuracy of measurements, data leaks, a lackadaisical approach to removing offensive material and, in 2018, the misuse of personal data in political campaigns. This was partly directed at automated programmatic advertising, which raised suspicions that robots were being programmed to generate fake clicks. Procter and Gamble’s chief marketing officer told the annual meeting of the Internet Advertising Bureau in 2017 that digital advertising operators should sort themselves out. Saatchi & Saatchi’s chairman said at the annual conference of ISBA (the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers) that the industry had become too concerned with targeting individuals, forgetting the value of context. The example

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he gave was of Rolex watches being advertised in a digital poster in a men’s urinal in the City. The question for broadcasters was whether an over-enthusiastic embrace of targeting tightly-defined audience groups and individuals was undermining the distinguishing power of television, its mass reach and broad appeal. Time will tell if David Abraham’s most vital initiative fully delivered on its initial promise. He drove Channel 4 onto the motorway to make the digital journey. The lead established meant it had won an honourable place at the table in negotiations over future moves. In June 2018 BBC, ITV and C4 agreed a new deal to invest in Freeview, the digital terrestrial platform, with a pledge to invest £125m over five years to develop new services, including an app to allow viewers to watch programmes live and on demand. In September 2018 All4 augmented its move towards expanding the platform with the arrival of the first VICE box sets, a release of 900 hours of edgy documentaries, the first time All4 had hosted a third-party publisher, a marker in its evolution towards becoming a hub and destination. So All4 became the key to Channel 4’s future. Its commercial focus on young adults was a strategic priority for Abraham’s successor, Alex Mahon, from the moment she joined in October 2017. To succeed it needed constant upgrades. It highlights the perpetual challenge for Channel 4: how to punch above its weight on modest resources.

Notes 1

Bob Harris in interviews, August 2017.

2

Royal Television Society speech, 23 May 2011.

3

Computer Weekly 500: “Why Channel 4 is crunching data”, June 2013.

4

Gill Whitehead interview, 7 December 2016.

5

Sanjeevan Bala interview, February 2017.

6

The development of 4oD is recounted in a chapter by Sarah Rose in Data Journalism 2017, edited by John Mair.

7

Harvard Business Review, May 2015: “Customer Data: Designing for Transparency and Trust”.

8

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Jay Hunt interview, 4 September 2017.

CHANNEL 4: A HISTORY

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hannel 4’s British-made dramas, the ones it orders and helps finance, are modest in number but they are expected to be distinctive and to win awards. The exception is its most expensive programme, the weekday soap Hollyoaks, which acts like a tugboat pulling in younger viewers. From its beginnings in 1982 the channel has topped up the schedule with comedy and drama – often from the USA, because it was cheap and of a high quality. This became part of 4’s initial appeal; but it has diminished in the new environment of access to archived programmes and streaming services. For example, in 2017, a typical year, it screened 429 hours of drama of which under half, 172 hours, were originated drama, of which Hollyoaks accounted for 127. Compare that with the 1,545 hours allotted to factual programming, 149 hours up on 2016. Spending on drama in 2017 – including acquired programmes – was £87 million. Acquisitions are still selected at annual May screenings of pilots in Los Angeles, or more directly from approaches by producers, but are governed by the house rule established in the 1990s: they must justify their cost and place by making a profit. Successful acquisitions between 2010 and 2017 included two supernovas, The Handmaid’s Tale and Homeland, then Fargo, The Returned, The Big Bang Theory, its prequel Young Sheldon and films. Unsuccessful ones are marched off the main channel or buried in late-night slots – which is what happened in 2017 to This Is Us, a saccharine family drama about a family whose three children were all born on the father’s birthday. It worked in America but flopped on 4. The problem of affordability became acute during this era, when the cost of most drama spiralled beyond the channel’s ability to pay. From 2013, when generous tax credits for British-made dramas were introduced, it sought partners, required the producer to fund the gap or joined as a junior in co-productions, which meant a shift towards international themes and casts, a trend across broadcasting. Channel 4’s co-production role on The First with Hulu, the American streaming service, about a project to send humans to Mars, is an example of the shift, exemplified by the casting of the lead characters – America’s Sean Penn and

Britain’s Natascha McElhone. This was an embarrassing flop. But Catch-22 starring George Clooney, broadcast the following year in 2019, did fine. * * * The members’ bar at BAFTA’s headquarters in Piccadilly, London, is a popular meeting place for television executives. Entering it, to your left there is a list of the winners of the award for single dramas, which includes director Marc Munden for 2007. He won it for The Mark of Cain – as near perfect an example of a bespoke Channel 4 drama you could find. It told the story of three British soldiers who fought in the Iraq war and retaliated after an ambush by torturing and beating local insurgents near Basra. It led to court martials and one suicide. Although this was essentially fiction, the plot reflected the case of three British soldiers convicted of abusing Iraqi civilians in Basra in 2003. The piece was nursed by 4’s film and drama unit headed by Tessa Ross and Liza Marshall respectively, written by Tony Marchant and produced by the trusty Manchester-based independent Red Productions. The broadcast was delayed because a group of British navy personnel had been captured by Iran – publicity that gave oxygen to a drama tackling a sensitive subject so soon after this controversial war. Munden’s career had taken off after he had been a beneficiary of Channel 4’s talent-spotting scheme in the late 1990s. A decade after The Mark of Cain he sat on the sofa under his name on the wall and reflected: “It was very much one of those dramas Channel 4 doesn’t seem to make very much now, a political issue drama.” Others of the kind in that year included Boy A, about a 24-year-old emerging from an institution, having committed a terrible crime as a minor and now trying to rebuild his life. It had overtones of the James Bulger case. Then there was Britz, Peter Kosminsky’s story about two siblings of Muslim background, one working for M15, the other a medical student who is radicalised and detonates her suicide vest in central London as he tries to stop her. A drama called Secret Life depicted a convicted paedophile trying to control his desire for under-age girls, on release from prison with a wish to reform. Easy viewing these were not. The year had opened with something different, an E4 series called Skins, with extreme storylines about the messy and dark lives of teenagers in Bristol and their experiments with drugs, drink and casual sex. It was designed for the YouTube generation by Company Pictures and written by Bryan Elsley, taking advice from his teenage son. The casting uncovered new talent: early members Dev Patel and Nicholas Hoult became adult stars. It ran for 7 series and 61 episodes. The parents were played by established comedy actors, including Harry Enfield and David Baddiel, and it was refreshed every two years with new faces. More than half its viewers were between 16 and 34. The series sent shivers down the spines of parents after a house party episode in series one was thought to have caused the disruption of a real teenage party, clumsily publicised on social media, by an influx of

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strangers who damaged the family home. That did not prevent Skins from carrying off several awards, led by a BAFTA for best drama series. As for Munden, he moved on from The Mark of Cain to compete successfully against eight other directors to make The Devil’s Whore (renamed The Devil’s Mistress in other territories), broadcast in 2008. A four-part serial, it was a project that Tessa Ross had been nurturing for twelve years. Peter Flannery’s script gave a vivid account of the passions, ideas and divisions within families that drove the seventeenth-century English Civil War, drawing on verbatim records of real debates on the divine right of kings, the emergence of parliamentary democracy, the thirst for freedom to worship and the terror of witchcraft. The Guardian wrote: “It was bloody, it was remorseless, but above all The Devil’s Whore was magnificent.” Original E4 drama continued in 2009 with Misfits, which followed a gang of five teenagers on community service who suddenly found themselves with supernatural powers after a flash storm. Such bespoke drama is a metered treat for a channel that depends on cheaper factual and entertainment programming in the main 8–10 pm evening hours. Drama’s task was expressed in a 2010 creative renewal document: “Drama provides distinctive, high quality series, serials and single films across Channel 4, E4 and More4. Drama works closely on projects from conception to script to production and delivery, developing material from new and established talent.” A senior executive fleshed out the concept more matter-of-factly: “Drama plays the same kind of role as Channel 4 News, except there is less of it. It is there as brand building. It is a massively long-term thing but it does not make money. Most things do not have a second series but it does cut through from time to time to steal a march on everyone else. But if you only have a few times every year to roll the dice, it is unlikely you will get an unusually high hit rate.” The channel’s adventurousness created a bank of goodwill and loyalty among the talented people involved. Commissioners would sometimes return to writers and directors who had done outstanding work for them and go along with their passion projects. An example was Unloved in 2009, an uncomfortably tough child’s view of life in a residential home without parents of her own. It was co-written by Tony Grisoni, an expert at dark themes, and the actor Samantha Morton, who also directed it, drawing directly on her own experience. Costing £1.5 million, it won a BAFTA for best single drama and drew 2 million viewers. Grisoni had also written Red Riding, a trilogy adapted from David Peace’s novels based on the Yorkshire Ripper murders of the 1970s and 80s. They were broadcast in 2009, when budget cuts arising from the recession had scuppered plans for a fourth episode. Another distinctly British piece, Mo, was aired in January 2010. Written by Neil McKay, this was a ninety-minute version of the Labour politician Mo Mowlem’s life between 1997 and 2000, during her recovery from treatment for a brain tumour which she covered up for as long as she could while brokering a peace deal for

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Northern Ireland. Mowlem was played by Julie Walters, who won a BAFTA award for best actor for capturing this eccentric, earthy, sometimes sweary woman, who had died aged 55 in 2005. Until the arrival of Abraham and Hunt at the end of 2010, decisions on commissioning drama were heavily dependent on Tessa Ross’s personal taste and on whether bankable stars could be persuaded to take part. Almost the last of such series was an adaptation of William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, the epic novel following a man’s extraordinary life through the twentieth century. The script, written by Boyd himself, was packed with stars, lust and love affairs. Produced by Carnival, the costs were partly shared with the American co-producer Masterpiece for PBS. The central character, the writer Logan Mountstuart, was played by four different actors over the four episodes as he moved through life, bouncing glancingly off the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Ernest Hemingway, Ian Fleming and other icons of the age. Although it won a BAFTA for the best mini-series it went down rather badly with most critics, one demanding the return of the four-and-a-half hours of his life that he had spent watching it. It had been expensive to make and had not paid back the channel’s investment. Its failure was a strong factor in persuading the new regime to take a much harder-nosed commercial approach to drama commissions. The Promise, broadcast the following year, was an ambitious series about the creation of the state of Israel, written and directed by Peter Kosminsky and produced by David Aukin, the former head of Film4. It was seen through the soulful eyes of a young woman, played by Clare Foy (later cast as the young Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown), who wanted to find out about her grandfather’s involvement in Palestine under the British mandate. Part of Kosminsky’s motivation was his view that, while in 1945 Jewish suffering had gained sympathy from most of the world, by the time of the drama’s broadcast there was little left outside the USA. However, some critics thought it was overtly critical of Israel. Howard Jacobson observed that “just about every Palestinian was sympathetic to look at, just about every Jew was not”. Ofcom received 44 complaints but concluded it did not breach its code of conduct. Audiences fell during the run from 1.8 million to 1.2 million but catch-up and online added a further 0.5 million. Abraham commented on the row in a Royal Television Society speech in May: “It’s more important than ever for Channel 4 to challenge the status quo, stimulate debate, take risks and be brave. I can think of no better example of how we continue to do that than … in The Promise.” It was screened in France, Australia, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Canada, Brazil, Slovenia and Israel, then available on Hulu. Aukin also contributed Endgame, a one-off feature based on the secret talks in England in the late 1980s between exiled members of the African National Congress and some South African business leaders, paving the way for the release of Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid.

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Piers Wenger was recruited to join the film side by Tessa Ross in autumn 2011 because he was passionate about developing British films. He had run BBC Wales drama, in charge of commissioning Dr Who and Sherlock. The BBC’s strong performance in drama was damaging the reputation of Channel 4’s by the time he arrived. The 2011 annual report noted that 4, with its sparse drama resources, had lost its lead to BBC1 “as being best for dramas that are different from other channels”. Wenger was promoted to run drama in spring 2012 after the commissioners Camilla Campbell and Robert Wulff-Cochrane fell out with Hunt – with whom Wenger had worked at the BBC – and left to become independent producers. It was a tough task, as Wenger explained: “Jay had very ambitious plans for the way she wanted to reshape the whole channel. Drama was to play a bigger key role. That was the conversation which led to my accepting the job. It was all-consuming and needed my sole focus because the department hadn’t had a head for some months.” At commissioner meetings on Tuesdays he detected “a sense of struggle and common endeavour” inspired by Hunt’s passion and ability to interrogate ideas. There was a debate about whether originated drama could contribute commercially in the future, while maintaining its special quality – a similar debate to the one taking place over Film4, still run by Tessa Ross. Before Wenger took up his new role, several pieces were ordered rapidly by the temporarily headless drama team. Commissioner Roberto Troni made sure that Hunt saw scripts of The Fear, a gangster drama starring Peter Mullan as a crime boss turned entrepreneur, trying to rebuild Brighton’s derelict West Pier. The Channel 4 twist was that he was beset by two enemies – a violent Albanian trafficking gang and the onset of early dementia attacking his memory and devastating his family: a cruel man afflicted by a cruel disease. Hunt greenlit it in early 2012 on the condition that it was delivered that same year, for she had gaps to fill. The four episodes, made by World Productions, were run on consecutive nights that December at 10pm. Audiences averaged 1.25 million, but it could not be recommissioned because the central character was dead by the end. Top Boy, Ronan Bennett’s East End black gang culture drama, was recommissioned but then cancelled, a decision subsequently regretted. A follow-up to The Devil’s Whore, called New Worlds, was written by Peter Flannery but it failed to catch viewers’ imagination, in part because Andrea Riseborough, the star of the original, was unavailable. More successful was the decision to convert the niche hit film This Is England ’86 as a television series from 2010. The key challenge Wenger faced was finding series that could return over the years to replace Paul Abbott’s Shameless classic black comedy of working class culture which by now was being remade for the US market. In May 2013 the final British series of fourteen episodes ended. In all 139 episodes and fourteen series had been created and archived since 2004. Channel 4 was addicted to it: it did well in the ratings but was not making much money for what had turned into almost a second soap after Hollyoaks, based on the economics of near con-

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stant production and fixed sets. It had to look real and rough but had mined the feckless council estate genre to exhaustion. “It had been a key driver of Channel 4 audiences,” said Wenger, “and provided the commercial credit that buys the drama department the less popular, more challenging drama, while … exploring what is going on in the world.” Hollyoaks, by contrast, was on the edge in 2010 after audiences fell below 1 million and it went through a drastic production shake-up and cast change assisted by the time-honoured device of disaster, this time a fire. There was a discussion about whether to replace it rather than reboot, but it was a key title for 16–34s, had a fixed place at 6.30 pm before the news and made money, if not much. It was also a staple of 4’s digital channels and 4oD. Cancelling it would have been an eruption too far, following the loss of both Big Brother and Shameless. It had originated in 1995 when Phil Redmond – fearing that his and 4’s first soap, Brookside, would be cancelled – developed Hollyoaks to replace it. This time no such option presented itself. Of all the decisions facing Jay Hunt this was one she was well equipped to tackle based on her experience at BBC1, where the cyclical nature of soaps – decline followed by shake-up followed by revival – was an accepted fact of life. Location was another protection. Hollyoaks was made in Cheshire by Lime Pictures, employing over 350 people, and was 4’s largest single commission, costing over £45 million a year. It brought on fresh talent and was a means of tackling social issues: Internet safety and rape storylines featured in 2011. Four out of five of its viewers believed that it was good at tackling difficult issues, according to in-house research. Channel 4, like all national broadcasters, was accused of an historic lack of attention to the regions which was becoming more intense, and Lime Pictures represented a handy rejoinder to that charge. Independently of Wenger, Channel 4 did have in his quiver a potentially powerful period drama that also tipped its hat to the northwest. The Mill, commissioned as a specialist factual history series, recreated the conditions faced by exploited workers in the cotton mills of the early nineteenth century, based on records kept by the owners of Quarry Bank in Cheshire. As such it was a drama hybrid backed by the history commissioner Julia Harrington. It featured the exploitation of small children and unpaid apprentices from orphanages, with ruthless punishments for runaways. Dubbed by one critic as “The Mill, where misery is relentless”, it proved too downbeat to catch on and was cancelled after the second series of six. It was a noble experiment. “Summer on Channel 4, quite a bummer” quipped a Guardian previewer, as 2013 saw another group of bleak dramas play out. They included Run, depicting interconnected characters struggling to survive, and Southcliffe, about a lone shooter returning from service in Afghanistan and the devastation he wrought on a sleepy town in Kent (it was filmed in Faversham) on one day. This went out on Sunday nights and won a BAFTA for the lead actor, Sean Harris, and praise for

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Rory Kinnear, who played a journalist. The good people of Faversham were upset, though: they thought it was going to be more like Midsomer Murders. Hunt and her colleagues had decided that with changing audience habits – viewers were time-shifting programmes more and more – its drama needed to be higher profile, encouraging people to sample what they missed by catching up. This meant finding powerful returning series that would run at 9 pm rather than 10. Wenger saw this as both a blessing and a curse: “It allows you to try something different, but you are up against stiff competition. At 10 you could sit there under the radar and be an alternative to the news. But 9 represented an exciting challenge. I grasped it with both hands – but some pitfalls and obstacles became evident as we tried.” Seeking investment from elsewhere to halve 4’s costs, he wanted 80 percent of drama to be co-produced. The gear change kicked in from 2013, when it became clear that Netflix (which had just released House of Cards) and others were able to outspend the traditional channels, while government tax breaks for high-end drama and animation costing over £1 million an hour were starting to transform the British production sector and drawing in the American studios, pushing up costs. Wenger had to find cheaper models to make most drama outside soap: “The strategy broadly was to find new ways of taking existing genres – sci-fi, period, police procedural, as well as four-part closed-end dramas – to tackle ideas other channels were more afraid of.” Not all of them worked. Babylon was designed as a satirical series with a dash of mischief. It featured a Metropolitan Police commissioner (James Nesbitt) dragging the force into the new media age, assisted by a driven blonde American communications director. The pilot episode, directed by Danny Boyle, was broadcast in February 2014 before the main run from mid-November, which ended with a police siege set in Forest Hill, South London. With gun crime, sieges and the head of the Met leading a double life, the desire to be out there and funny clashed with telling the bigger story of policing. It wanted to do both – a hard trick to pull off – and it failed on both sides of the Atlantic. The biggest gamble in meeting the 9 pm challenge was Indian Summers, pitched as a retelling of the end of the Raj from an Indian perspective. It was the first production from Charlie Pattinson’s New Pictures enterprise. He owned the script (an increasing trend) and in a seller’s market was expected to be picked up by ITV. But Hunt and Wenger were invited to bid for the initial 50-episode proposal, planned over five series. Co-produced with Masterpiece PBS, and starring Julie Walters, the first series was the most expensive in the channel’s history, costing an estimated £14 million. Wenger was excited by the prospect. “As an escapist sweeping period epic drama – this felt like a natural fit for Sunday night,” he recalled. It was two-and-ahalf years in the making and shot in Penang, Malaysia, representing Simla in 1938, complete with elephants. It began the run in February 2015 and the first episode drew more than 5 million viewers – 4’s best-performing drama for two decades. It

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was quickly recommissioned but audiences fell away when it had to compete with Poldark and J. K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy on BBC1. The first series of Indian Summers closed at 1.83 million and the second opened at 1.48 million – disappointing ratings that led to cancellation in April 2016. Wenger reflected: “Scheduling, that was the big issue. That is about experience. Perhaps if I had been more experienced and had considered the extent to which popular period drama was a fixture on every channel, although we loved the piece I should have thought whether there was a way of shaping it differently, for a midweek slot. It really appealed as a piece of writing. I didn’t anticipate the huge success of Poldark.” He had bravely – or foolhardily – taken on the big channels on their biggest night of the week and had been repulsed. But the drama itself didn’t work as well as it should have done, given the money lavished on it. Some critics thought that Julie Walters was miscast as an unsympathetic manager of the club patronised by expatriates, and the characters and themes failed to establish themselves. Next up was Humans, about rebellious anthropomorphic robots living alongside families, which enjoyed initial success. Co-produced with the American AMC Studios, it was launched on a Sunday evening in June 2015, out of range of its rivals’ autumn blockbusters. This was based on a Swedish sci-fi drama and came from Derek Wax, an executive producer at Kudos, creator of Spooks. Eight episodes cost £12 million and it received a full marketing thrust, with actors pretending to be robots wandering stiffly around London. The first series achieved an average consolidated audience of 4.7 million and an average 8 percent share. But the second faltered with 1.2 million and a 5 percent share the following year when scheduled on autumn Sundays against I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! on ITV. It appeared to have lost its focus on the central dilemma of domestic life with a robotic slave, by taking the story outside North London and going international. Commissioning series three was delayed until March 2017 as AMC assessed its performance in the USA. It returned in May 2018 on a Thursday evening, refocused as a precinct thriller; but its moment had passed. It averaged 600,000 viewers per episode, 3 percent of the audience, and ended with a whimper. BBC Worldwide had invested alongside Channel 4 in Russell T. Davies’s ambitious gay drama Cucumber Banana Tofu – a title that, according to the author, represented the three stages of the male erection. In an experiment it was screened both on the main channel 4 and E4, with an online spin-off. Davies was the creator of Queer as Folk, which had been one of 4’s great successes at the turn of the century, but he had later fallen out with the channel over a discarded project. Wenger, who had worked with him on the BBC’s Dr Who revival, persuaded him to return. Screened in the winter of 2015, the series was a muted critical success but it was bleaker and at the same time less ground-breaking than Queer as Folk and made less impact on viewers. The script won a BAFTA for Davies, though, and Wenger asserted that episode six represented “the proudest of all the times I was there”. That episode had taken

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an unexpectedly tragic turn when Lance, a rejected lover but the most attractive of the characters, died slowly of a head wound after being struck by a golf club. Cucumber closed after eight episodes with just under 600,000 viewers and did little better in America. It showed how challenging it can be to bring a mainstream audience to a minority experience. The annual report offered consolation: “It contained some of the most talked about moments seen on screen this year and set out our stall in terms of how seriously we take diversity, with an entirely LGBT writing team.” No Offence was ordered from Paul Abbott as Shameless was cancelled. It was envisaged as a police procedural with a twist and energy, once more set in Manchester. It was a hit, with consistently good reviews, attracting 2.5 million viewers on launch. Abbott explained that he had taken time to get the tone right, breathing new life into the genre with sharp and funny writing and standout casting. The first series was screened in 2015 and it returned successfully in January 2017 and September 2018. However, this third series, hurriedly scheduled to fill an empty slot, had a reduced impact, competing against wave after wave of accomplished dramas from BBC1, BBC2 and ITV, especially the wildly successful Bodyguard. Marc Munden meanwhile had returned to direct two series of Dennis Kelly’s drama Utopia, about a murderous conspiracy network, which had begun life as a potential film under Tessa Ross. This had to be broadcast at 10pm, due to its violence and bad language: the first episode included children being gassed by thugs in a comic novel shop and a prolonged torture scene involving the removal of an eye with a spoon. It was slick, menacing and mysterious. Despite a loyal fan base, Kelly’s wish for a third and final series was swept aside, but HBO picked up the format rights. Munden then directed the greatest success of this era, the miniseries National Treasure, by Jack Thorne, starring Robbie Coltrane as an aged and cherished entertainer accused of historic sex abuse, shaking the foundations of a comfortable life. His wife was played by Julie Walters with Andrea Riseborough as their disturbed adult daughter. Clearly drawing on the Jimmy Savile scandal and Rolf Harris’s conviction for sexual offences in 2014, National Treasure was a return to classic Channel 4 drama, created by George Faber’s new company, The Forge. (Faber with Pattinson had been part of the team that made Shameless and Skins.) The first episode in autumn 2016 drew 4.3 million viewers. It was fully funded by Channel 4 and everything depended on having British actors of standing. “In some ways those actors had themselves to be national treasures – it was central to the casting,” said Munden. The four episodes cost £1 million each. By the time this success had played out Wenger had resigned, to run BBC Television drama. Beth Willis, daughter of John Willis, 4’s director of programming in the 1990s, was promoted to replace him but she took maternity leave so Phil Clarke, running the comedy commissioning took over drama in a caretaking role until her return. She left to return to production as the new regime took over the reins in 2018. Her successor was Leeds-based Caroline Hollick, executive producer

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of Red Production Company’s Happy Valley. Another media thoroughbred, she was the daughter of Sue Woodford, who had launched multicultural programmes for Channel 4 in the 1980s, and Lord (Clive) Hollick, who was involved in a number of regional ITV franchises in the 1990s and in the launch of Channel 5. The Forge quickly established itself as one of the channel’s most important providers of drama. The summer of 2017 saw the broadcast of a much-vaunted project, Ackley Bridge, a series aimed at teenagers – a response to years of pressure from Ofcom and other lobbyists over the broadcaster’s neglect of its regulatory duty to make specific educational programming for this age group. “It was the centrepiece of our educational content provision for 14-to-19-year-olds” said 4’s annual report. With a budget of £8 million, it was promoted as exploring a turbulent school, confronting prejudice and the mixing of cultures which began with the merger of two schools in a segregated British and Pakistani community. But before the start on 7 June the Manchester Arena bombing took place and this meant that an opening scene – in which a troubled student strapped a fake bomb to himself in order to disrupt the merger – had to be hurriedly changed. To viewers with long memories, Ackley Bridge seemed rather like Waterloo Road, the cancelled BBC school drama, with a dash of Shameless. Others saw a resemblance to Grange Hill, plus mobile phones. A former Halifax high school was used as the setting and, while the personal problems of the teachers were also played out to give it a broader appeal, it provided opportunities for young actors, students from local schools and acting workshops. The lead director for the first episode was Penny Woolcock, the force behind a series of 4’s original arts events between 2000 and 2007. It attracted over 3 million viewers at first, dipping to 1.78 million. This was enough to win an order for twelve more episodes in 2018, starting again in June but running through the summer holidays. This saw audiences halve, due to the long spell of hot weather and the rival attraction of ITV’s Love Island; but it was renewed by the incoming regime for 2019, cut to eight episodes. The Forge teamed up again with Jack Thorne to triumph in January 2018 with Kiri, a four-parter that drew more than 4.9 million viewers when time-shifting was taken into account, the largest for a Channel 4 drama for two decades and beating the previous record for Humans series one, of 4.7 million. Commissioned by Beth Willis during her brief tenure, this was more local British drama, starring Sarah Lancashire as an experienced social worker who made a critical misjudgement when she allowed a little girl to have an unsupervised meeting with her biological grandparents, who abducted her. One of the reputational successes of 2017 was The State, another pedigree Peter Kosminsky drama, following the travails of four young British men and women – one with a child – who leave their British lives behind to join Islamic State fighters in Raqqa. They were doomed to disillusion and death as they burnt their passports on crossing from Turkey to Syria, to emphasise that it was going to be a one-way

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journey. Co-produced with National Geographic, it ran as a stripped series across the last week in August – one of Hunt’s final bold decisions – attracting more than a million viewers each night, and 5.5 million total viewers, 9.2 percent. It was especially good at attracting BAME viewers, and independent research showed that three quarters of viewers believed “this is the sort of programme Channel 4 should be showing”. Born to Kill was about a 16-year-old boy gripped with an urge to murder – the coming-of-age of a psychopath. It provided the first leading role for Jack Rowan, who was soon snapped up for the BBC’s hit Peaky Blinders. It was produced by World Productions, makers of Bodyguard, their first contribution to Channel 4 drama since The Fall and drew over a million viewers. Also in 2017 an experimental piece, The End of the F***ing World, was a critical hit shared with co-producer Netflix. The first episode was premièred on Channel 4 and it was released as a box set on All4. In September came Electric Dreams, which was an anthology of ten different scripts, based on the short stories of sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick. There was something of a free hand when it came to treatments from distinguished contributors from the UK side including Jack Thorne and Tony Grisoni, and director Marc Munden. Bryan Cranston stepped behind the cameras as a producer. Under the co-production deal the first six were broadcast as a weekly series first on Channel 4. Made by Sony’s UK-based Left Bank Pictures the entire series was then released on Amazon Video in January 2018, excluding the UK, Australia and Canada – the deals were getting sharper. But this ambitious project did not have the cohesion of a previous dramatisation of Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle and was criticised for feeling like another Black Mirror clone. This was one of the projects from Simon Maxwell, who had been recruited in 2014 to a new role, head of international drama, to spearhead co-productions and set up partnerships. Maxwell had worked in scripted projects and the move was timed to exploit UK tax credits. Electric Dreams had a troubled birth anyway, as the original US partner AMC pulled out. His biggest bet was The First, about a commercial project to launch the first human flight to Mars, set thirteen years in the future. The eight-part opening series was created by Beau Willimon, who had adapted House of Cards. The estimated cost was $58 million, with Channel 4 putting in a relatively small percentage. Hulu had already released the first two episodes when the British launch took place in October 2018. Maxwell reflected that Mars seems like a distant red dot and “at times this show has felt the same – the collective power of human endeavour: it has required a lot of that from us”. The dangers of co-production are that 4’s interests as a junior partner could be easily squashed. Hulu, without a UK service, was for this reason a logical choice as co-financier. A further co-production, thriller Chimerica which dramatised a hunt to find the Tiananmen Square tank man, also bombed in spring 2019.

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The Handmaid’s Tale The highest profile drama to emerge from the Hulu MGM relationship was dark and disturbing: The Handmaid’s Tale based on Margaret Attwood’s popular novel published in 1985 about the totalitarian society of Gilead, formerly the United States, in which enslaved women serve elite men and barren women by bearing them children as handmaids. Dressed in a depersonalised uniform of cloaks and white hats they endure a horrific life kept in line by terror and death sentences. This had a starry cast, with Elisabeth Moss (Mad Men, Top of the Lake) as the passively defiant Offred, and Joseph Fiennes, her elite master. Channel 4’s Hunt fought for the rights to it after she and the team saw episode one: it was a straightforward acquisition, a global hit which feminists flocked to. Channel 4 won because MGM considered it was a good partner after marketing Fargo well, and a perfect fit because also it would be broadcast free to air, meaning maximum exposure. After the first episode was broadcast in May 2017 popular demand drove the book to the top of the bestseller list, generating more debate, with some seeing parallels with the treatment of women by ISIS, others noting that there had been a surge in sales of the book in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election, because it chimed with political uncertainty. The first series hit a sweet spot with an average 2.3 million audience, the biggest of any acquired drama since Homeland, a coup for Channel 4. A second series was immediately ordered and the first female chief executive of Channel 4, Alex Mahon, a fan, duly hosted a preview screening for female guests in April 2018 at an all-woman club off Oxford Street. She wore a T-shirt with the slogan across the front, “IT TAKES TITS TO DO THAT”. But the much-anticipated second series in the summer of 2018 was criticised as “torture porn”, less interested in men as aggressors than in women’s role in upholding the patriarchy. It was a case of there being too much of the same relentless misery of women being oppressed. The audience faltered. “As many female critics have pointed out, the second season’s obsession with violence makes it a little exhausting for anyone to watch, let alone someone who doesn’t already agree with the show’s ethos,” wrote a Guardian critic. It seemed a shame that the first series, so true to the book, had to have a follow-up. Nonetheless business is business and Hulu ordered a third for 2019. But this deal illustrated the advantage a free-to-air broadcaster enjoyed. The period of 2010–17 confirmed that Channel 4’s original dramas were a pretty mixed bunch and Wenger’s two big bets, Indian Summers and Cucumber Banana Tofu did not deliver. But with American giants waving big cheques, it became ever harder to attract established and formerly loyal writers to work for what 4 could offer – and some were also worried that, because of these financial constraints, projects might not be followed through. It was also clear that returning series failed to build audiences. On the plus side, Humans, National Treasure and Utopia were bang in the zone of distinctive and talked-about drama, alongside

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Brexit: The Uncivil War (Nick Wall/Channel 4)

The Promise and The State. Kiri had all the agonising ingredients of a popular hit wrapped up in a four-part series. The desire to make waves again with costly political drama was clearly signalled as the new director of programmes, Ian Katz, settled into the job in 2018, with the greenlight for Brexit: The Uncivil War, a one-off £2 million drama adapting James Graham’s stage play, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Dominic Cummings, made by Tessa Ross’s recently-established House Productions. 2018 also threw up a fascinating hybrid – cut-price drama that worked. The channel’s factual legacy came into play with The Interrogation, a verbatim piece using police interviews with the Norfolk farmer Tony Martin, jailed for shooting and killing a burglar. Martin was released after three years in prison and the programme ended with a riveting interview with him outside his boarded-up house. This hour, basically four men sitting in a room around a desk, had cost around £350,000 – a quarter of the budget for a conventional drama. It was written and directed by Dave Nath, a BAFTA-winning factual director moving into drama through his own independent company. The executive producer was Jonathan Smith, director of The Family, the first rig show of consequence. Its success suggested that both local British stories and international co-productions about futuristic Mars space adventures had roles to play. This shift, in line with Channel 4’s UK partial migration to the regions and nations, was confirmed with the appointment of a new drama team, headed by Caroline Hollick and primarily based in the new National Headquarters in Leeds.

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n observer standing outside Sloane Square underground station on the evening of 6 October 2016 would have seen a stream of urban thirty-somethings striding towards the Curzon cinema in the Kings Road, where critics were out in force. It was the start of the London Film Festival, a screening of new Black Mirror shows – a series that examined satirically the influence on society of new technology. Six episodes were to be released exclusively by Netflix on 21 October, with another batch in 2017. The creators and producers, Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones, were at the Curzon to answer questions from the fans. The première began with a drama called Nosedive, directed by Joe Wright. It was a tale of a society where everyone is rated for their social status by points out of five and awarded privileges on that basis. So people neurotically strove for advancement, staring into their devices like addicts during and after social encounters, always rating others. It is a bleak comedy, and waves of rueful laughter rippled through the audience. Channel 4 had premièred the first Black Mirror season of three in December 2011. It was part of a big push that saw investment in comedy double, with an injection of more than £30 million. The shows were made through Brooker’s production company, Zeppotron, under the umbrella of Endemol, which had supplied 4 with Big Brother and Deal or No Deal. Brooker had made his name with a Guardian column and was now a Channel 4 regular, a stalwart of the live 11 O’Clock and 10 O’Clock Shows, nightly series mixing comedy with current affairs. In the interval at the Curzon, he was asked what Black Mirror meant. “When a screen is off it is like a black mirror and there is something cold and terrifying about that,” he replied. “People watching on TV, tablet, smartphone see themselves reflected when finished.” But these new Netflix versions of Black Mirror had cinematic scale. They were glossy cousins of the grainy first programmes that established the brand.

One of Jay Hunt’s big editorial decisions on joining Channel 4 had been deciding whether a subsequently headline-grabbing sequence in the first Black Mirror, called National Anthem, was suitable for transmission. She said yes. Broadcast in December 2011, it revolved around the British prime minister, called Michael Callow, waking to find that a member of the Royal Family has been kidnapped and will be killed unless he has sex with a pig on national television. The boldness and careful crafting of the story wowed the critics. “A dementedly brilliant idea,” said the Daily Telegraph. “The satire was so audacious, it left me open-mouthed and squealing.” It drew 1.9 million viewers and another million watched on 4oD catch-up. The three episodes were among Channel 4’s most talked-about shows among 16-to 34-year-olds and won Best TV Movie/Miniseries at the International Emmy Awards in 2012. A second run of three went out in 2013. Endemol said that Channel 4 had had the opportunity to recommission Black Mirror since 2013 but passed on it, and on subsequent co-production offers. The new head of comedy Phil Clarke (who had recently replaced Shane Allen) retorted that there was an offer of a two-series deal over two years on the table but he was not given the opportunity to come back with a final bid. Nor was 4 interested in buying secondary rights, to trail in Netflix’s wake. During the Curzon debate Brooker pointed to the “massive influx of cash” from Netflix that had enabled a lavish shoot and a top director. “It is very exciting. Netflix connects with a global audience, so we can be bigger, stronger, more international.” As well as far bigger budgets, the episodes could vary in length and were not interrupted by advertising breaks. “Anthology shows like this were waiting for a service like Netflix to come along because we don’t have cliffhangers, we don’t have recurring cast members or characters, so really the shows struggled in the TV ratings. The only way to drum up support was by running lots of trails.” This was a turning point, a warning of what was to come. Netflix flexed its global broadcasting biceps: Channel 4 was swept aside. Jay Hunt reacted ruefully to the loss: “If Tim Hincks had been at Endemol he would have picked up the phone to me and sorted something out. Black Mirror couldn’t be a more Channel 4 show. We grew it from a dangerous idea to a brand that resonated globally. Of course it’s disappointing that the first broadcast window in Britain is sold to the highest bidder, ignoring the risk a publicly-owned channel like 4 took in backing it.” It is easy to see why she was aggrieved. The channel had spent heavily from 2011 onwards on a marketing campaign, with posters at stations and on buses establishing Black Mirror as a hot property. It had paid its top tariff of £1 million an episode for the stand-alone dramas, which meant it could not have bid above £10 million for the new season. Although the audience ratings were not huge, they were absolutely Channel 4 pieces. But the story was as much about people as about money. Shane Allen’s view was that Hunt had never really got on with Brooker and his style of working unnerved her. Certainly it did not conform to 4’s standard practice, where scripts had to

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be agreed with commissioners before production began. Brooker did not want to have his homework marked by Hunt. Phil Clarke noted that Netflix had committed $40 million without, he said, seeing scripts. “For a public service broadcaster that would be insane.” Everyone learned a lesson. Channel 4 tightened up on contracts, taking a tougher commercial line with producers owned by studios or broadcasters than with genuine independents, by demanding more rights or reducing the proportion of funds they would contribute. This could be counter productive and had turned it in the eyes of some from the best place in town to do a deal to the most challenging – an impression confirmed in an annual survey of independents conducted by Broadcast magazine for 2016. As regards content, Hunt cooled on anthology dramas such as Black Mirror. She did try again, investing in Electric Dreams, a heavily-promoted Philip K. Dick season screened in 2017, a co-production with Amazon Prime. It turned out to be disappointing, a format that did not generate enough response to justify the cost or the trouble. It was as well that 4 did not rely solely on one big name in the comedy field. Allen’s eclectic approach and an inheritance from his quirky predecessor Andrew Newman had paid dividends. In 2011 the annual report said it had established a 12-point lead over rival channels for being best for entertainment programmes you would not see elsewhere, and a 14-point lead in the field of cult comedy – exemplified by Black Mirror. Allen was always trawling for new ideas and devised regular comedy showcase seasons to try things out. After he left to join the BBC the channel had to reset itself. The glow from the extraordinary success of The Inbetweeners and its spin-off movies would soon grow dim: an audience of 4.2 million viewers for a lads’ comedy was unlikely to happen again. But his successor Phil Clarke and audiences would benefit from the range of inherited comedy. Friday Night Dinner, a sitcom about an idiosyncratic North London family, was developed for E4 then commissioned for the main channel by Kevin Lygo in his final months. Family sitcoms had been rare on 4 but this was a success from its first outing in February 2011, because it was funny and featured familiar Channel 4 stars: Simon Bird (The Inbetweeners), Tamsin Greig (Green Wing) and Mark Heap (Spaced). It was written by Robert Popper, who had worked on Peep Show and The Inbetweeners, and was produced by Big Talk – run by Kenton Allen, an experienced operator who had overseen the BBC2 comedy Rev. Much loved by its fans, the fifth series of Friday Night Dinner ran in 2018. Then, fortuitously, a sixth series of one of this most-requested-comedy on All4, landed in March 2020, just as the pandemic struck. Clarke was on familiar ground overseeing one of the long-running and award-winning strands that would shortly come to an end. He had been the executive producer of the first episode of Peep Show in 2003, written by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, who were destined to play a continuing role in Channel 4 comedy. Produced by the Objective Media Group, it chronicled the life of two men progressing through their

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twenties and thirties. Mark and Jeremy, played by David Mitchell and Robert Webb, decided to end their flat share in Croydon with a final episode in December 2015, on Clarke’s watch. They returned in 2017 with the launch of a new comedy, Back, about brothers reunited at a funeral, which was recommissioned. Objective also supplied Fresh Meat, a weekday comedy drama about university freshers which ran from 2011 to 2016 at 10pm. Earlier it had provided an experimental and audacious comedy called Star Stories that satirised celebrities and their lives – until they ran out of celebrities. One episode, Top Shop Presents Kate Moss, featured “my rise, fall, rise, fall again, and then rise”. This disrespectful approach was resurrected under Clarke in 2016 with The Windsors, by the same writers, an audacious spoof of the Royal Family, which was revived as a one-off in 2018 to mark Prince Harry’s wedding. Pete Versus Life, following the misadventures of a young sports journalist in London, did well enough at 10  pm for two series. Less successful was Campus, a semi-improvised sitcom set in a university run by a crazed vice chancellor. It came from the stable of Smack the Pony and Green Wing but lacked charm. With an audience of only 554,000, it was cancelled. Another holdover from the Allen era was Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy for E4. Despite being dubbed “rudderless whimsy” by the Guardian critic Stuart Heritage, it returned in 2014 subtitled Tales from Painted Hawaii, in which Fielding built a canoe of vultures, which sank. Nerys Evans, deputy to Clarke, believes that these sort of commissions show that Channel 4 backs creative talent and that they have a halo effect of attracting new talent. “We decided a comedy brain like Noel is close to the genius of Spike Milligan experimenting with form.” Subsequently Fielding was picked to join The Great British Bake Off team as a foil to Sandy Toksvig, developing a persona of goofy charm, a touch of the big kid. E4 is an important channel, screening bespoke series alongside long-running acquired hits such as CBS’s The Big Bang Theory. Three series of Phone Shop, about a mad mobile phone shop in Sutton, Surrey, sprang from a 2009 pilot and ran on E4 between 2010 and 2013, popular with young adults. Fonejacker, a prank call comedy, ended in 2012, the year that saw the start of the award-winning sketch show, Cardinal Burns, featuring comedians Seb Cardinal and Dustin Demri-Burns. Recurring characters included the Office Flirt, New Boy and fashion interns sending up working life, as well as a parody of a reality show. It moved from E4 to Channel 4 for the second series. Bwark, the production company that had made The Inbetweeners, came up with E4’s Drifters, chronicling the lives of three young female friends living in Leeds, falling into familiar traps after university and gap-year travel. Before launch it was being hailed as the British equivalent of HBO’s Girls, which ran for six seasons from 2012, but its creator, Jessica Knappett, maintained that in most respects it was the very opposite. “We do not go to Manhattan warehouse parties. We gatecrash rooms above pubs and get scabies.” It ran for four series, from 2013 to 2016.

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A “funny fortnight” celebration of the channel’s thirtieth anniversary in 2012 dedicated forty-five hours to comedy, with eleven new shows combined with some classic series, led by Father Ted, Brass Eye and Spaced. The louche comedy Toast of London, an old-fashioned scripted sitcom about a jobbing actor (played by Matt Berry) was part of that line-up, and it eventually ran for three series. The pilot episode was one of the last things Clarke had co-produced before joining Channel 4, as well as representing the swansong of Allen, the man he replaced. Clarke is an experienced and resilient professional who had worked at Talkback, Peter Fincham’s independent, when Ali G was on the books, and helped to define its sharp alternative edge. His initial task was to convince Hunt that offbeat comedy was essential to 4’s branding and that she needed to continue backing a range of programmes for the long term, not just in short runs to wow the critics and win awards. She was little versed in the comedy development process, which requires much patience. For example, Morgana’s Very Important People, with a cast headed by Morgana Robinson and Terry Mynott, was an attempt to revive and update impressions on TV, in the steps of Rory Bremner. But Hunt cancelled it after one series against the wishes of the comedy team, who tried to persuade her that comedy shows hardly ever took off in their first series, but needed a second series to develop, and that it could take up to 18 months to write and film. You had to think long. Another early decision that rankled involved London Irish, also cancelled after one series. Made by Company Pictures and starring Ardal O’Hanlon, it featured four Northern Irish youths having predictably rackety adventures in London. It was crafted by Lisa McGee, previously a writer on the BBC3 cult hit Being Human and had been backed by Nerys Evans when she was acting comedy head before Clarke arrived. But there was an unusually bad taste joke, hinting at paedophilia, in the opening episode. The sponsor pulled out. Hunt said the run had to start with episode two, with episode one played second, which confused viewers. The audience fell away from 1.2 million to 700,000. Switching the order of comedy episodes never happened again on Clarke’s watch. Talented McGee came back in triumph in 2018 with Derry Girls, a resounding hit from Northern Ireland that had elements of a feisty female gang show, based on her childhood growing up in Derry, schooled by nuns. This was a break-out hit, immediately recommissioned: the international rights were snapped up by Netflix. Ricky Gervais’s comedy Derek, in which he played an autograph hunter who worked in a care home, was among those piloted in 2012. On the strength of Gervais’s reputation it ran for two series, with a final Christmas special in 2014. But it was criticised for not being funny enough and, by some, for its portrayal of mentally disabled people in a “mockumentary” handheld style of shooting that was uncomfortable viewing. Bad Sugar, written by Peep Show’s Bain and Armstrong, was stronger meat, a spoof melodrama featuring three top actresses – Olivia Colman, Julia Davis and Sharon Horgan – with Peter Serafinowicz from Shaun of the

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Derry Girls (Adam Lawrence/Channel 4)

Dead. It chronicled a wealthy mining dynasty with an ailing patriarch and greedy siblings. Made by Tiger Aspect, a full series was planned for 2013 but never materialised due to problems co-ordinating the schedules of the leading actors. The IT Crowd, written by Father Ted’s creator Graham Linehan and filmed in front of a live audience, ran for four series till 2010, and Channel 4 wanted more. The cast included Richard Ayoade as the clever IT technician and there were recurring guest appearances by Channel 4 favourites. It was commissioned for a fifth series but by then Linehan had moved on to writing Count Arthur for the BBC. He just wrote a Christmas special. Clarke’s arrival heralded a shift away from stand-up comedy to scripted shows. “I had a strategy,” he asserted. “It was all going to be narrative, more sophisticated, pushing the boundaries of what’s considered comedy. My opinion was it had got to the point that in the past thirty years alternative comedies had shocked everybody, said all the taboo things, done all the swearing. I believed what really shocked people nowadays was a brilliant story: you can still shock with a plot. Channel 4 comedy had to grow up and stop currying favour with a young audience – because a young audience just likes good shows. I loved Monty Python when I was a kid.” One result of his aversion to stand-up was the loss of Peter Kay. Channel 4 had launched his TV career in 2000 with That Peter Kay Thing, after he won their So You Think You Are Funny contest in 1997. He had regularly pitched them recuts of his stand-up shows, which easily attracted 3 million viewers, but Clarke did not try to keep him, reasoning that he had outgrown Channel 4 – a fledgling too big for

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the nest. So Kay followed Allen to the BBC. Clarke also backed off from animated adult comedy, pulling the final episode of Full English, a crude sitcom aspiring to match Family Guy and American Dad. In it, a member of the family married a gypsy, and he and fellow executives were concerned with possible accusations of stereotyping. The script of Catastrophe, the biggest critical success of this era, was offered to Channel 4 in July 2013. From her time at the BBC Nerys Evans knew the writer and performer Sharon Horgan, whose new project also featured the American comedian Rob Delaney. She followed him on Twitter. After reading a sample script Evans recommended it to Clarke, who shared her enthusiasm but asked for the pilot to be rewritten to stress the romance and fun of the couple’s early meeting before the awkward development – getting pregnant so early in a relationship – that shapes the rest of the story. The debut was scheduled for a Wednesday night in January 2015 at 10pm, after Grand Designs. It was watched by 1.1 million, increasing through catch-up to 1.8 million. Two series had been commissioned and the second was brought forward to October, to capitalise on its early success. Two more series followed. All six episodes of series three were released by Amazon in United States in April 2017. Horgan and Delaney landed BAFTAs and a Prime Time Emmy for best comedy writer. This was the change in direction that Clarke had promised. It was grown-up writing about two adults who loved each other yet faced problems – young children, job loss, alcohol addiction and the routine frictions of everyday life. After the fourth and “last for now” series launch in December 2018 Sharon Horgan said: “We are very proud to have made it, exactly what we wanted. We have said what we wanted to say about young kids and family, it is a super uplifting story about two people who stick together.” Congratulated by an audience member for making the sex so graphic and honest she added: “We don’t want sex to look pretty, just real and rank.” Rod Delaney said: “Channel 4 deserves a lot of credit in helping it to shape it.” Clarke liked to take artistic risks, bringing on new writers and making the point that comedy did not have to be a closed shop of established suppliers. His department had £1 million a year to develop new shows, but that amounted to little more than preparing two proper comedy pilots suitable for transmission. So he opted mostly for commissioning scripts and the £50,000 taster blaps, and he was prepared to sit down with writers and help them polish scripts. Flowers, a dark comedy starring Olivia Colman, Julian Barrett and Daniel Rigby, was one of the gambles. It was written by Will Sharpe, a newcomer to TV. Clarke had watched Sharpe’s first melancholy film, Black Pond, which won a BAFTA nomination, and recognised an emerging talent. Flowers was about a dysfunctional family living in the country, whose members included a depressed author of graphic novels, an unhappy mother and weird grown-up children. Sharpe wrote, directed and played a lead role. This was not a smooth production from pilot to broadcast: it was amusingly different and difficult to categorise, so Hunt stripped it across a week

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at 10pm, almost like a box set. After some discussion with her commissioners she reordered it for a second series, run in similar stripped fashion in 2018. It added a dash of a different flavour to Channel 4 and served to underscore its reputation for backing risky, distinctive programmes after the loss of Black Mirror. Clarke also knew Channel 4 needed what he called range – silly shows with lashings of slapstick exemplified by Man Down, starring Greg Davies as Dan, the infantile man who hates his job as a teacher. The first episode of series one opened with Dan losing his trousers. Rik Mayall played his dad and was due to have a larger role in series two, but he died in June 2014. The comedy lived on, though, with the fourth series in 2017 charting Dan’s initiation into becoming a family man. The co-tar was Roisin Conaty, who in 2014 created her own comedy show, Gameface, in which she played an aspiring actor struggling to cope with life. The first series was aired in 2017. Raised by Wolves was a semi-autobiographical comedy written by the Times columnist Caitlin Moran and her sister Caz, loosely based on their eccentric hand-tomouth homeschooled upbringing on a council estate in Wolverhampton. After a pilot in 2013 the first series was broadcast from March 2015 and attracted an average 1.3 million viewers – a 6.3 percent audience share, making it the second-highest-rating comedy of the year after Catastrophe. Hunt had wooed Moran from the start of her reign, impressed by her witty and frank book, How To Be a Woman, and her fast talking, which rivalled Hunt. Neither sister was a natural comedy writer but the TV series was knocked into shape by its production house, Big Talk. A year later the second series performed respectably but not so well as to persuade Hunt and Clarke to offer a third. Some believed this was partly because Moran had written an article for Radio Times criticising 4’s Benefits Street for, in her view, failing to represent people on benefits fairly. “It’s the only time I have seen people on benefits on television, but you didn’t get to hear them talking about their ideas on philosophy or politics, you didn’t get to see them being joyful – it was simply about surviving, and that made them look like animals. It didn’t show them as human beings.” Clarke rounded on her in turn. “My criticism of Caitlin was she took the stance that she was the only working-class comic voice on the channel – that we were public school. My department took that badly because we all went to comprehensive schools. She sort of burnt her boats. We gave her two series, we were really proud of them, even though they didn’t rate brilliantly. Editorially, my criticism was that everyone spoke with the same voice. She is an amazing writer but I would question whether she is a dramatist.” In such marginal cases Hunt, anxious to disprove her reputation as a petty tyrant, would sometimes put it to a vote of the commissioning team; so around eighty people were asked if they wanted Raised by Wolves to return. When the majority voted against it, a furious Moran tried to crowdfund a third series through a Kickstarter campaign. That failed, but it was picked up for pilot by ABC in 2017.

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Clarke had found a way to work with Hunt, whose high-handed method of taking control had been a shock to the comedy team when she arrived. In 2013 she had introduced a system of regular “creative breakfasts” in an attempt to stimulate discussion and spark ideas. “The way Jay liked to work, she made the final call,” he reflected. “My job was to decide what to lay out in front of her. Nerys and I behaved like a production company inside Channel 4. It was never a problem if she said no. If I really wanted to make it I would leave it a couple of months and go back and be a little more persistent. She is tough, dictatorial, all those things people have said about her. She is not a democratic leader: she was the monarch rather than the manager. The good side was that she took responsibility for decisions. All bosses are different: you have to find a way to work with them.” When it came to Royal Family spoof The Windsors he did just that. There was a script and a taster tape that did not win Hunt over. The producers were former Channel 4 drama commissioners who had quit soon after she arrived, and whose company, NoHo, was backed by ITV Studios. Clarke commissioned a second script and Hunt now agreed it was funny and gave it the green light. It was a hit. But nothing came of an initial discussion to remake Charles III, Mike Bartlett’s hit play of 2014 imagining how Prince Charles’s reign might go. It would have sat perfectly on the Channel 4 of a decade earlier, which had lampooned Tony Blair in the Comedy Strip, hypothetically tried him for war crimes in The Trial of Tony Blair (2007) and converted David Blunkett’s affair with Kimberley Quinn to a comedy drama in A Very Social Secretary. In the event Bartlett chose to go with the BBC. In another misstep, Scrotal Recall was aired in 2014. Armed with a list of his past lovers, a young man embarked on a quest to inform one old flame per episode that he had a recent chlamydia diagnosis. It ended on a cliffhanger, then got cancelled. “It didn’t work and we made a fundamental error letting it be called that,” said Clarke. But it was revived by Netflix and rebranded in 2016 as Love Sick – a more apposite title, since it was also about the sweetness of romantic nostalgia. For Clarke, such rebuffs and cancellations represented opportunity, a chance to try something new. In May 2016 the established comedy stars Jo Brand and Alan Davies won an order for Damned, a six-part “bitter sweet” series about two social workers in a children’s services department. It had been a pilot for Sky but not picked up, principally because this is an unlikely area for jokes. It was written by Will Smith, whose credentials included the BBC’s The Thick of It, and Morwenna Banks, who also acted in it. But the combination of wobbly camera work and some dark issues of neglect and abuse yielded few memorable moments, and it was cancelled after the second series. Brand, though, was selected as the host for The Great British Bake Off: An Extra Slice, promoted to an 8 pm Friday slot for the second series in 2018. Not a bad consolation prize. Successful shows that Clarke’s era brought to the screen included Lee and Dean, a 10 pm Friday night comedy about builders created by Mark O’Sullivan and Miles

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Chapman and designed to appeal to male viewers. It ran in 2018 and was recommissioned. In 2017 a comedy blap, Home, a heart-warming story about a family who bring home an illegal immigrant, resulted in a series broadcast in 2018 with a second ordered. One bone of contention was the lack of narrative repeats of comedy episodes, twice during the week on the main channel, which would have boosted the chances of viewers just stumbling on them. But Hunt, along with the scheduler Richard Brent, did try to help launch 10 pm comedies in helpful slots. There was by now no specific audience target for comedy, although anything that attracted fewer than a million viewers was unlikely to be recommissioned. Clarke recognised that the genre would seldom draw really large audiences but that comedy had to create a buzz. There were examples of mishandled talent in this era. Phoebe Waller-Bridge wrote two plays that were turned into a series for E4 called Crashing, about six young women acting as guardians in a grim disused hospital, made by Big Talk. But it was pushed forward to the main channel, where it died a death when premièred in January 2016. Clarke had wanted Waller-Bridge’s next project but the channel missed out as her new producer Two Boys took it instead to the BBC, where it became the BBC3 hit Fleabag. That projected her to international screen stardom, with a second series ordered for 2018. In between came Killing Eve, a slick eight-part thriller pitting an MI5 spy against a dangerous assassin. Funded eventually by BBC America, it premièred there in April 2018, and on BBC1 and iPlayer in September, was a huge hit and was recommissioned. A public rebuke for the TV production industry came from Michaela Coel, an actor born to Ghanaian parents, brought up in a City of London council flat and educated at a Catholic girls’ school. She trained at the Guildhall School of Music and was an aspiring auteur who also wrote poetry. A scout from the comedy producer Retort, part of Fremantle, saw her one-woman play, Chewing Gum Dreams, about the trials of Tracey, a sheltered young woman locked in virginal adolescence, which transferred for a brief run at the National Theatre. Retort thought Coel could develop a TV series around the character if some of the darkness was replaced with a feel-good factor. She was asked to make a comedy blap, which went straight to a six-part E4 series, with Hunt firmly backing it and Netflix screening it shortly afterwards. Clarke had personally devoted time to help Coel adapt the scripts, which he said had been delivered as plays, not television episodes. The comedy called Chewing Gum, in which Coel addressed the audience direct, ran in the autumn of 2015. “It was filthy, funny and Christian,” wrote The Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone. Vanity Fair called it “a unique thrill”. A second series was immediately commissioned in which she was continuing her personal development by working in a corner shop. But despite the buzz around series one, the sequel fell flat on E4 and it was announced that there would be no series three. Coel made waves with her very personal 2018 MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival. She disclosed that she had been the victim of a sexual

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Chewing Gum (Dave King/Channel 4)

attack that affected her writing and the delivery of series two. She added that the black cast had been treated poorly on set and when it came to accommodation. She claimed there was a lack of transparency in the industry, which had led to attempts to persuade her, as a newcomer, to sign away her rights. She painted a dark picture of the way vulnerable new talent was treated – and added that she still wanted to bring back Chewing Gum one day. During Clarke’s years at Channel 4, switching from producer/supplier to insider/commissioner, he had a close-up view of the changes and the financial strains highlighted in Channel 4’s 2017 annual report, stressing the need to share costs and to co-produce. As he prepared to leave after four-and-a-half years, to return to independent production, he noted: “Before I joined it was still a world where broadcasters paid for a show entirely. In the years I was there everything became a co-production, because editorially the expectations were way in advance of the money Channel 4 had. Every channel has to look for additional funding, just like film-makers. That has changed radically over five years.” Avalon did a deal with Amazon for Catastrophe: they put in £100,000 per show. With Flowers, NBC put in a quarter of the first budget, 50 percent for the second

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series, which was released on its Seeso online portal. So decisions on whether to renew or cancel were affected by the degree of external finance. “Comedy is a loss centre,” said Clarke. “I worry what’s going to happen to scripted shows.” No laughing matter. But he left in 2017 with a handful of successes and a smooth handover. Deputy Nerys Evans who had spotted Catastrophe’s potential went to Expectation at the same time, a high powered new independent founded by veterans Peter Fincham and Tim Hincks. Comedy commissioner Fiona McDermott, part of the team since 2011 was made comedy head, and she set about rebuilding the team. Her first hire was Jack Bayles, producer of the first three seasons of Catastrophe. Once again Channel 4 reverted to the time honoured practice of plucking a successful producer from the supply side of the street to join its commissioning ranks for a few years.

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nce in a while a film catches the popular imagination, drawing people out of their homes and into the cinema queues. So it was in 2008, when Slumdog Millionaire carried off eight Oscars and became a global sensation. This was down to its originality and heart-warming mix, contrasting the harsh lives of India’s underclass with the tale of a hard-pressed teenager who wins Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? And it ended with an uplifting group dance. The downside of this good fortune though was that it thrust its key backer, Film4, under a searching spotlight after a period of relative obscurity. This prompted two principal questions. First, why had this relatively cheap film, a stunning success, made so little money for the company that first spotted its potential but now was facing a severe slump in income and sacking staff? From that followed the broader issue of exactly how Film4 fitted into a commercially-funded TV channel expected to fund loss-making public service programmes. Slumdog grossed $378 million worldwide. Channel 4 put in a modest sum and made back just under $7 million: not even enough to fund its next annual film budget, as Tessa Ross, who had been running Film4 since 2002, revealed candidly. Film4 was an invention of the founders of Channel 4 and covered itself in glory during the broadcaster’s first two decades, triggered by films such as My Beautiful Laundrette through to Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and Four Weddings and a Funeral. It was the first broadcaster to back independent film, allowing a release in cinemas before screening on television. Over four decades it has become a vintage film brand, ensuring that British creators are sought after and respected internationally. By the end of 2017 it had backed 546 films. Its founder, David Rose, fulfilled Jeremy Isaacs’s and Richard Attenborough’s original commitment to use Channel 4 to revive British film-making, and took the plunge from single television plays to the big screen. David Aukin, who ran Film4 between 1991 and 1998, honed the approach of making bets on around fifteen films a year, because he knew hits could not be predicted with precision, although his background at the National Theatre helped him land talent. He oversaw a sustained run of successes, aided and protected on the commercial side by

Colin Leventhal. The films ranged widely in tone, including The Madness of King George, Peter’s Friends, Howard’s End, Ladybird Ladybird, Brassed Off and East Is East. Channel 4 executives recognised a golden touch and let him get on with it, increasing his budget to £30 million a year. But he was working for a broadcaster then raking in advertising, a decade before the digital revolution ate into that strand of income. Paul Webster, Aukin’s successor, had a rougher ride, and so initially did Tessa Ross. Eventually, after losing money on unsuccessful films, Film4 bounced back in 2006 with The Last King of Scotland, about the murderous Ugandan president Idi Amin, which would prove a slow-burning classic, singled out for special praise during Channel 4’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 2007. Forest Whitaker won an Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe for his performance as Amin, and the film, directed by Kevin Macdonald, won BAFTAs for best British film and best screenplay for Peter Morgan. Slumdog was an even greater hit, but did little for the channel’s balance sheet. The newly-formed sales house Protagonist – a three-way joint venture involving Film4, Ingenious and Vertigo – had its offices at Channel 4, but was too newly formed and never in the running to win the rights. Those went to Pathé and Fox Searchlight. Harry Dixon, a Film4 lawyer, commented: “Slumdog was humungous. It was the first time I remember someone coming down from the finance department and saying: ‘This thing is a hit – how much did we make? Why are we only making £4 million?’”1 In public Channel 4 exuded pride and sucked up the prestige. Slumdog crowned “an extraordinary year of critical success for Film4, reinforcing its reputation as the creative powerhouse of British film”, said the annual report – gushing yet true. But when Tessa Ross returned from two film festivals preceding the main awards season, with praise for Slumdog ringing in her ears, she was summoned to chief executive Andy Duncan’s office. She expected congratulations, but instead he told her that the Film4 budget was being cut from £8 million a year to £6 million, as part of Project Benson, the economy drive resulting from the slump in advertising. This could have threatened Film4’s ability to develop its own films. Rumours that Film4 would be axed then started to circulate, but Duncan had no such plan and David Puttnam, the deputy chairman, would never have allowed it. On the back of her success, Ross took the high ground: “As much as I am fighting for film and drama, I care mostly that this place exists for our children and grandchildren,” she wrote in Television, the Royal Television Society’s magazine. “Channel 4 has stood for the kind of programming and film-making I believe in.” She had optioned the book on which the Slumdog script was based – Q & A, by the Indian writer Vikas Swarup – with support from the creators of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? Danny Boyle, the director, insisted repeatedly that the film would never have happened without her; and he spoke out in defence of Film4 as the rumours of its potential closure circulated.

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She was successfully running Channel 4 drama when Mark Thompson, the incoming chief executive, asked her in 2002 to take over the rump of Film4. “It was a fairly dead beast when I took it on,” she recalled. “The press called it the ‘defunct Film4’ and it remained so for quite a long time. When he gave me the job Mark told me to ‘write off £10 million and get me some decent films’.” 2 But, as David Aukin noted, he had not ensured that she had an experienced film finance expert by her side in her mini-studio. A quiet period ensued during which her team developed potential films and scripts, around half derived from books. Over the next twelve years Ross redefined the brand, exercising her sound judgement and thirst for creative excellence, while constantly hunting for new talent. It was a brand that would abide by her rules: contemporary, original, no traditional costume or period drama. This differentiated it from BBC Films, which had followed Channel 4’s lead onto the big screen. “It was quite easy to know what was a Film4 project and what was a BBC Film,” said an industry insider. “Crudely, they were opposites.” Her method was to nurture projects, often for years. There was an emotional investment, the “Tessa input”, to films she developed and the people she rated and cared about. Sue Bruce-Smith, Film4’s business and brand manager, later deputy director of Film4 said: “She is a relationship person. She built a strong rapport with certain directors, who trusted her to lead them to success.” Film4’s reputation revived. By the time Slumdog was released the team was at full stretch. It was one of 16 new films released in a year. “I made Slumdog happen with the least amount of money I could because I had others in that year to make happen,” Ross explained. The others were In Bruges (Martin McDonagh), Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh) and Hunger (Steve McQueen’s celebrated debut film about the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands). “For me it was an idealistic thing. I believed our job as a public service broadcaster, as a public service arm of the British film industry, was to remain a constant supporter of British talent.” Her aspiration was to make Film4 a welcoming, open-door place, to attract gifted independents, so it could sift out the best stuff. “Stand for quality, so film-makers know their work will be protected, treated fairly: that was the vision.” She would also guarantee to take the next film and even the third from those she rated as rising stars, so they had some certainty of taking the next steps in a precarious business. She was working like a public funder in a commercially-funded broadcaster – and a broadcaster under stress. Ross had managed to convince Channel 4 that her contribution ensured a variety of returns, not all of them easy to measure – including the fame factor, the glow of prestige, the boost to Britain’s creative standing. For a relatively tiny amount – a net cost of about £5 million a year, she estimated – it was gaining the company and its audiences guaranteed access to £100 million worth of films, plus shelves of BAFTAs and Oscars. She cannot pinpoint exactly when Film4 also became about making money, but the change started to happen in 2006, after The Last King of

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Scotland. Critics within the channel began to suggest that it was unfair to have a public service pot of money without the financial pressure to make a return on investment on at least part of it, as some of the programme commissioners were expected to do. Film finance is a complicated business involving partners, who might put up the money in equity shares (ownership) or loans, while films can be made on different models: independently, or with the backing of the big studios that tie in distribution and marketing. Often Film4 would put in the crucial first money, alongside the Film Council, to kickstart a project by optioning a book and commissioning a draft treatment or script. A typical Film4 investment would run from around £200,000 to £1.5 million, which would include a down payment for the eventual TV broadcasts. Film4 was also able to tap into projects brought to it by Channel 4 commissioners. In the run-up to 2010, the arts commissioner, Jan Younghusband, hit on a strategy to invite artists, usually Turner Prize winners, to use the television screen as their canvas. In this way she introduced them to film directing. Steve McQueen, in conversation with Younghusband over a cup of coffee in Soho, realised they had hit upon the idea for Hunger. Sam Taylor Wood (Nowhere Boy, about the young John Lennon), and Clio Barnard (The Selfish Giant, inspired by the Oscar Wilde story) were both introduced to film directing by this route. Peter Dale, head of documentaries, championed Penny Woolcock, a director who would have an enduring influence on the channel, making the transition to TV drama with the ambitious 2017 school series Ackley Bridge, which used amateurs found through street casting. More problems were now surfacing. First, Channel 4 paid an inflated price for the TV licence to broadcast Film4 movies both on the main channel and Film4 channel – which had moved from subscription to being free in 2006, targeting younger adults. Under the abandoned Film4 Ltd model the licence could cost up to £1 million. By 2006 Film4’s investment was more typically split 50:50 between the TV licence and external equity funds. If they put £1 million into a film today, a third might be the TV licence – say £330,000 – when a more realistic value might be closer to £80,000. Abraham spotted the anomaly: “When I looked into the Film4 strategy, we were being very good to producers, but frankly we were not benefiting to the degree you would have expected. Of the £10 million we were spending we were losing half. To those who think we are public money, like BBC Film or the BFI, we point out that the money arises from advertising. The way it was accounted for internally, a little perverse, was that Jay Hunt was having to buy the movie to put onto the channel at an inflated rate. We were buying the rights at ridiculously high prices. The whole thing needed to be unpicked.” Ross said: “Jay Hunt was very wound up about this … she wasn’t different from any other channel head, just more vocal. You ran into someone not habituated to the culture of Channel 4.”

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Channel 4 schedulers were starting to push the more experimental Film 4 movies into graveyard slots. Also, as subscription and pay-per-view services grew, with the arrival of Netflix and Amazon, the value of a free-to-air broadcast declined because it was screened months after the films’ earlier releases. Film4’s staffers split their time and resources on proceeding with films they had developed themselves from scratch, and carefully selected third party projects it boarded later. The downside was that it was difficult for an independent film producer from outside to win financial support. It could seem like a club. For example, the acclaimed director Amma Asante, born in South London to Ghanaian parents, developed from being a child actor on Grange Hill to striking out with stories of mixed-race relationships. But she never won the team’s backing. Her first film in 2004 was picked up by ITV Wales, while the mainstream 2017 hit, A United Kingdom – about the mixed-race marriage of Ruth Williams to Seretse Khama, the future ruler of Botswana – was backed by the BFI and the BBC. “Although I have sent them all my scripts, apart from A United Kingdom, I have never done a Film4,” says Asante. “I met Tessa at festivals, but nothing ever progressed.” 3 In the mangled and rushed 2010 Digital Economy Act, Channel 4’s statutory duties were expanded to include and protect Film4 films and content. Its duties were now “the making of high quality films intended to be shown to the general public at the cinema in the UK” and “broadcasting and distribution of such films and content”. Said Ross: “That was the greatest achievement for Film4.” 4 She was pleased with the flexible wording, which did not stipulate that the films had to be certificated as British-made. Although Channel 4 received no subsidy to support this commitment, the incoming chief executive David Abraham restored its annual budget to £10 million in May 2010, then boosted it to £15 million, gaining approval from the new coalition government and its culture minister Ed Vaizey. “Under my watch investment in British film will continue to sit at the heart of Channel 4’s public service mission,” Abraham promised, winning a five-year guarantee from his board. His view was that Channel 4 could manage on its own, without subsidy. Three months later public support for British film changed dramatically, with a certain knock-on effect for Channel 4. In the “bonfire of the quangos” ignited by the new government, the Film Council was abolished, closing on 31 March 2011. The British Film Institute, protected by Royal Charter, took over financial support with a guaranteed slice of National Lottery funds, specifically to encourage British film-making. Recoupment was not the main objective: there was no formal requirement to make a profit. This was public money, in generous slabs. By 2015–16 it had been allotted £52.2 million. Recoupment was £4.6 million in that year, i.e. just 8.2 percent. New film investment was £23.57 million. Soon after joining Channel 4 Abraham visited an editing suite in Soho, where a third and final series of the smash hit The Inbetweeners – a lads’ comedy that orig-

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inated on E4 – was being readied. The original audience of 500,000 would peak at 4.1 million when the third series was under way later that year. “The evil geniuses showed me episode one, where a character loses his trousers,” he recalled. “They then said they thought we should do a movie.”5 He swiftly signed it off, not fully realising the scale of commitment. In fact the Channel 4 home entertainment business side already had the film project in hand with the Inbetweeners production company Bwark, run by Damon Beesley and Iain Morris. They had shot a taster tape. Shane Allen, the comedy commissioner, accompanied by his deputy Nerys Evans, had successfully argued the case for a further £500,000 with the acting chief executive Anne Bulford, though she warned Allen that the money would come from his budget. Martin Baker, the business director, was a key enabler. A DVD release after the film was a key financial component, and estimates of a profit started around the £5 million mark. The two wings of Channel 4 financed the production of The Inbetweeners Movie, about the gang on holiday in Crete. The deal and risk were unusual. It was a blatantly commercial film, not the sort of project customarily nurtured by Film4, though Ross’s team proved indispensable in the execution. No one dreamed that they had a runaway hit on their hands until it was audience tested. Released on 17 August 2011 (after exam results became known) it attracted repeat visits by groups of teenagers and was then sold as a Christmas DVD. Abraham said: “I sat down with Martin Baker and found a further £3–4 million to fully fund the movie-and we ended up with a £45 million box office hit. It was my first really big win, creative and financial. It taught me that if you take a bigger financial risk you make more money.” Allen was given a further £1 million to develop British comedy films, with Ross insisting that they should be included within the Film4 brand. By now Channel 4 had started tracking Film4’s annual returns in forensic detail for the first time. Between 2010 and 2014 these returns ran between 42 and 56 percent of outlay. But recoupment shot up to a dramatic 92 percent in 2011, thanks to The Inbetweeners. The follow-up, The Inbetweeners 2, was released in 2014, and did even better on its opening weekend, though it was the last hurrah for the franchise. The star and narrator, Simon Bird, said at the première: “Once you see the film you’ll see it feels like they have all moved on in their lives, so unfortunately this is it. It’s a great way to say goodbye.” David Puttnam believed Channel 4 missed the boat by not doing a fast three-movie deal at the start of the comedy’s TV success, as he had once done with On the Buses. In retrospect, though, this was a flash in the pan, rather than the basis for a new brand of films. It resonated best with young male audiences. The comedy film fund under Allen never delivered, despite Ross’s attempts to advise him, and he left for the BBC in a stormy exit in 2012. The lasting impact was that Film4’s model seemed misaligned with the channel, and its operations attracted closer scrutiny. Chairman Terry Burns wondered: “Who was this for? Was it the film industry,

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Channel 4, or Channel 4 audiences? The question was how to get a bit more discipline into it, to balance off between these things. The administration of Film4 was poor. I don’t think Tessa understood the meaning of accountability: she thought it meant interference.” Ross was perceived as difficult, adopting an aggressive attitude towards any challenge to her authority, while the board saw it as axiomatic that it had a right to probe. She came under increasing pressure to make the division sustainable, while she insisted that the creative aspect of film-making was more important than the financial outcomes. There had always been a question mark over how a television company – focused on daily broadcasting of programmes with short production cycles – accommodated a film unit, backing films which were not primarily designed for its schedules and might take a decade to arrive. Film4 movies when broadcast made a comparatively small contribution to audience ratings for a broadcaster heavily dependent on factual programmes. The halo effect could be huge, but very few films, perhaps one in twenty, ever become hits. Ross did present monthly accounts to the board. “I don’t think my behaviour was aggressive. It is certainly true I had one big row with David. He was very keen to examine a first-look deal with Sony, a studio, which would have limited our independence. I was sure it was the wrong thing to do. They never did that deal”. There was some cross-fertilisation: Ross had oversight on drama as well, giving the green light in 2007 to Shane Meadows’ hit film, This is England, which in 2010 morphed into a returning TV event drama, This Is England ’86, targeted at young adults. Utopia was developed as a potential film under Ross, and became a two-series TV drama, partly backed by BBC Worldwide, but with such violent scenes – mass killing and eye-gouging – that it had to be scheduled at 10pm. In 2018 it became a four-part global series for Amazon. Its director Marc Munden was one of the talented directors Ross encouraged: in 2008 he had won a BAFTA for The Mark of Cain, and another in 2017 for National Treasure. Film4 at 30 was celebrated in November 2012 with an iPad app. “It stands as a proud testament to the rich and enduring legacy of British film-making over three decades,” said the citation. There was also a promotional offer: “30 of its most iconic films from the past 30 years for 30 pence per film.” Ross’s delivery of a range of award-winning films and her patronage of rising British directors continued to win plaudits. There was Shame, starring Michael Fassbender, Chris Morris’s Four Lions, The Iron Lady – starring Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher – and The Selfish Giant. Another big success was 12 Years a Slave, released in 2013 and directed by Steve McQueen, his third film after his progression from video artist to the first black director to win an Oscar. It was garlanded with BAFTAs and Oscars in 2014, and was a showcase for British actors, principally Chiwetel Ejiofor, though telling a brutal American story. When McQueen walked into the Channel 4 headquarters bearing his Oscar, the staff crowded onto the front balcony to cheer him in. Yet there were also some sour comments – how he had

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heaped praise on Tessa Ross, rather than Channel 4. As with Slumdog Millionaire and The Last King of Scotland this was by any measure a successful film, and Film4 had its prominent credit on screen; but the equity stake was modest. Abraham had brought in Simon Bax, an accountant who had worked at Fox Filmed Entertainment and Pixar Animation, as a consultant and, by 2016, a non-executive director. He was an alumnus of the advertising agency Chiat Day, where Abraham, Dan Brooke and M. T. Rainey, who succeeded Puttnam as deputy chair of Channel 4, had also worked. Soon afterwards Abraham summoned Ross for a conversation about The Last King of Scotland, which is still delivering profits to the channel.6 He said it had not been a good enough deal. She replied that at the time it was the best way of making a film that no one else wanted. “We 50 percent financed it and as a result have earned money consistently,” she pointed out. When Abraham said they could have done better, she responded: “It’s like saying to an old girlfriend I didn’t really love you. You are going back ten years. It was a very good deal being mirrored in some of the studio deals now. I don’t know how you can do more without taking on more risk.” By now she was a revered figure in the film-making community but something of a Queen Bee within Channel 4. In particular, she never hit it off with Jay Hunt, who arrived in 2011, though she tried. Insiders said the channel was not big enough for two such domineering executives. Though Film4 and drama sat together the TV side was handed to Piers Wenger, a former producer who had joined originally to make films. In the 2013 annual report, released in May 2014, Ross described her strategy for the year ahead as “finding a way to maximise commercial returns from our films without harming the strong creative bonds we’ve nurtured with our talent and producers”. Measuring success was always a challenge. “Box office is one part, Channel 4 transmission another, but critical success is very important, too. If you have a film that hasn’t done well at the box office but wins some prizes, then that has hopefully nurtured someone’s career.” In 2013 Ross was awarded a BAFTA for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema. This coincided with news that Film4, 4DVD and Warp Films were to make The Stone Roses: Made of Stone, a documentary of the band as they embarked on a reunion tour. Shane Meadows, a devoted fan, had won access. It also coincided with the release of one of the longest-gestated projects, Under the Skin, jointly financed by Film4 and the BFI, with three other investors. It starred Scarlett Johansson as an alien in a white van, scouring the streets of Glasgow and picking up unsuspecting men and women for terrible fates. It was an expensive critical hit, named as one of 2014’s best films and loved by the big film festivals – Venice, London, Toronto – but it flopped at the box office, taking around $5 million globally. In May 2013 Rose Garnett had joined the team as head of independent development, and would later become creative director. She had been a key figure at London’s fringe Gate Theatre with David Farr who wrote the celebrated TV miniseries The Night Manager. She had spent years as a freelance script editor, work-

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ing with Sam Taylor Wood and, most recently, on the film Black Swan. Entering her 40s, the Channel 4 post was her first full-time employment. Katherine Butler was promoted to deputy head of Film4, having run the low-budget feature end, including in 2011 the powerful Tyrannosaur, about violent men on a northern council estate – a debut for the actor, writer and director Paddy Considine. She had also brought the Liverpudlian director Terence Davies back to the screen with The Deep Blue Sea. “We were told to find the best work in the country, be the cleverest people in the meeting,” Garnett recalled. “It was all about vision, authorship. It was only after a while I realised the pressures Tessa was under. She kept us very protected from the corporate side.” 7 Film4 premièred three typically diverse titles at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, headed by Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner, a biopic of the painter J. M. W. Turner, played by Timothy Spall. This was a box office success, unlike the other two – Ken Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall and Catch Me Daddy, a debut for Daniel Wolfe, who had formerly produced videos and commercials. That summer the inevitable happened. After a series of conversations with chairman Terry Burns, Ross realised that her time was up. She accepted the position of chief executive of the National Theatre – a post she held for only six months. Her exit from Channel 4 was marked by an awkward Edinburgh Television Festival session devoted to her achievements, with Abraham in support in the audience. Abraham explained: “Bluntly, it was not well known in the industry that we were losing 50 pence in every pound on the activities of the (film) division. Up until recently that loss was a valid part of the cross-subsidy model of Channel 4, which had to be paid for by the television division.”8 He was determined to find a different model, and instructed Ross’s successor, David Kosse, to make the films more commercial. Film4 would now operate with a profit and loss account, aiming to break even eventually, and in 2016 committed to reinvesting any profits back into film. Abraham said he was imposing aggressive profit targets. Ross reflected on the changed business plan: “I wasn’t the person to come in and do it. They had moved the goal posts. I was trying to do it in a gentler way. I couldn’t have undone my own work, having told the industry that what we care about is your difficult first film no one else would make, rather than your most commercial project the rest of the market wants. And that was undone 100 percent by Kosse’s business plan. It was not what I was set up to do, not the language I used, nor the vision … Everything I had done was through a proper sense of commitment and belief.”9 Garnett agreed: “Tessa had a film ecosystem that was talent-driven. Kosse and Abraham wanted a mixed ecosystem.” Her legacy stands at around 120 films, a clutch of popular and critical hits. Her priority was a deep development slate and a carefully chosen group of film-makers. It would be wrong to state that she did not understand the financial side of film-making, but her driving force was a belief in artistic potential. Kosse, by contrast, taught his staff about audiences, financial deals and recoupment.

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But the film industry was also changing fast. In 2013 the Chancellor, George Osborne, extended tax relief to British-made films and expensive drama. This attracted Hollywood’s big-budget films, while putting a squeeze on smaller British efforts in the £500,000–£30 million bracket. Fuelled by the tax break, inward investment by Netflix, Amazon and HBO boomed. British domestic film spend dropped as producers launched television divisions. Abandoning Channel 4’s previous flexible model, which had treated drama and film as overlapping creators of fiction under Ross, now seemed questionable, a backwards move. Kosse’s appointment as director of film was the result of an eight-month executive search. American-born but a British citizen, he joined from United Pictures International where he was President International, a post that was being switched from London to the USA. During a ten-year career at Universal he had built the company’s international marketing and distribution arm across sixteen countries, a sharp contrast with the film development and production focus of Film4 to date. “He will be responsible for seeking to maximise return on investment for Film4 titles both in the UK and abroad and exploring new partnerships and distribution platforms for Film4 content,” said the announcement of his appointment.10 This softly-spoken boss told his team that he had come to make changes. Carrying a sizeable commercial stick, he was in favour of backing a selection of films, some with bigger equity stakes in the expectation of higher returns for an early involvement. He would restructure the deals to Channel 4’s advantage so it was higher up the recoupment chain – known as “the waterfall” – compared with the BFI and its soft public money. “Tessa did a great job, and then they changed the rule book,” he reflected. “I felt it was an evolution. The pendulum had swung too far since 2003. Film4 was at a creative high-water mark, taking creative risks with a lot of small investments, without any commercial standing. It didn’t seem a fair deal, if by supporting the industry we might be subsidising Hollywood studios, on top of the film tax breaks of up to 25 percent being reaped for qualifying UK-produced films.” 11 The objective was to restructure the deals and make them smarter, while not compromising creativity. “They asked me how we could still work with great film-makers, still make great films, but not lose so much money, and then move to break even.” That was his task for 2014–16. To some of his Channel 4 colleagues, he seemed to be acting like a fixed-term change consultant. Others feared he was too schooled in the ways of the American studio system for the job. Garnett said: “Kosse was a dynamic, energised disrupter.” With Abraham, he embarked on a charm offensive to film-makers, stressing the virtues of working with more ambition and a fatter wallet on selected bigger projects. He also tried to convince them that any profits would be ploughed back into more film production. “The difficulty came because he moved from A to Z in a very blunt fashion, almost overnight,” said a major film collaborator. “He was

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a deals man, rather than an arbiter of material. He wanted simple big deals. He didn’t have a lot of tolerance for the vagaries of independent film-making.” Yet, in this move away from public funding, key elements of Film4 were retained, in line with Channel 4’s remit and commitment to diversity. A pot of £3 million was ring-fenced. First-time film-makers judged important to the British industry merited subsidy and benign treatment, as did low-budget films in two cost bands – £1–2 million and £3–4 million – if judged potentially brilliant or challenging. Ross observed that the adjusted model, potentially not as attractive as previously, ran the risk of diminishing Channel 4’s chances of hooking the best rising talent and film proposals. As part of the overhaul, licences for TV screenings moved onto a variable rate more in line with the advertising they might attract, or in some cases disappeared entirely. Kosse struck a development deal with Fudge Park (the new company formed by The Inbetweeners movies team) for four light-hearted films aimed at young adults, and with their distributor the British Entertainment Films Production Company, which delivered its first film in 2018. In a second Kosse high-impact deal Film4 partnered with Fox Searchlight in a 50:50 finance arrangement for the drama Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, by Martin McDonagh, nurtured by Film4 from short film Six Shooter to cult hit In Bruges. Once he had seen it cut in May 2017 Kosse predicted, correctly, that it would be a brilliant movie, and even wagered it could make a return of $20 million on an outlay of $7 million. With the BFI, Film4 also backed American Honey, the coming-of-age road movie directed by Andrea Arnold, a rising British film-maker. She won the 2016 Cannes Jury Award for the film, which found an enthusiastic audience among millennials. Channel 4 had kickstarted her move into writing and directing films in 2003 with Wasp – a short feature set in her native Dartford, Kent – followed by Red Road, Fish Tank (both backed by BBC films), and Wuthering Heights, which flopped commercially. The first film in which Kosse took a new position was Free Fire, a Boston gangster movie shot in Brighton, starring Cillian Murphy and Brie Larson, laced with black humour but lacking much in the way of a plot. Released in 2017, it was directed by Ben Wheatley, another Film4 protegé, with Martin Scorsese as executive producer. It was a disappointment at the box office. More opportunistically, Film4 had put in funds to enable the completion of Amy, the documentary about the tragic life of Amy Whitehouse by Asif Kapadia, another Film4 alumnus. This was a smart financial move – championed by BruceSmith – gaining a licence on what would become a classic. In February 2015 Kosse signed a development deal with Jonathan Glazer, whose directorial debut with Film4 had been Sexy Beast in 2000, starring Ray Winstone. Kosse spent only £10.8 million of his £15 million budget in 2015. In 2016 this rose to £22.4 million of the £25 million budget.

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He had inherited a fine, typically diverse slate from Ross: the nominations list for best British film and best director at the British Independent Film Awards 2015 consisted entirely of Film4 talent. The admired films included Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster, Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years, Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth, Alex Garland’s hit Ex Machina, Ben Wheatley’s High Rise, Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette, debut director’s Louise Osmond’s Dark Horse and John Maclean’s Slow West. 2015 also saw the release of Carol, one of the films Ross was proudest of, starring Cate Blanchett, about a hesitant romance between an elegant New York socialite and a department store worker, which won six Oscar nominations, alongside The Duke of Burgundy and Second Coming. Serious success arrived with Room, the Film4 movie of the novel about a mother and son held captive in a shed for seven years, which won an Oscar for the actress Brie Larson. Its director, Lenny Abrahamson, was another Ross protegé, though the film’s success highlighted Kosse’s marketing skills, and it had fallen to him to give it the green light. Garnett had worked closely on the film, which attracted a healthy audience of 1.2 million when it had its small-screen première on Channel 4 in March 2017. All these films bar Amy were a direct creative inheritance from Ross and her team. In September 2015 Channel 4’s board had formally agreed a “Supercharging Film4” strategy to increase the return on investment in original British film by taking a bigger share in more commercial projects. It approved the principle of investing at an increased level from 2016. 12 As the now £15 million annual budget agreement expired, the board, under its new chairman Charles Gurassa, increased it to £25 million, expecting the additional funds to be deployed in a more commercial manner. It represented a 150  percent increase on the original £10 million, riches never available to Ross. Channel 4 also gave £1 million to support the National Film & Television School. These moves were announced at a reception at the glamorous West End restaurant Hix in February 2016, held to celebrate Film4’s record of 22 BAFTA and 15 Oscar nominations. In the room were the people who had made them. Kosse commented that the current slate of films were to an unprecedented extent made by, with or about women.13 But although Ross was among the guests neither Abraham nor Kosse mentioned her in their speeches, even though these movies were her team’s legacy. Several guests expressed shock at the omission – a manifestation of the Hollywood mantra: “You don’t get to inherit.” Film4 went on to option Neal Bascombe’s novel, The Grand Escape, about three World War One British pilots escaping from a German prison camp, with the team which made Room. Kosse also approached Amma Asante about backing her next film after A United Kingdom, but eventually told her it was not one for Film4. A month after the extra funding was made public Kosse announced that he was leaving Film4 to set up a new London-based film studio, STX Entertainment. He was asked to remain as a consultant for six months, until autumn 2016. An embar-

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rassed Abraham said of his move: “He has done a phenomenal job and it would have been lovely to have him for another year or two.” Lord Burns, too, regarded it as a big loss. Kosse explained: “I had the chance to build an international film and distribution company with a well-funded business plan. It is rare for funding, plan and the people to line up like this. I just had to jump at it. I made a big impact at Film4 and want to leave it in good hands.” Ross said of Kosse’s brief tenure: “He is commercial, and he made very clear commitments as to where his success would lie. But the mistake has been not understanding what it took to make it work. What he did was brutal in terms of deals – the Film4 team were reeling for quite some time. But he is also very clever, very much a studio man.” She thought he might have misunderstood the scope of the Film4 post. “I made it look like a shinier job than it was. But when you come in at Film4 you sit in an open plan office and your job is meeting all the producers, directors and writers who want a conversation. You are a public servant, opening the door to as many people as possible. That is not a shiny job with a private jet and decent salary. It was not what he thought it was.” The unforeseen vacancy could have been an opportunity to promote Rose Garnett; but it was not opened up to competition. “We didn’t know David Kosse was leaving until we knew Daniel Battsek was hired,” said one of the Film4 team, angry that they had been cut out of the process. Battsek had previously been earmarked as a potential executive to run the BFI’s film fund, according to Ed Vaizey, the culture minister; so he was viewed as a catch. He is the elder brother of the documentary film-maker John Battsek, brought up by a father who was a film buff and ensured his children watched all the classics. After college (Oxford Brookes, where he ran the film society) he made a career in the film industry, but not writing or directing. At the time, the late 1970s, the industry was in the doldrums. “On my first traipse down Wardour Street, I thought the business was dead,” he said. “People thought television was taking over.” A fan of Australian movies, he went to Sydney where he broke into the film sector, and on his return to London he found things had changed: “One of the first memories I have of being an active member of the British film industry was watching My Beautiful Laundrette. My life intersects with Film4, and now I am here.” Between 1985 and 1991 he worked for Palace Pictures, before moving to New York. In 2005 he became president of filmed entertainment at Miramax Films, from which No Country for Old Men emerged, after Harvey and Bob Weinstein left. Between 2010 and 2012 he was president of National Geographic Films, then of Cohen Media Group. Distribution, production and acquisition were his forte. He said he aimed for continuity at Film4, “so we remain right at the forefront of award winning and being commercially viable, so those two things co-exist side by side”. 14 Denying that he would modify the Kosse changes, he said: “I am being realistic and pragmatic about the way we produce movies. I am not moving away: it is a very solid and smart structure. We need to be practical. I didn’t grow up as a lover

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of film finance but it is a vital part of what I do running Film4. I have to have a left brain/right brain going on, where I am making decisions for heart and head reasons.” But Garnett, a key creative force, left to run BBC Film in February 2017, only months after he arrived. The BBC had been tracking the declining morale within Film4, stalking the talent that could be attracted across. The view at Channel 4 was that Abraham made a mistake in not keeping her. Battsek recognised that there had been a hiatus, “a dip trying to reset Film4”, as film-makers grappled with the changes. “That was not the most creative time, and things just lulled a little.” Tellingly, the 2017 Oscars and BAFTAs ceremonies came and went leaving Film4 empty-handed. The outstanding British film of the year was Ken Loach’s campaigning I Daniel Blake, backed by BBC Films. But the announcements of new Film4 projects began to accelerate. Battsek brought with him a personal project: an option on Stoner, the vintage John Williams novel about the life and passions of a poor farmer’s son who becomes a devoted English literature professor, trapped in a failed marriage and dispossessed of his only daughter. In February 2017 he announced his first significant deal, acquiring the development rights to Graham Swift’s 2016 novel, Mothering Sunday, set in the 1920s. Mike Leigh’s project, about the Peterloo massacre of 1819, was in production during 2017/18 and released in November 2018 as was (Film4 co-financed) Steve McQueen’s fourth film, Widows, a story of four armed robbers killed in an attempted heist, starring Viola Davis with Elizabeth Debicki supporting. But these were eclipsed by The Favourite from Yorgos Lanthimos, his third and most successful movie with Film4. It also took a stake in developing a film with an American theme, Burning Rainbow Farm, the true story of two gay marijuana activists in Michigan, killed in a shoot-out in 2001. Battsek worked hard at trying to reassure his creative team. I see my role as to protect the Channel 4 and the Film4 remit; to find new voices, diverse voices, low-budget film-making to create the next wave of British film-makers that Film4 has always been in the vanguard of supporting: the next Danny Boyle, Steve McQueen. We are doing films, not creating programming for the channel. We are very disciplined about what we put in, and estimate how our investment will perform, but with the freedom to vary it according to the merits of each project. It is risky in that we have to place some bets.

Film4 staffers carried on building relationships with aspiring film-makers: “The hope is that people we give a start to will want to come back here,” said Battsek. “We are a mix. We are in the business of getting movies made. We have to stay flexible.” The virtuous circle – successful films making profits to subsidise the others – remained the goal.

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Our overall strategy in every film is to take a position where our money is protected as best it can be if the film doesn’t work, and to give us a real chance to make a profit if it does … I wasn’t here when things shifted, and perhaps there was a misunderstanding amongst some people. The key thing is that film-makers understand we are a not-for-profit organisation. This isn’t money going to shareholders, or into executives’ pockets, this is money being funnelled back into film-making. It is vitally important we support our film-makers – we need auteurs, alternative voices. Ultimately the best thing for British film-making is for more commercially viable movies to get made. And that is certainly what my guiding light is.

Under Battsek it is back to the recipe of twelve-plus films a year, with a budget of £25 million guaranteed during the current Channel 4 licence. These would be a mix of remit films and commercially viable films, some made through deals with studios and others as independent productions. Abraham told the May 2017 conference of the British Screen Advisory Council: “We are backing more films, but not in proportion to the budget increase [150 percent]. We have seen gradual and encouraging signs of delivery of self-sufficiency [targeted for 2020]. It’s not fully formed yet, but we are well on the way.” The 2017 Cannes Film Festival selected five British films, four of them from Film4. They were Yorgos Lanthimos’s grim The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here – both in the competition for the Palme D’Or – and John Cameron Mitchell’s How to Talk to Girls at Parties, screening outside the competition. The fourth, Rungano Nyoni’s I Am Not a Witch, played in the Director’s Fortnight. It was at Cannes that the debate was ignited about the role and eligibility of film-style dramas paid for by Netflix and Amazon, which bypassed cinema. The respect that Film4 commands in the industry was demonstrated in 2015, when Kosse was approached by the T2 Trainspotting producers and offered a chance to invest £1 million in the film to buy the television rights. They explained that the original team, especially director Danny Boyle, simply wanted Film4 in the credits. Even in the dog-eat-dog world of film, the Channel 4 brand could inspire reciprocal loyalty from the Britons it has backed since 1982. The problem was that, lacking box office hits over the past few years on the Slumdog Millionaire scale, it was again becoming invisible to the public by 2017. Research for Ofcom, published in that year found that the Film4 channel was losing out to the subscription on-demand services. It noted: “Many people were not aware Channel 4 actually makes films.” The first production to come out of the new strategy did assist in rescuing the profile. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, with its mix of dark comedic tone and humanity starring Frances McDormand wowed both audiences at the Venice, Toronto and London Film Festivals, just when it was needed, and those

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who go to the movies, winning five BAFTAs and two Oscars. It took £121 million worldwide at the box office, giving Film4 an immediate profit in excess of £10 million and growing, as it moved into the category of a much-viewed classic. Finally, David Abraham had the chance to gloat: “I think it’s fair to say that the new strategy is working so far.” This was confirmed with a second strong year in 2018 headed by The Favourite, winning outstanding British Film of the Year from BAFTA, whose star Olivia Colman – playing an actively lesbian Queen Anne – was crowned leading actress. Tessa Ross, with former Film4 executive Juliette Howell, by now was running a successful production business, House, with a mission to transfer the flow of ideas and creative talent between film and television, continuing their Film4’s vision. House Productions made Brexit: The Uncivil War starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Dominic Cummings. David Kosse became vice president of Netflix’s new film division in 2018. The Film4 journey is an example of how Channel 4, at best, can adapt its model without in this case trashing its heritage.

Notes 1 Harry Dixon interview, 27 March 2017. 2 Tessa Ross interview, 27 March 2017. 3 Amma Asante speaking at BSAC conference to Maggie Brown, 3 May 2017. 4 Tessa Ross interview, 27 March 2017. 5 David Abraham interview, 16 October 2016. 6 $400,000 in 2016; source Tessa Ross and Harry Dixon. 7 Rose Garnett interview, 8 November 2017. 8 Royal Television Society’s Television May 2016. 9 Tessa Ross interview, 27 March 2017. 10 Press release, 4 August 2014. 11 David Kosse in interviews, May 2017. 12 Channel 4 board meeting, 22 September 2015, “Supercharging Film4”. 13 2015 C4 annual report. 14 Daniel Battsek interview, 13 March 2017.

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19 NEWS

G

ray’s Inn Road, where Channel 4 News originates, is only a couple of miles across London from the corporate headquarters in Horseferry Road, but the cultural chasm between the two often seems a lot broader than that. Although the hour-long 7 pm bulletin has been a staple of the channel since its launch, the people who create it have frequently felt misunderstood and undervalued – not to mention underfunded – by those who construct the schedule around them. With the move of the channel’s national headquarters to Leeds with a bureau and studio for Channel 4 News included it seemed an open question whether hopes of a more harmonious relationship – less tense – could be fulfilled. “We’ve always been separate, not part of the rest of the channel. Look at the BBC’s news – always promoting its programmes – or Sky News reporting on the latest Premier League match. We don’t want any of that drifting onto our programme,” said editor Ben de Pear. To which Dorothy Byrne, the no-nonsense head of news and current affairs responded, “That is obviously untrue. Channel 4 News is under the direct editorial control of Channel 4, as laid down in a very lengthy contract. What is given to ITN is a day-to-day editorial control. We have editorial control of the programme.” Perhaps the lowest point had come a decade earlier, in the summer of 2009. On 5 August it was announced that economies demanded that Channel 4’s News at Noon and More4 News at 8 pm had to be sacrificed. Ben Cohen, technology correspondent, tweeted at 9.26am about a prospective “grim staff meeting”. At noon 149 people were told formally that thirty posts were affected. No hint of this had been dropped in May when the chairman and chief executive had been grilled by the parliamentary Culture, Media & Sports committee about the channel’s future. But Andy Duncan said advertising was likely to fall by 18 percent in the first half of 2009 and the programme budget would be cut by 10 percent. The arrangement with the news supplier, ITN, would be changed to a one-year rolling contract. John Hardie, the newly-appointed chief executive of ITN, said it had all happened very suddenly: “In my discussion with Andy he said he thought he had

a good chance of a subsidy. That didn’t happen, and very quickly he launched into ‘we must save money’ mode.” The board had been notified of the cuts to news at its July meeting preceding Duncan’s sacking. A thirty-day consultation period opened. In the end there were twenty not thirty redundancies, and the noon bulletin was reduced to a round-up, but More4 bulletins ceased at the end of the year. The official line was that the cuts had been essential to “preserve the reach and impact of Channel 4 News, by concentrating resources on the main bulletin”. The announcement added that it was the intention to invest extra in online news. More4 News was a half-hour bulletin that had been in place since the launch of the channel in 2005. It attracted modest audiences: a low of 33,000 in May 2009. By now Channel 4+1 was established, repeating the 7 pm bulletin at 8pm, so they clashed. But News at Noon was different. It had started in 2003 during the Iraq war, replacing the current affairs show Powerhouse, though its audience was small. The saving cut £5 million from the £28 million annual news budget. A week after the announcement, a meeting was called to allow the journalists to have their say. Kevin Lygo, programme director, and Dorothy Byrne, visited ITN’s Gray’s Inn Road studios in a flinty mood. Hardie took them into the packed meeting room and Lygo began his explanation. Rachel Jupp, the National Union of Journalists’ mother of the chapel (and a future Panorama editor) thanked him politely and read out a letter agreed by her members: “We believe you have made a terrible mistake that is bad for our viewers, staff and public service broadcasting. We have lost count of the times we have heard you say the news is at the heart of Channel 4. We have been a loss leader for the channel, but one which helps give the channel its identity and reputation … and we have repeatedly heard from Andy Duncan about a ‘public service future’, which would see the channel’s public-service remit grow. So we do not see why a channel which claims to be a public service broadcaster is cutting half of its news output. It seems like an extraordinarily short-sighted decision in the current political climate – and one that will make the privatisation of Channel 4 much easier, should a Conservative government be elected next year. The loss of More4 News and News at Noon has not been justified to us or our viewers. And as the people who put out the news, we believe your decisions will damage the flagship programme. Because to pretend that you are protecting the main 7 pm programme from damage is a delusion. News at Noon and More 4 News do not operate in isolation… . These programmes are where stories are broken every day, news lines are generated and talent is grown. They make the 7  pm programme better. To be cutting half the posts for general reporters, a third of producers, programme editors, pictures editors and cameramen will make the 7 pm programme worse. … Finally, we just want to express how sad and painful this is for us. We have been very proud to make Channel 4 News the service it is. We feel you had other options, other things

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you could have cut… . And it is not too late to do something about it. But for now that is all the members would want to say. And we agreed that having read this statement, we would all now like to return to work.

With that they stood up and exited in silence, leaving the trio facing an empty room. Hardie observed that the journalists had denied themselves a discussion. In any event, the decision stood. At this point some young rising stars were lost, among them Sudanese-born Nima Elbagir. She wanted to be a foreign correspondent but there were now no vacancies. She would go on to a distinguished career at CNN with award-winning reports on refugees attempting to flee from Libya and Egypt to Italy, and the abducted girls of Chibok, Nigeria, victims of Boko Haram. Had she stayed, she would have proved an asset to Channel 4 News. At the Edinburgh Television Festival later that month Byrne denied that the news division was in crisis and described More4 News as a “lovely extra”, insignificant in terms of competition with the BBC. Reducing News at Noon was part of the broader decision to slash daytime programme costs to defend the evening schedule. “Channel 4 News is the main show and we can still fund it.” She conceded that the channel had not spent enough on its digital news strategy and pledged to keep fighting for more resources for online news. This was a major challenge over the next years, as was serving younger viewers, and Ofcom applied pressure. In 2009 Channel 4 News had 836,000 viewers on average each night, a 4  percent share of audiences, skewed towards young, minority and upmarket viewers. In the following two years Jay Hunt oversaw wholesale changes. It was an era of no sacred cows. News staff, ever suspicious, believed that, despite her news training, she was no friend of their programme or of current affairs. It was common knowledge that relations between her and Byrne were poor, and this created tensions. They were both, in their own ways, formidable characters. Byrne, a single mother, battling health problems and approaching 60, had no intention of joining the ranks of departing female commissioners: the furore over Miriam O’Reilly’s age discrimination victory against Hunt acted as a check. “The odd thing about Jay, she did not regard her time in BBC News as a career asset,” said a colleague. “She never took pleasure in it. Much more relevant was her time running BBC Daytime, Channel 5 and BBC1.” Another explained: “She is past the liberal consensus that dominates large chunks of our TV business.” She worried about falling ratings and complacency, and placed a higher value on audience figures than on winning awards. “Channel 4 News, like many aspects of Channel 4, can be unbelievably smug … like a small collegiate university or The Guardian.” Nor was Hunt an unconditional fan of Jon Snow, who consistently maintained that she wanted him out. She categorically denied ever trying to oust him and said there was no foundation of fact to this rumour, but certainly wanted to change and

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expand the line-up. Professor Charlie Beckett of the London School of Economics, founding director of Polis, the think tank for research around international journalism – and a former C4 News programme editor – contextualised it: “The polite way is to say they were preparing for succession. They didn’t want it to be a one-man show in the American mould. If it was the Jon Snow News you knew you would get a liberal take on the world.” Meanwhile, its audience continued to melt away from 810,000 in 2010 to a low point of 611,000 a night and a 2.9 percent share in 2013. Hunt was in an unenviable position. There was no doubting the quality of the product, which had confirmed its high reputation as it pursued horrifying accounts of crimes against the Tamil population of Sri Lanka, the abduction and trafficking of women in Mexico and the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in Haiti. Jon Snow took a leading role in bringing the Sri Lanka massacres to a wider world and was repeatedly named news presenter of the year by the Royal Television Society. Yet what did all this prestige amount to when people increasingly declined to watch? It meant that the channel’s more popular programmes, starting at 8pm, had no legacy of an audience to build on. This is how one of the presenters saw it: “They became obsessed about why we were losing viewers: there was a natural seepage and consistent slow decline in viewers across the board as people got news from the Internet. There was a sudden worry – were we behind the times?” Research showed that the core audience remained loyal but few. Less committed viewers preferred the BBC and ITV’s less demanding approach. BBC1 had upped the challenge from 2007 by screening its news magazine, The One Show, at 7pm. Moreover fans of Hollyoaks, which ran from 6.30 pm to 7 on the main channel, were encouraged to desert to E4 at 7 for the next episode. Hardie and Hunt had a heart-to-heart. “She said they wanted to redefine the news,” Hardie recalled. “Their sense was that it had been terrific, but had been the same for a long time – a programme designed a decade before and maybe not firing on all cylinders. The challenge was how to make domestic news more relevant to viewers, alongside foreign and political news.” She still wanted “oppositional ideas” but within a refreshed, slicker programme, and a reduced role for the silver-haired Snow. “I was a massive fan of diversity in the news presenter line-up,” she explained.1 One further problem was attitude. Channel 4 News is like the BBC’s Newsnight – neither respectful nor client-focused. It hums away in its own territory, at this time a claustrophobic basement where no natural light penetrates, while the rest of 4 sat in its glass palace across town. This sense of separation was built into the arrangement, because there was no plausible alternative supplier, although two previous chief executives, Michael Jackson and Mark Thompson, had looked at options a decade earlier. Jackson tested the water with a pre-tender process to which Associated Press and Barraclough Carey, a production house, responded; and in 2002 Thompson toyed with using a possible Sky News feed.

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The reboot was disruptive and long drawn out. The first phase was about presentation and format. The show was quietly relaunched from a restyled set in September 2011 as a double-headed presentation, with an unhappy Snow reduced from five to four days a week. “She wanted to sack me,” he told anyone who would listen, including this author. The smart Krishnan Guru-Murthy, who had presented the News at Noon and was a main presenter, was handed a key role on Fridays introducing and sometimes featuring in Unreported World. There was an offer of voice coaching to some on-screen talent to make them sound less assertive, more conversational. In the biggest change, forced through by Hunt, Matt Frei was recruited from BBC World News America to be a co-presenter. He was widely viewed as the pretender to Snow’s crown, and producers of news and current affairs specials soon twigged that they were more likely to be commissioned if Frei was in them. They co-existed. Snow had his supporters. “He is the David Attenborough of news,” observed an ITN insider. A ceaseless networker, humanitarian, supporter of a myriad charities, his portrait hanging in the National Portrait Gallery, in touch with students thanks to countless campus visits … he seemed and was untouchable. Professor Beckett explained why: “When I talk to young people and ask which journalist they like … they go for this 70-plus white-haired bloke. They love Jon Snow because of his enthusiasm, energy, non-patronising tone. They know he is biased – they like that – he has heart and soul, he can write brilliantly and he has vulnerability, a slight childishness. He isn’t the classic know-all journalist.” Meanwhile the quest was on for an established female as the fourth presenter but none of the big beasts approached at the BBC agreed to join. Hunt alighted on Cathy Newman, the political correspondent recruited from the Financial Times, so she was selected instead and extensively trained by Ian Blandford, Hunt’s husband, to reduce her rather stiff on-screen presence. Blandford ran a company specialising in the art of presenting: he had experience as both news director and a programme presenter, which was unusual. Clearly people meet in their jobs and marry. His use at the BBC by Hunt had raised eyebrows. At 4 he was brought in at around the same time to coach the channel’s Paralympic presenters as well as news hounds. Hunt said: “the board and David Abraham were kept informed about my husband’s career, it was declared to the board every year of my employment at 4. The work at Channel 4 News and on the Paralympics did not involve me in any way and in the latter case was the outcome of a formal competitive tender process I did not sit on.” Newman was enthusiastic about her style overhaul: “He gave me confidence to be myself, but in a slightly enlarged version. It is a big leap from correspondent to presenter. Dual presenting was quite a big change. Previously a second presenter read a few links, dealt with the news belt [headlines, catch-ups] and would not get to do interviews. Now the number two is properly integrated. Jon by and large does the top interview, but not always. It is much more of a team.” 2 She had some

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missteps as her profile was raised – including tweeting about being turned away from a South London Mosque on an open day, when she had turned up at the wrong place – but she developed into a strong screen presence, with a particular interest in women’s issues. At the same time Michael Crick, one of the original 1980s news team, was rehired from Newsnight as political correspondent. A specialist in energetic doorstepping and asking awkward questions, he made an immediate impact with items about Newsnight’s mishandling of the Jimmy Savile story and its wrongly naming the late Lord McAlpine, a former Conservative Party treasurer, as a paedophile – events which led to the resignation of George Entwistle, the BBC’s director-general. This first revamp deviated from the programme’s traditional values by doubling the number of stories to twelve or thirteen, copying mainstream bulletins, and adding items of “news you can use” and shorter filmed reports. The changes were based on the notion that the teams took too long over stories, there was too much foreign coverage and too little of what the average viewer wants. Ratings continued to tumble, though. As Hardie put it: “Candidly, it hadn’t set the world alight.” The newsroom by now was in revolt, angered by the loss of ten people, including the presenter Samira Ahmed. A move to strengthen arts coverage with Matthew Cain, the arts editor recruited from The South Bank Show, petered out and he resigned to write novels. By the end of 2011 Jim Gray, editor for fourteen years, had also left, to resurface at the BBC, while his deputy Martin Fewell, a contender for the top job, quit for the Metropolitan Police. They had been stern taskmasters with a beady eye for details and the structure of the running order; but their departure emphasised the schism between the news team and the Horseferry Road hierarchy. Enter Ben de Pear, the rumbustious and straight-talking foreign editor recruited from Sky News in 2005. He had a habit of stalking around the newsroom in big woolly socks and sharing punnets of soft fruit with whoever he was talking to. He had produced some of the era’s most famous coverage – the fall of Baghdad, Saddam Hussein’s statue being brought down, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto – but had never edited a news programme or covered political news. He had been critical all along of the relaunch – and was the beneficiary of its failure. “I was not a pillar of opposition, but was quite vocal in saying it was not going to work… . They asked why six to seven stories in an hour when you should be doing twelve to thirteen? I was horrified. I thought – hold on, that’s what I used to do at Sky News. Look at the remit for Channel 4 News. As a foreign editor what set us apart was the quality of our analysis and our local journalists.” So in July 2012, a year after the unsuccessful relaunch, de Pear took over as editor, beating experienced candidates. There was speculation that one of the possible candidates with the right experience was Robbie Gibb, the BBC’s editor of Daily and Sunday Politics, who became Theresa May’s communications chief in 2017, but this never reached Dorothy Byrne.

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The new editor did not enjoy a cosy relationship with Hunt. “She never takes me to lunch,” Ben de Pear complained. Indeed, she was never one to visit the Channel 4 News basement (perhaps wisely, because in 2018 the ceiling collapsed on the graphics area and the team camped in the atrium for much of the year). My pitch for the job was that we needed to be distinctive, be true to our exact remit, which is to be different, to go further, to go deeper, to surprise the viewer, enlighten them, and service key demographics, younger people and minorities. We should not be all things to all people. We are at a crucial period in history, in a here and now where digital consumption of news is going up. Very few people turn on at 7 pm for a whole digest of the day’s news – they see it on their phone. We need to stand out and say these are the things we think you should know about: they may be things you have never heard of or things you sometimes find important. We had become boring and predictable like the BBC and Sky. We needed to go back to being passionate, to take risks, do investigations, more undercover, holding people to account. The channel was saying do this and the other. The channel is great, but we couldn’t just say yes. They were basically trying to get rid of Jon Snow, dilute him. Jay Hunt was very clear when I got the job, Jon Snow was out. And I thought, no he’s bloody not, if he goes we are all jumping ship.”

He had a slide in his presentation: “Let Jon be Jon.” I was essentially taking it back to the way it was before. Sometimes it got lost up its own arse, and it still can. But I went against the year-long relaunch. Another part of my pitch was doing something digitally in the mix. I wasn’t sure what it was but I was very clear that we needed to increase our numbers [of users] exponentially … . Jay was a very good thing for Channel 4 in many ways but she is unbendable and thinks she knows better than anyone else… . You can’t disagree with her.

But he did and was promoted. (Hunt denied that she had wanted Snow out). Dorothy Byrne also did not recognise the Jon Snow belief of being threatened with the sack. “Makes no sense to me. The stuff about Ben de Pear saving him … it’s nothing to do with him, and he’s still there. In Ben de Pear’s world the whole world revolves around him. He is very good at some things. He could be better groomed, comb and cut his hair, pay attention to his shirts, as in change them.” Dan Brooke, marketing and public affairs director, was a consistent defender of the news operation, warning David Abraham about the dangers of tinkering with it. The chairman, Lord Burns, was also supportive, noting that the news was losing viewers in line with similar programmes such as Newsnight, while admiring Hunt for always trying to improve output. “The whole market was going down. It was not that it was worse: you can’t push water up a hill.” He also appreciated the programme’s spirit: “They are brave, I like that.” The board never for-

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mally considered changing the time of the news. The programme handily soaked up a lot of the remit requirement, which was diminishing in specific areas of the arts and religion. In September 2010 the news website was relaunched with online reports, in-depth written analysis and blogs by the star names, seeking to give them a personal relationship with viewers. Its Twitter account had around 30,000 followers. The most successful innovation was the Factcheck service during the general election that year, which became a useful feature, predating the controversy over “fake news”. Two recruits from Newsnight strengthened de Pear’s team. Paul Mason joined in 2013 as digital and cultural editor, becoming economics editor in 2014, and was expected to inject energy into the online side, too; but he left early in 2016. He had written a polemical book about post-capitalism and started writing an opinionated Guardian column. Like Jon Snow, he recorded YouTube videos unlikely to pass the strict impartiality rules governing broadcast news. With Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader he wanted freedom to write in his support. In August 2019 he tweeted that he regarded Channel 4 as the best news programme in the world. Shaminder Nahal, a former deputy editor of Newsnight, brought a breadth of experience and contacts. She worked at improving the quality of interviews and guests, reducing a reliance on “boring” think tanks. A third Newsnight refugee was Jeremy Paxman, who had quit the late-night programme in 2014. He had nothing to do with news but was hired to present live election and the referendum debates on an ad hoc basis, not entirely successfully. The Referendum Debate Live made by ITN Productions in 2016 was particularly chaotic and boisterous, as a panel of 100 celebrities got out of hand. Hunt told those who had commissioned the programme that it was one of the darkest days of Channel 4’s history. In Hardie’s view the more settled Channel 4 News of the 2013–17 Hunt era was “the legacy of two processes – a modernisation of the structure to suit a modern schedule, and then a wholehearted embracing of the remit”. He added: “You cannot look at Channel 4 News and not say it is a completely distinctive news programme in this country – with attitude.” And the all-important ratings started to climb, if only gradually – from 611,000 viewers in 2014 to 683,000 three years later, for a share of 3.4 percent. (The figure for 2018 was lower, partly because of a clash with the football World Cup, with a match starting at 7 pm most nights.) The downside was that, within these figures, the number of viewers between 16 and 34 was continuing to decline rapidly, from 194,000 in 2010 to just 93,000 by 2017. This was raised by Ofcom in its annual reviews of 2013 and 2014 and became a major issue in its third public service broadcasting review in 2015. Tim Gardam was now overseeing Ofcom’s review and, as 4’s former programme director, suggested that the solution could be through considering online news as well as the broadcast programme: online clicks would count. In January 2015, de Pear recruited as digital editor Jon Laurence, a 26-year-old Cambridge graduate whose CV already included spells as a producer at Sky News and a digital journalist at the Daily Telegraph.

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“I came in with the brief to keep Channel 4 News values and remit at the forefront of everything, but to also grow the audience,” he recalled. “I always knew there was a huge opportunity there, and a huge amount of sympathy for Channel 4 among young viewers, and we just had to experiment over a few months. But I don’t think anyone predicted how fast it would grow. The growth we have had on digital platforms is because of the remit, not despite it. Young audiences want to see serious news – there’s a huge market and opportunity. They like integrity, authenticity, and they like news delivered to the places they consume. The key was Facebook – not seeing social media as a website or for promoting our news programme, but as a destination in and of itself.”3 In two years 4’s presence on Facebook grew from an inherited 200,000 fans to 2.4 million, of whom two thirds were aged 16–34. The number of views per month increased from 5 million to 250 million. The team put out about sixty videos a week. Laurence explained: “The number hasn’t changed but the amount of thought we put into them has. Because right at the start we were just clipping up footage without thinking of storytelling. Now digital videos can take two to three days to prepare. If something goes viral, say 10 million views, if it is not held to the same standards as the programme that clearly is an issue. We have done that while maintaining the seriousness of our agenda, a focus on international news, while continuing to challenge authority through our Factcheck videos – some of the most viewed ones we do – and by showing clashing alternative points of view from diverse communities people do not see elsewhere. The other thing we have done is to subtitle and caption everything we do, so you can watch without sound.” The key was to commission two-or three-minute videos as stories, not teasers or trailers for the main news. “We had some of the most amazing video in the world, and we wanted to essentially double down on that, pushing it out in the most appropriate way, without changing our values at all. In this news room you get assailed by Channel 4 values every time you walk in. Absolutely unavoidable. You couldn’t work here without a sense of them… . We don’t do royals, animals, sport, technology, Kim Kardashian: many of the most viewed videos are primary news stories from the programme.” The branded videos include shorts from Unreported World and Dispatches and Factcheck using animations from the digital team. The most outstanding strand in 2015/16 were the contributions from a brave young female film-maker Waad al-Kateab, who documented the horror and the humanity of the final agonies of rebel-held Aleppo. The work was destined to have a long after life when painstakingly edited by ITN Productions into an award-winning film, released in 2018. There were questions raised by this rush to social media, not so dissimilar to the debate around 4oD: could the reputation of Channel 4 News be compromised through a reliance on Facebook within an environment where dodgy postings and fake news abounded? The audience was potentially global, but Channel 4 News had a domestic duty to serve British viewers first, and a requirement of impartiality.

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The issue of how the impartiality of the news bulletin related to tweets and online news videos was highlighted in 2014 by Jon Snow’s Gaza video, in which he spoke in a direct and personal way about the deaths of Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis, and the impact on children. It was immensely popular. He was subsequently reported to have shouted obscenities (“F*** the Tories”) about the Conservatives at the 2017 Glastonbury Festival. He said he had no recollection of this. No recording surfaced. Although technically the obligation of impartiality does not extend to online output, these events were taken seriously by the channel’s executives, who gave him a stern dressing-down. From then on his tweets were expected to be double-checked. An ITN source explained: “Every editor at ITN has to balance client relationships [the client in this case being Channel 4] and his own team. Ben sided with his newsroom… . He is constitutionally resistant to client satisfaction. He, like Jon Snow, expresses himself in a state of rebelliousness. Jon Snow survived: it was recognised that he’s untouchable.” After the 2016 referendum, de Pear went with a cameraman to a Conservative Party fundraiser at the Hurlingham Club by Putney Bridge in West London, and put a video on Facebook showing that, after the Brexit shock, the Tories were dancing the night away. It was recognised as an error and quickly taken down but it stoked tensions between de Pear and his political unit in Westminster, especially now that it appeared the programme was biased against Brexit as well as the Conservatives. The political editor, Gary Gibbon, believed this could have affected his team’s chances of getting interviews with Conservative senior ministers and politicians, but this was nothing new, Channel 4 News had long faced this reluctance. By 2018 Theresa May refused interviews with Channel 4 News and Channel 5 at the Conservative Party conference: other broadcasters signed a letter of protest at this historic event. Robbie Gibb was reported to have asked, “What’s in it for us?” The ever-present prospect of a clash between news and broadcaster came to a head over Fatima Manji, a Muslim newsreader who was presenting – with her customary headscarf – on the Friday, 15 July 2016, after the Nice lorry terrorist atrocity on the 14th, which took the lives of many and which included a visibly shaken Jon Snow on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. This drew a fierce comment from Kelvin MacKenzie in The Sun on the following Monday who questioned whether it was appropriate for Channel 4 News to use her on that day. Channel 4 responded fast with a statement that his comments were “offensive, completely unacceptable and arguably tantamount to inciting religious and even racial hatred”. Neither Manji nor de Pear thought this response was robust enough. Manji wrote a critical article for the Liverpool Post that clearly reflected her disappointment. She then had her claim of unfair treatment over MacKenzie’s article rejected by the IPSO press standards board, which had received more than 1,700 complaints. Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme following the IPSO ruling, she objected to the implication “that I am somehow sympathetic

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to a perpetrator of the terrorist attack” but ran into the criticism that she had made herself the story. It certainly did not harm her career. In March 2017 Channel 4 News received multiple honours at a Royal Television Society journalism awards ceremony attended by 500 people at the London Hilton. It won Daily News Programme of the Year, especially for foreign coverage; the International News Coverage prize for Inside Aleppo, and Matt Frei was crowned Television Journalist of the Year, beating Krishnan Guru-Murthy. And it had the star of the year in the room – Waad al-Kateab, a tiny woman in a cream headscarf, named Camera Operator of the Year. In punchy English she told the black-tie event: “I was in Aleppo with the other journalists trying to record what is happening… . Then we were forced to flee. But we haven’t lost hope. Today I am here, I win the award. It makes us feel like our struggles matter. Thank you Channel 4 News for the people in Syria, working for our dignity.” De Pear rounded it off: “Waad stood for everything Channel 4 News does. We are given generous money by Channel 4. We thank you for your support to provide in-depth coverage of what is going on.” It was a moment to savour. Channel 4 News was riding high, and, for the time being, at peace with its broadcaster. But a new crisis arose later that month, when a van hired by Khaled Masood ploughed into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, killing three people. Proceeding on foot he then knifed PC Keith Palmer to death inside the Palace of Westminster courtyard. The veteran home affairs correspondent, Simon Israel, was asked at around 6.30 pm to check out a name of the alleged murderer that was circulating on the Internet. He rang a trusted police source, who confirmed the name – but it was the wrong man: Abu Izzadeen, formerly known as Trevor Brooks, an Islamist activist. This false identification was broadcast live, signed off within the office by managing editor Ed Fraser in consultation with the lawyer, without being referred up to Hardie or Channel 4. (Ben de Pear had taken the day off because his wife was having surgery, but he joined Jon Snow on the outside broadcast in Westminster.) Izzadeen’s brother, Yusuf Brooks, rang within minutes to tell the news desk that he was in prison and could not have been the killer. The error was corrected on air before the end of the bulletin, and Channel 4 suspended part of the rebroadcast on Channel 4+1 at 8pm, to prevent the mistaken identity being aired again. This was the fourth serious lapse of standards in three years. In 2014, an unbalanced vox pop in Brixton had been broadcast following the Ellison review of the role of undercover policing in the Stephen Lawrence case. The five interview clips about whether the police were trusted all came from the same organisation, to which the reporter had links. The same year a report on Russia’s military and foreign policy included an audio clip supposedly of an RAF pilot intercepting a Russian military plane in British airspace: it turned out to be an intercept of a Latvian cargo plane. Then in 2015 two victims of the fatal Shoreham air show crash were named before their deaths had been officially confirmed.

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This time the Channel 4 board ordered an independent inquiry into the naming of Izzadeen and broader issues. Chairman Charles Gurassa decided enough was enough. It was conducted by Richard Sambrook, deputy director of the Cardiff Journalism School and a former BBC News director. In July 2017, just as the Abraham/Hunt regime was coming to an end, the board was presented with the fifty-page Independent Report into the Procedures and Culture at ITN and Channel 4, extending beyond the one incident. It established that this was a management failure, compounding fundamental errors by journalists running with a single source. In effect the newsroom had taken a punt. The report characterised the incident as a perfect storm: “Hubris, or a sugar rush.” The lack of referral upwards was due to self-imposed time constraints, confused editorial lines of authority, a team distributed around different locations, a weak challenge within the programme and no one of sufficient authority to challenge the direction of travel. It was not referred up to the agreed executive at Channel 4 either. Recommendations included a firm commitment from ITN and Channel 4 to the spirit as well as the letter of agreed procedures for communication and reference up, and to the values of Channel 4 News. (Daniel Pearl, the deputy to Dorothy Byrne at Horseferry Road, was the person who should have been contacted and was 100 percent convinced that if they had followed the agreed upwards referral it would not have happened.) ITN should consider greater editorial diversity within the newsroom, strengthening the proactive role of producers and lawyers. The newsroom culture should focus on rigour as much as impact. The programme’s weakness at dealing with breaking news contrasted with its excellence at managing longer-term investigations and projects. Sambrook suggested making a “countercultural” appointment on-screen or off-screen to break what was described as a hegemony at senior editorial level, with most senior jobs going to people whose experience was primarily in foreign news. Sambrook also resuscitated the Jon Snow issue: “Within the news room there was some spontaneous concern about Jon Snow’s tweets, and the extent to which they may compromise the programme’s impartiality, and the difficulty of managing major on-air talent. Presenters are answerable to their individual editors and in all their journalistic work should embody the channel’s editorial values. I understand following a further incident new controls have been put in place to ensure a second pair of eyes on all Jon’s tweets pre-publication. This is a sensible policy if it can hold.” In the wake of the report, procedures and protocols were overhauled. Sambrook saw that the power and roles of producers and the lawyer in the newsroom needed strengthening in the face of its big-name presenters and journalists. They had to be able to say no. There was no doubt in Sambrook’s view that de Pear was one of the best television news editors in the business but his experience and approach was driven by news gathering, not output. As a former news executive Sambrook

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knew how demanding live news programmes are. This one takes more risks than others, with investigations, undercover filming and forthright challenges to the political order. While this review was being digested Channel 4 News with Jon Snow in the lead was straining every sinew to cover the Grenfell Tower disaster of June 2017 which shook the nation. He was selected to give the MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival, marking his forty years at the frontline of news reporting. He said reporting on Grenfell Tower had made him feel “on the wrong side” of Britain’s social divide, the media had become far too removed from ordinary lives and lacked diversity. It should have been more aware about the dangers of the block. When he arrived in the immediate aftermath angry locals cried “Where were you?”, saying no media had shown interest before, despite their complaint blog. Hunt was no ally of de Pear, but she was leaving which may have helped him survive, though for a time it seemed touch and go. Byrne saw it this way: “The choice of Richard Sambrook was benign. Jay was no Cruella de Vil. He was not sacked. It was partly that they all got it wrong together, it was a mindset. We didn’t need to wait for a report to sack him”. They did not want to destabilise the news programme. The news team was badly bruised and de Pear took Israel out to dinner to reassure him that his apology was accepted and his mistake would not end his career. Ofcom took the step of demanding an apology on air for the first time since a decade earlier, when it had received nearly 45,000 complaints about the bullying of Shilpa Shetty on Celebrity Big Brother. “We found Channel 4 News committed a serious breach of its requirement to report news with due accuracy. We are particularly concerned … given Channel 4’s previous assurances to Ofcom that improvements in its compliance processes were being made. Considering the seriousness of this breach, we are requiring Channel 4 News to air a summary of our breach decision.” The ruling was broadcast on the programme in September 2017. Discussion of the report served another purpose. It gave Hunt the opportunity to have a frank boardroom debate over whether 4 still needed an hour-long bulletin, and whether cash could longer term be chopped from the news programme budget and be diverted into digital news, following the Facebook success. (By 2017 the annual report said there were 1.98 billion news views on Facebook and YouTube.) But she did not get her way. Ofcom’s audience research still confirmed that broadcast television news was trusted by the public far more than newspapers and online, and was the main source of news for 75 percent of people. It should be valued for that, not undermined. Jon Laurence left for a new job in New York and Ben de Pear broke with what he now saw as “his addiction to Facebook”. YouTube was back in favour as the outlet of choice because it suited longer videos, and, according to de Pear, resulted in a more loyal following and better payments. He was in favour of recruiting

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younger and socially varied staff from outside London and was prepared to make changes to his “static staff ”, provided there was help with severance payments. But he argued there needed to be caution in the dash for youth, because experienced correspondents often brought in the big stories on which the digital journalists based their versions. Things looked up for him a year later in 2018 as the same team delivered the goods, breaking two major stories. It was the seventieth anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush, introducing a generation of people born in the Caribbean who were invited to live in Britain between 1948 and 1971. Channel 4 aired the first broadcast on the evolving scandal of the mistreatment of those wrongly categorised as illegal immigrants and threatened with deportation by the Home Office, or refused healthcare and jobs for lack of official documents. It continued to harry the Government throughout the year. The second opportunity was Channel 4’s role, along with The Observer and international media including the New York Times, in breaking the significant story of the scraping and misuse of millions of people’s personal data by Cambridge Analytica and the links with political lobbyists to apply quasi-military techniques to engineer election results. Michael Crick was one of the early leads on the story for 4, as he explained: “We approached Cambridge Analytica. They were keen to market themselves. Alexander Nix [the founder] did a big presentation demonstrating for us [how they worked] at the office in New Oxford Street. I found Nix strange … slightly sinister.” He followed their researchers during the US presidential election of 2016. “What surprised me when you got to the doorstep was they talked to people, they typed it all into a small screen and sent it straight back to headquarters. They left the Democrats far behind.” Crick realised that this was a key digital tool for Trump’s campaign. In September 2017 de Pear contacted Carole Cadwalladr, the freelance journalist who had written an article for The Observer the previous February which drew links between the Cambridge Analytica work in the US and the UK Brexit campaign. She gave valuable initial assistance and introduced him to Chris Wylie, the whistle-blower who confirmed that Cambridge Analytica had contracted a Cambridge University academic to harvest the data illegally from the profiles of millions of Facebook accounts, then designed a way of turning that data into an electoral asset. De Pear launched an undercover sting, getting a 4 reporter hired by Cambridge Analytica. The result was a two-part documentary, aired the following March, that confirmed the apparently illegal harvesting of Facebook data. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) raided Cambridge Analytica’s office and in May the company closed down and became subject to an insolvency order. Channel 4 News was a pioneering factor in exposing the threat to democracy of fake news. Byrne said one of the challenges for Channel 4 was to choose investigations of great significance. “We succeed by thinking carefully which subject to concentrate on. Our rejection strategy is as important as what we do”.

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“In Jay’s era, though not directed or shaped by her, we saw a massive expansion of digital news and current affairs. This is of huge significance for the future of Channel 4 journalism.” While Channel 4 News had thus confirmed its prowess at finding and researching important stories, reaping awards and recognition, as 2018 rolled into 2019 it was facing the challenge of redeploying its resources. Nobody knew how it would be affected in the medium term by the move of the channel’s national headquarters to Leeds; whether this would further increase the tension and underlying lack of trust between the journalists and the executive suite. Or if it would be refreshed and enriched by adding more regional UK news, a non-metropolitan base and staffers representing Britain’s multicultural mix. It still had its ageing presenter Jon Snow, now 71, who had seen off two changes of regime during the decade, but the punishing schedule of Brexit news was taking a toll. It had a broader range of four presenters and a refreshed mission to cover under-reported Britain though that had meant making savings on foreign news and closing its South East Asia bureau. It had been watched by an average of 8.2 million people each month in 2017, the fourth year of relative stability. But this dropped by 9 percent to 7.4 million in 2018 as the overall reach of the main Channel 4 declined, combined with Brexit fatigue and fierce competition from rivals at 7pm. It continued to perform relatively well among minority groups, and video news views on YouTube doubled; but the TV audience fell below 600,000 to 566,000, with only 68,000 of 16–34s watching. Like Snow himself, it soldiered on.

Notes 1 John Hardie interview, 15 March 2017. 2 Cathy Newman interview, 2017. 3 Jon Laurence interview, 11 October 2016.

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20 CURRENT AFFAIRS AND DOCUMENTARIES

I

n 2007, the year this history begins, Dispatches held a key place in Kevin Lygo’s Channel 4. It was an hour-long programme running for at least thirty-five weeks a year, mixing foreign, domestic, political and social stories with ambitious investigations, some undercover. It could be adventurous and daring, and had certain topics and issues it returned to, under the guardianship of Dorothy Byrne, the longest-serving head commissioner. Until 2011 its prominent place in the evening schedule and distinctive brand, central to the channel’s remit, was enabled by the commercial success of Big Brother. Lygo was usually ready to move it into a prime 9 pm slot when its subject was sufficiently controversial. The most uncompromising edition, which echoed down the years, was Undercover Mosque, broadcast in January 2007 and made by Hardcash Productions, one of the regular suppliers. Its subject was the dissemination of hate and the encouragement of extremist views and violence in speeches at mosques, investigated and recorded by an unnamed reporter. This programme raised uncomfortable questions and produced a fierce response from Muslim groups, who saw it as an example of anti-Muslim hostility. It caused a particular furore in the Midlands, because undercover filming had confirmed incendiary radical preaching at two Birmingham mosques, where British imams denounced non-Muslim laws, apostates and the shortcomings of women’s minds, while stressing the requirement that girls must wear the hijab, enforced if necessary by hitting them. They further advocated and predicted violent jihad against non-Muslims and dismissed the idea of integration into British society. Those who killed British soldiers, especially the Taliban, were praised. A sample quote was: “Take that homosexual and throw him off a mountain.” The investigations, covering six mosques and Islamic centres, were broadcast with copious on-screen written responses. It was a difficult programme to watch but its impact was immense. The West Midlands Police began an investigation into whether the programme’s findings amounted to criminal incitement on the part of the featured imams and issued a production order for access to the secretly-filmed unseen footage.

Soon, though, they reversed the focus of their inquiries, suggesting that the heavy editing of the speeches amounted to a distortion of the truth. The Crown Prosecution agreed, asserting that the splicing together of extracts had distorted what the speakers were saying, giving no grounds for prosecution for incitement. The West Midlands Police then referred the programme to Ofcom in a formal complaint, on the grounds that the intensity of editing so altered the form of the original material it was “sufficient to undermine community cohesion”. Five excerpts were produced in evidence. The complaint was rejected by Ofcom in November 2007. The eleven-page adjudication stated that none of the five extracts constituted a breach of its guidelines. It noted that there was evidence that the 364 complaints from viewers were part of an organised campaign. Dismissing representations from Saudi Arabia and the London Central Mosque, it pointed out that the controllers of the featured establishments were in some cases unaware that such extreme language was being used by preachers. The report concluded: “Undercover Mosque was a legitimate investigation, uncovering matters of public interest … accurately representing the material it had gathered.” Kevin Sutcliffe, deputy head of news and current affairs, wrote an article in the British Journalism Review, recording this turn of events, how the investigation by the police turned into an attack on 4’s journalism, exposing their ignorance of how television programmes are put together. It also highlighted how Ofcom’s decision, upholding free speech on one of the big issues of the decade, went largely unreported – in contrast to the original allegations by the police.1 Channel 4 supported the documentary-making team when they launched a libel action against the Crown Prosecution Service and West Midlands Police, on the grounds that their criticisms of the methods and motivation of the investigation were unfounded. When the case went to the High Court the following May, the two bodies apologised for accusing the documentary-makers of distortion and agreed to a payment of £100,000, which went to the Rory Peck Trust, a charity supporting freelance journalists and their families Hardcash made a sequel, Undercover Mosque: The Return, broadcast in September 2008. This took a closer look at the role of Saudi Arabia in spreading hard-line Wahhabism. An undercover female reporter secretly filmed a sermon addressed to women, advocating death for adulterers, homosexuals, women who act like men and converts to other faiths. The programme included a visit to the shop in the London Central Mosque, where videos were on sale espousing public beheadings, amputations, lashings and crucifixions. Dispatches was nothing if not eclectic. By 2008 the mix of thirty-one programmes included a scientific analysis of sandwiches from major retailers, scrutiny of the skincare industry, a quizzical look at the fluctuating reputation of British Airways and questioning the influence of Christian fundamentalists on the Conservative Party. The strand did not have a monopoly of current affairs, though. Stand-alone documentaries in that year included Chosen, about grooming and sexual abuse in a public school, and in 2009 Lost Girls of South Africa, which

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exposed the scourge of child rape in the republic the year before it was due to host the football World Cup. Both were made by True Vision, one of the channel’s most important suppliers of documentaries that tug at the conscience. But there is a limit to how many heavyweight public interest investigatory programmes the schedule will bear, especially when by their nature they can be subject to delay and even cancellation. A period of change was set in motion by a review in 2010, as part of the regime change. As a result of this review, in an attempt to introduce more certainty into the programming, and incentivise producers on modest budgets, guarantees of commissions were introduced to provide regular work to a group of committed companies. On offer were contracts for eight Dispatches a year, which included the obligation to provide paid work and mentoring to trainees on Channel 4’s new investigative journalism training scheme. That year saw two eye-catching programmes: The Slumdog Children of Mumbai, drawing an audience of 2.4 million at 9pm, and Post Office Undercover (1.6 million), which examined how and why post was going missing, a national concern. After 2011 the balance shifted further away from earnest documentaries to more popular topics. That year’s titles included Train Journeys from Hell and Landlords from Hell, and there were consumer-oriented programmes about supermarkets and discount stores. In April 2012 the focus shifted to half-hour slots at 8pm, involving around twenty-four minutes of film, designed to pick up viewers after the news ended and to avoid a clash with the BBC’s Panorama. The year’s tally was twenty-six half-hour and eleven hour-long programmes. The most popular were Secrets of Poundland (3.15 million), The Truth about 5 a Day (1.65 million), Tricks of the Dole Cheats (1.39 million), Undercover Retirement Home (1.4 million) and MPs: Are They Still at It? (1.39 million), about the expenses scandal. Three stories in 2013 that successfully went back over familiar ground were Secrets of Your Missing Mail (1.73 million), Secrets of Your Supermarket Shop (2.44 million) and Secrets of the Discount Stores (2.19 million). The half-hour film tariff was set at around £90,000, rising to £200,000 for sixty minutes, with co-production funding. By the end of 2013, a year after the changes were introduced, Dispatches averaged 1.3 million for the half-hour slot, almost doubling the audience for Channel 4 News. More serious subjects, eight to ten a year, were tackled in hour-long specials. They included Jon Snow’s exceptional exposé of Sri Lanka’s war crimes and Kashmir’s Torture Trail, both shown at 11  pm because of their horrific content. The fast turnaround news-related programmes – usually from ITN Productions and fronted by Matt Frei – included The American School Massacre, broadcast on 17 December 2012, three days after the shooting of twenty elementary schoolchildren in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. According to Sutcliffe, it was wrong to see the change in emphasis as watering down 4’s commitment to current affairs. “It was a response to the competitive environment. … It was a more flexible approach: the background was to keep

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quality up to a high level of ambition. Not all forty are going to make that and hold attention. I was party to this decision: it was a struggle to keep going… . It was a good idea. I don’t think it is any secret Jay Hunt divides opinion with her style, but that was not a factor in this decision.”2 He and his successor, Daniel Pearl, were overseeing up to twenty documentaries at any one time in various stages of production, all needing to be checked by the channel’s lawyers. Some of the most fraught drew challenges from household names. Ryanair: Secrets from the Cockpit, shown in 2013, examined the airline’s safety record and the complaints of pilots about pressure to operate a low-fuel policy. Ryanair sued Channel 4 and the respected production company, Blakeway, for defamation in the High Court in Dublin. It also tried unsuccessfully to identify the anonymous pilots who spoke to the programme-makers. The one veteran who had spoken openly was sacked; but Ryanair’s bid to overturn journalistic privilege was rejected by the Dublin High Court in December 2017. Another long-running saga involved the incident that led to the resignation of the government Chief Whip, Andrew Mitchell, in what came to be known as Plebgate. Mitchell allegedly swore at a police officer who asked him to dismount from his bicycle as he sought to leave Downing Street via the pedestrian gate, calling him a “pleb” for good measure. He denied using the word but stepped down a month later. Michael Crick, in the Dispatches slot, broadcast three streams of CCTV pictures in December 2012, and more in a follow-up programme in 2014. The Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, attacked the integrity of Channel 4’s journalism, claiming footage of the encounter at Downing Street had been edited, but later withdrew the charge in a written apology. Mitchell subsequently lost two libel cases against the Downing Street police officer and The Sun, which had first published the story. He was a shining example of a senior Conservative politician who held Channel 4 News in high esteem. A popular but combative edition of Dispatches, in 2013, infuriated ITV with an hour-long programme entitled Celebs, Brands and Fake Fans, in which it exposed Coronation Street actors taking free products in exchange for endorsements on social media. Reporters set up a fake cosmetic company named Puttana Aziendale (Italian for corporate whore) and persuaded several stars to scoop up their products and tweet about them. The resulting programme was watched by 2.65 million. Undercover reporting was now in vogue. In 2015, in the run-up to the general election, two former foreign secretaries, Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Labour and Conservative respectively, were approached by reporters from Dispatches claiming to represent a fictional Hong Kong communications agency seeking to hire senior politicians to its advisory board. No cash changed hands but both men were heard offering their services and talking up their access to influential figures. They were suspended from their respective parties and referred themselves to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, who concluded

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they had not broken the rules. Ofcom ruled that there had been no breaches of the broadcasting code and the programme had represented the MPs’ views fairly. Anna Hall, a producer-director who was based in Leeds (long before it became the new national headquarters), had a close association with 4. It was she who brought to the channel its first exposé of the abuse of white underage girls by Asian predatory gangs, often taxi drivers, a decade before the prosecutions and trials took place. The 90-minute special Edge of the City examined this horrific scandal in Bradford, focusing on two mothers whose daughters were victims of the abuse. This programme was highly controversial. The right-wing British National Party advertised it on its website as a “party political broadcast”, reflecting its views, and the chief constable of West Yorkshire warned that its screening could provoke community disorder. Transmitted in August 2004, it was watched by 1.8 million; but to Hall’s surprise, there was little immediate follow-up. Still, she persevered, and in 2009 produced Britain’s Sex Gangs, in which she spoke to members of the British Muslim community about the criminal behaviour, and in 2013 The Hunt for Britain’s Sex Gangs followed the successful prosecutions that followed and opened up the issue finally to external reviews. Hall said that 4’s general counsel, Prash Naik, had stood by her all the way, enabling the broadcasts to go ahead. “Channel 4’s current affairs commissioners and lawyers work really well together. I need to rely on that team to help me. For example, in The Hunt for Britain’s Sex Gangs we had a jaw-dropping scene, where officers were watching an interview with one of main perpetrators. He denied it over nine hours, saying: ‘I didn’t rape her, I had sex with her.’ … I had key footage, and the lawyers said that if he was found guilty, we would transmit it. We did transmit it.” A related programme – if tangentially – was Forced Marriage Cops, Hall’s documentary on a Manchester police squad’s move to crack down on abuses. She saw part of its role as educational, showing coerced partners how to find a safe exit. This was followed in 2017 by The Truth About Muslim Marriage, which surveyed 1,000 Muslim women and found that two thirds were not legally married in Britain. Many said they were married under the Muslim marriage covenant and did not realise it was not recognised in British law. A three-part observational documentary series, Extremely British Muslims, made by fly-on-the-wall experts The Garden attempted in March 2017 to present a more rounded portrait of life in Britain’s Muslim communities based around Birmingham. Difficult to film due to suspicion of Channel 4’s motives – and complaints that too many programmes had the word Muslim in their titles – it concluded that a generation of British Muslim women face a crisis, caught between two forces. Dorothy Byrne said there was a counterargument to the view that Channel 4 had been anti-Islamic. She believed a documentary in 2001, Beneath the Veil, set the tone with an undercover investigation of human rights abuses committed by the Taliban, made by Saira Shah with Hardcash Productions. “If only others had not shied away from

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serious problems in British mosques and accused us of Islamaphobia. If only they had acted when we filmed Abu Hamza secretly at Finsbury Park Mosque, more than twenty years ago, well before 9/11. If only they had acted when we filmed Islamists teaching vile hatred across this country.” Hall was able to deploy her relationship of trust in another area with the police in Catching a Killer, a four-part extended documentary project with access to Thames Valley Police investigations. The first, in June 2017, dealt with the murder of a 31-year-old mother by her partner, who disposed of her body in woodland. It included film from the police interviews with the controlling and violent suspect and with her 6-year-old son. Cameras followed police as they searched for three weeks for the body. The programme was eighty-one minutes long: they let her run it to the length needed, which with adverts meant from 9 pm to 10.45. It attracted 1.7 million, a 9.5 percent audience share, beating the slot average of 6.2 percent in the previous year. In 2017 there were twenty-eight Dispatches aired, most at 8pm, now averaging 1.1 million viewers per episode, including domestic investigations on welfare reforms, the housing crisis and the insecure gig economy. The most popular was Secrets of Coca Cola, about the company’s opposition to the sugar tax, watched by 1.7 million. Dispatches as a distinct brand had to be consistent and revelatory, sometimes campaigning. Where the BBC went for analysis and ITV chose popular subjects, at its best Channel 4 remained ambitious and eclectic. The Ofcom appraisal for 2018 highlighted that the Dispatches TV audience was down 26 percent on the previous year. Bucking the trend was the strand which had been cut back, Unreported World. There was regret that it was broadcasting fewer serious current affairs and documentary programmes in peak time. For instance, in October 2018 Brian Woods pleaded for a 9 pm slot for a beautifully-made programme, Child of Mine, about three couples’ experience of still births, which had required huge patience and sensitive filming. It ran to ninety minutes. The scheduler pushed hard to get it a 9 pm slot, initially supported by the new director of programmes, Ian Katz. In the end they concluded that it was better to transmit it at 10, because 9 pm was so competitive – even though it was acknowledged that the 10 pm audience would be lower. Dorothy Byrne News and current affairs revolved around the formidable if cranky Dorothy Byrne, who for twenty years ran this core public service purpose of Channel 4. She was an embattled figure for much of the 2011–17 era as she outsurvived Hunt. It was no secret that the two feisty executives did not get on. Byrne had fashioned a shield for herself, combining age, disability and her status as a single mother, joking she was unsackable. It was certainly unusual for any commissioner to remain in such an important post for so long, and there were plenty of whispers that time was up. Yet the evidence shows that these years saw some of the bravest programmes, mostly broadcast after Hunt had left to help set up Apple TV. “Jay gave us the

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money to kick off several important and difficult projects. …We overcame differences to create work across news, investigations, digital and popular journalism envied in the UK and the world,” she acknowledged, once Hunt was safely installed around the corner from the Apple Store in Regent Street. Byrne realised Channel 4 needed a bold move into serious explanatory podcasts to capture thoughtful young adults, and also aim to supersize documentaries with journalists asking big questions which would resonate across all generations and perhaps around the world. “True intellectual complexity for me is the way forward,” she concluded. It meant Channel 4 would aspire to act as the ideas developer and producer of a few chosen programmes, with the budget augmented by other wealthier broadcasters including HBO. This aspiration was not so very different from the model for film and expensive scripted programmes. It was also a way of escaping the fact that spending on routine news and current affairs was flat, at £27 million a year for each arm. It would try to monetise its international reputation for public service journalism … if possible. Channel 4 had a long-standing link with Frontline, the flagship investigative journalism arm of America’s PBS (Public Broadcasting Service), and established a fruitful relationship with its lively executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath, who joined in 2012 with a mission to expand and revamp its documentaries, including online. “The awards we win around the world speak to the fact we are in a good place,” Byrne reasoned. This resulted, for example, in The UN Sex Abuse Scandal which tracked down survivors, some as young as 10, from an estimated 1,700 victims exploited by peacekeepers in Bosnia and Cambodia through to Haiti, broadcast in the UK by 4 in July 2018. The key example of a link with HBO was arguably Leaving Neverland, which patiently, harrowingly told the story of Michael Jackson’s abuse of two young boys, and the process of grooming parents. Eventually broadcast in March 2019 it became a global success, selling to 130 territories. On Channel 4 the four hours broadcast over two nights in March in the same week as HBO attracted 2 million and 1.85 million viewers respectively, then racked up 9 million views on All4 in three months as Jackson fans raged. It was an event. The UK producer, Dan Reed and team at Amos Pictures, had originally been urged to make a one-hour show but worked on it for four years with a budget, some estimated, of £4 million. It was steered onto the UK airwaves by Channel 4’s in-house lawyer, who rebuffed calls to pull it. This was especially satisfying because it had previously tried – and failed (as had many others) – to tackle the subject, only to stumble. In May HBO and Channel 4 co-operated again with The Hunt for Jihadi John, based on a story and script by the Australian-born London-based Sunday Times journalist Richard Kerbaji, which cost a more modest £1 million, the price for an hour of drama, attracting 1 million viewers on the night. It was true urgent current affairs with the values of a feature film. This again was a project developed by 4 attracting partners.

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In the same month came For Sama, a documentary film crafted from the thousands of hours of video recorded during the obliteration of rebel-held Aleppo for Channel 4 News by the trapped but enterprising Waad al-Kateab. Dedicated to her baby daughter and garlanded with awards at documentary festivals in 2018, it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, and caused a stir: “A guttural howl of a film,” said The Times. Director Edward Watts, who pulled it together, had finessed his craft on the strand that kept on giving, Unreported World. Byrne started to raise her profile and deep anxieties about holding politicians to account during 2018. At a Voice of the Listener & Viewer conference in May 2019, she said an obsession with due impartiality during the referendum campaign had resulted in a failure to carry out the true duty of news providers, digging out the facts and figures essential to an informed Brexit decision. She also added that she was always struck by the BBC talking about the pressure and lobbying it faced from political parties. “I say don’t take calls, BBC.” Channel 4 does not have a tradition of meeting with its critics. “I am very concerned about the stories we are not hearing,” she concluded. She then handed the stage over to Cameroon (African) TV journalist Mimi Mefi, a guest in her house. She was on a PEN fellowship after being arrested for reporting on the largely unreported conflict in the majority French-speaking part of the country with minority English-speakers, and the death of an American missionary. She stepped out into the full spotlight of scrutiny as the choice of MacTaggart lecturer at the Edinburgh Television Festival in August 2019. This reflected the flowering of news investigations of great significance (Cambridge Analytica) and bold documentaries she had backed. Acknowledging her role as the Methuselah of television, she lashed out at “too many programmes saying small-and medium-sized things” and “formats that only describe the world as it is,” one of Channel 4’s addictions thanks to fixed-rigs, rather than providing a vision for change. Get serious was the headline message. “If we are worried about being irrelevant, start making big controversial programmes about the UK, climate change, the viability of our current financial system. Terrestrial television still has 69 percent share of viewing. Think what you have that makes you special. We are the only people who have an interest in saying big things about Britain. That’s not the role of Netflix or other streaming services” (though 4 was happy to take money from streamers for the right project). But the red meat of the speech was her direct attack on Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn for their failure to hold themselves up to proper scrutiny on television by avoiding in-depth interviews, adding this had become progressively more serious during July and August of 2019 during the Conservative leadership election, and was about to ignite even worse abuses. Johnson had become virtually invisible on television (leaving Channel 4 with an empty seat in a leader’s debate), except for a forensic BBC interview by Andrew Neil. They

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both favoured sound bites on unregulated social media – Johnson experimented with the people’s PMQs, direct to the nation – rather than submitting to testing cross-examination. She also issued a warning to politicians about lying: “You have got to tell the truth. If you do not we will call you out.” This invited a backlash and retaliation. On Sunday 25 August, three days after her lecture, Channel 4 News flew a team out to the President Macron-hosted G7 summit in Biarritz, where Matt Frei was to interview Johnson, as planned with Downing Street before the speech. Waste of their time. Editor Ben de Pear found access was denied. It was first suggested this was due to a shortage of Johnson’s time. But another view was that Byrne’s hardball threat of calling out lies by politicians was counterproductive, and had even “crossed the line of due impartiality” she was required to safeguard, in compliance with the Ofcom Broadcasting code, or so suggested by Robbie Gibb, Theresa May’s communications chief. It was he who had turned down the routine request for the then prime minister to be interviewed at the 2018 Tory Conference by Channel 4 News which so rankled. Byrne had also attacked his query, “What’s in it for us?”, as if he believed “an interview is purely for the benefit of politicians and not the public”. Channel 4 News had partly built its reputation on in-depth interviews of twenty minutes which created headlines in the 1990s, but this part of the 7 pm programme’s DNA looked shaky as demand for appearances outstripped supply and online news filled a lot of the gap. Byrne saw it this way: “Evil regimes kill, arrest journalists. In the UK they are trying to ignore them.”

Unreported World Unreported World is a strand that sits roughly in the centre of the golden triangle of news, documentaries and current affairs. Aimed at providing insights into countries and issues that most viewers do not come into direct contact with, and the lives of people lacking basic human rights, there is no shortage of subjects to tackle. Launched in 2000, it was a survivor from Michael Jackson’s era of rethinking Channel 4’s mission. By 2018 there had been 36 series and around 250 programmes in the archive. The strand appeared to adapt more smoothly than Channel 4 News to the new era: its band of youngish reporters and gritty style suited shorter versions on the web. Yet it was cut back twice after 2011: from twenty to sixteen programmes a year in 2012 and then to twelve in 2018. Both cuts were ordered by Jay Hunt – the second reluctantly, due to the sharp drop in 4’s advertising income after the vote to leave the European Union. She told the executive producer, Eamonn Matthews, that everyone must share the pain. As a result, two occasional freelance reporters and several other team members lost work.

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The programmes cost between £90,000 and £95,000 an episode, so the saving was modest. As with Dispatches this is not an area where great riches are spun out of formats and it was never put out to competitive tender. Matthews had launched the programmes with the veteran producer George Carey, then he founded Quicksilver Media in Oxford, which has curated Unreported World throughout its span, as well as continuing to make hard-hitting Dispatches. After the news and current affairs review in 2011 and discussion about moving it to a weekend slot, Unreported World was left alone to follow a curtailed Channel 4 News on Friday evenings. From 2012 it was trailed during the news by Krishnan Guru-Murthy, who also made several programmes annually. In 2016 it averaged 687,000 viewers, a 3.3 percent share, the highest for three years. Some argued that its low budget was mean-spirited. At that tariff it required a disciplined cycle of production teams doing their best with three-week shoots and a light team of two in the field – a director/producer and a reporter. The 2011 review heralded a change in approach: though there were still austere reports of terrible events, there was a new focus on more engaging human interest stories. This worried some purists, among them Mark Gallagher, director of the International Broadcasting Trust. But in 2016 the strand was the subject of a BAFTA celebration, when the team illustrated the revised approach by showing an extract of a film from Cambodia about reuniting families, drawing tears from some members of the audience. After success as a Paralympics co-presenter in 2012, the wheelchair basketball athlete Ade Adepitan became a reporter/presenter, making two programmes a year. Born in Nigeria and disabled by polio, his first assignment was to Cuba, to explore defections among its top athletes. In 2014 he went to Jamaica to make a report called Underground Gays and covered the impact of polio in Nigeria. He subsequently travelled in Vietnam, to investigate the effects of Agent Orange: a video short scored 11 million views. “When I am half-way through one I think why on earth did I agree,” he wondered. “This is so bloody hard – dealing with difficult people, governments, sometimes minders. Then presenters are involved in the edit and you learn the mechanics of TV.” In India, the way open-cast mining was overtaking farmers’ land was illustrated by footage of a child labourer aged 8 rolling huge lumps of coal down a hill, then stopping to pick up his tiffin food-carrier: a small figure in a grim landscape. As well as contributing the first documentary about refugees crossing the Mediterranean, Unreported World ran a story about young men in Somalia viewing wrestling as a way out of poverty. Other firsts were coverage from Syria as the revolution began and civil war erupted, and the first on-the-ground report from Sierra Leone about Ebola – requested by Downing Street and watched in the White House and by US military. A team from the programme was in Kobani when the Isis siege was broken, and in 2016 the programme made by Guru-Murthy was first with the news of the famine devastating Yemen as a result of the civil war.

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“I hope we are positioning ourselves at the crossover between documentaries and traditional current affairs,” Matthews said. “I have become more interested in films that relate to the modern human condition, less about the country.” The challenge for the future is how to keep a youngish audience watching. Channel 4 News, Dispatches and Unreported World are crucial components of public service broadcasting. Unreported World was specifically namechecked by Karen Bradley, the Culture Secretary, in her March 2017 speech confirming that 4 would not be privatised. The reduction in episodes was announced six months later, just before the new regime of Alex Mahon and Ian Katz took over. But worse was to come. In January 2021 as the coronavirus pandemic continued to cause havoc, responsibility for Unreported World was handed to the Channel 4 News team, allowing it to be made at a marginal cost, thereby saving the broadcaster half a million pounds a year. Eamonn Matthews, still executive producer and chief executive now after 38 series had relinquished the contract after being asked to halve the budget to under £50,000 an episode, which was too low to pay the required team of three. No other independent company stepped forward. After a debate the title was retained. He said: “I’m glad the Unreported World name is surviving. Will the show remain distinctive as to its agenda and film-making style? I hope so. Running Unreported World has been a privilege and passion”. It had been a key training ground – reporters and film-makers who started their careers working there won the BAFTA award for current affairs four out of six times between 2015 and 2020. The financial stress Channel 4 was under had turned this modestly resourced yet ambitious public-service strand into a luxury.

Notes 1 British Journalism Review, 19:1, March 2008. 2 Kevin Sutcliffe interview, 30 May 2017.

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21 PRIVATISATION

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rivatisation was always on Channel 4’s corporate mind, and with good reason. It had been caught up in two threats from Conservative governments, first under Margaret Thatcher in the late 1980s – when she was also plotting the auction for ITV franchises – then more subtly from John Major in 1996/7. Both were dealt with by Michael Grade, the chief executive, and the respective chairmen, Sir Richard Attenborough and Sir Michael Bishop. The threat surfaced again in 2014, when Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, raised the subject within the Public Expenditure (Asset Sales) subcommittee, whose eleven members included Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Matt Hancock, minister at the Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) department, and Ed Vaizey, minister at the Department of Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS). These were the dying days of the Conservatives’ coalition with the Liberal Democrats. The LibDem Vince Cable, who ran BIS, was aware of Hancock’s agenda. He joined the debate, listened to the arguments, and squashed the idea shortly before 2014 drew to a close. Nick Clegg, then leader of Cable’s party, said: “I’m not very ideological either way but I am happy for it [Channel 4] to remain as it is.” The party’s 2015 election manifesto undertook to keep the channel in public ownership. Executives drew up plans for all possible outcomes of the 2015 election. When David Abraham was composing the MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival the previous August, lobbyists considered whether he should raise the ownership question. They advised him to keep quiet. If the Conservatives won a majority, privatisation would be mooted. Labour, under Ed Milliband, was conducting a Creative Industries and Digital Economy Review, with a focus on bolstering Channel 4’s potential contribution. The lobbyists hoped that if Labour won they just might be persuaded to turn the broadcaster into a not-for-profit mutual company. The chairman, Terry Burns, drew up Plan B, proposing a Company Limited by Guarantee (CLBG) modelled on Glas Cymru (Welsh Water) – which he had pioneered – also British Waterways and the Transport Research Foundation. A CLBG has no share capital and thus no shareholders. Members have no rights to dividends, and the not-for-profit status can be enshrined in binding articles of association. The “members” in his proposal would be a self-perpetuating band of trusted people, who changed over time but defended the model in perpetuity. A corporation

without a track record of making profits and paying dividends offered the ultimate guarantee against privatisation: because how could it be properly valued for a sale? The Conservatives won an outright majority in the May 2015 election, so were freed from LibDem restraints. Their leader, David Cameron, appointed John Whittingdale, chair of the Culture, Media & Sport parliamentary committee, as Secretary of State for the department. This was the politician who in 1996 had moved an amendment to the Broadcasting Bill to privatise Channel 4 and who, in his role with the parliamentary committee since 2006, had been carefully scrutinising its annual reports. When handed the post, one of his first acts was to appoint as an advisor Ray Gallagher, a former Sky corporate lobbyist, who had analysed Channel 4’s reports for the committee, concluding that it was overseen too benevolently by Ofcom, had a fuzzy remit whose delivery was partly assessed by attitudinal surveys and was overpaying its top executives. Between 2007 and 2010 it had overplayed its hand on the funding gap it said it faced. It had not fully disclosed the details and scale of Andy Duncan’s pay-off in 2009 and failed to break down the revenue and performance of the individual channels it ran. On 2 June Terry Burns led a Channel 4 introductory meeting with Whittingdale: not a moment too soon, for there were already some parliamentary questions down about privatisation. As Burns left the office he made reference to his CLBG plan: “I hope there won’t be a debate about privatisation, but if you ever get to a position where you are wanting to look at the ownership of Channel 4 there is a proposal we have given thought to.” At its July meeting, the board discussed and backed the proposal. When Whittingdale attended the Edinburgh Television Festival in August, he said there were no current plans to privatise Channel 4. Earlier that month he had commissioned Ofcom to review the terms of trade agreement, which had in 2003 transferred majority ownership of intellectual property rights to independent producers supplying the public service broadcasters. If the agreement were relaxed it would increase the valuation of Channel 4, were it put up for sale, because it would sit on a constantly expanding archive. But Ofcom, in a report published in December, advised the DCMS to retain the status quo. On 9 September Whittingdale went before the Culture, Media & Sport Committee and clung to the “no plans for privatisation” line. Two weeks later that was called into question when an alert freelance photographer lurking outside 10 Downing Street took a picture of a document marked “sensitive-commercial” as it was carried into the building by an official from the Cabinet Office. This internal memo to Whittingdale and Hancock was headed “Assessment of Channel 4 Reform Options”. It read: “Work should proceed to examine the options of extracting greater public value from the Channel 4 corporation, focusing on privatisation options in particular.” The report contained other options, including “do nothing” – but the overall gist suggested that the Government was keen to raise funds from a sale. The news broke as Abraham, Burns and Dan Brooke were in a meeting in Horseferry Road. The public affairs executive James MacLeod appeared at the

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glass cubicle wall, trying to attract attention, holding a blown-up snapshot of the document. “We let him in to see what he had to say,” Brooke recalled. “Channel 4 News had sent over a copy because its political editor Gary Gibbon knew the photographer. By 5 pm Jon Snow was on the Radio 4  pm programme being interviewed. It was out in the open. Everything changed.” Whittingdale denied that the memo constituted an actual plan. “This was a first internal memo to me and Matt. We have had a look at it, what might be possible. These are the arguments, the challenges. When I was asked are there any plans, there weren’t any. This was something not discussed with any other colleagues. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor didn’t know anything about it. If we had told the select committee everything we were looking at, there would be uproar.”1 Earlier that month Burns had been to see Whittingdale, armed with his CLBG proposal, which broadly had the board’s support. The feedback was cool to hostile. Whittingdale saw it as a means of depriving the public purse of any return. “I could see no benefit at all in the great mutual idea for the Government. Under the Burns proposal Channel 4 was literally accountable to nobody. It provided no return whatsoever, apart from securing 4’s future and allowing them to sail on. The board was very heavily influenced by David Abraham and at that point Terry Burns… . Of course I said we would look at it but I couldn’t find anyone who thought much of it. “That was where my relations with Terry started to deteriorate. I always had a high regard for him when I had him before my committee. He’d produced a very good report on the BBC. But he did adopt an aggressive stance towards me.” Relations between the two powerful figures effectively broke down. It did not bode well for Ofcom’s chair, Dame Patricia Hodgson, either: she had already proposed to Whittingdale that Burns should stay on for an extra year as chairman. Ed Vaizey, who remained in post as culture minister, was in the room when Burns presented his plan. “No one was impressed,” he confirmed. “We resisted extending Terry Burns by a year – no way were we going to allow that. She got that totally wrong. Neither of us was a huge Terry Burns fan. We felt it was more of the same. As a minister you always find yourself frustrated by chairpeople who are captured by their institutions. I am always struck that never has any chair of any institution ever said anything of any interest to me in the way of challenging the status quo. John Whittingdale had never worked in business, Why was it he who had to ask the [ownership] question? It should have been the Channel 4 board asking the question.” Hodgson phoned Burns on 21 September to tell him that his term was not going to be extended. Whittingdale pointed to the Cameron government’s intention to stick to the time-limit rules on public appointments and not extend them unless there were compelling reasons. He believed anyway that Hodgson was trying to bounce him into a decision. “She thought the next Culture Secretary would come in without any real knowledge of broadcasting, and she would say that Terry was doing a very good job and should be extended by a year. I knew a lot about Channel 4 and I was not going to buy that.”

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Burns’s main criticism of Whittingdale was that he conducted so much of his business in a haphazard way, talking about it in public before he had really done the work and made his mind up. After the controversial memo came to light the Culture Secretary finally had discussions with Cameron and George Osborne, the Chancellor, in late October, about exploring privatisation. “They both said they were quite attracted to the idea,” said Whittingdale. “The Prime Minister agreed that officials working with the Shareholder Executive, the Cabinet Office and the Treasury should undertake an analysis of the broad range of options.” They encouraged him to explore, to see where that led, but did not specifically support privatisation. There was a suggestion that Cameron did not want to give an outright no to a sale because it could be seen as a snub to Whittingdale, on whom Osborne had already pulled rank since the election by requiring the BBC to shoulder the burden of free TV licences for the over-75s. “The process started from the moment after I had permission from David Cameron and George Osborne, when I rang up David Abraham and told him to give the Shareholder Executive access to the accounts,” said Whittingdale. “To reach a view on valuation and assets, they had to dig deep into accounts which are not that clear. They are not produced on a profit-and-loss basis.” The issue of whether Channel 4 Corporation should be audited as a conventional business, run with the discipline of a profit-seeking company, was one that had interested several board members. Channel 4 asserted that it was audited by KPMG and gave the shareholder executive access to its management accounts every quarter. The decision on privatisation eventually boiled down to two questions: how much was Channel 4 worth and was that price going to be worth the hassle of achieving it? The not-for-profit and regulated public service status of the channel was a pivotal issue because commercial shareholders would want to see a return on their investment, whether in dividends or capital growth. No definitive valuation was reached in these months, but estimates were as high as £1 billion. There was a belief that the BIS department and the Treasury, in preparing its post-election emergency budget, had proposed to privatise Channel 4 through a Money Bill, a device sometimes used to avoid primary legislation and parliamentary scrutiny. It was given currency in a book, What Price Channel 4?, published in 2016. Whittingdale maintained that it was untrue. “If there was a suggestion, I would have said it was profoundly wrong. The first I heard of it was when the book came out… . I would never have supported it. It would never have got through Parliament, and it was never floated at any point during my tenure as Secretary of State.” In late October DCMS officials went to Channel 4. They were led by the department’s senior executive, Hugh Harris, who had a high reputation, based on his prior experience at the Treasury, Cabinet Office and Number 10 Policy Unit. Announcing that the review was formally under way, they came with a single sheet of requests for information, as follows:

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1. Historical financial information for the last three years (income statements, cash flows and balance sheets) with detailed analysis of revenue; programme and other direct costs; marketing; cost of sales and other operating costs. 2. Current year performance against budget and expected out-turn, with detailed analyses of revenue (as above). 3. Financial forecasts for the next three years. 4. Analyses of scheduled programming for the past 12–24 months, to identify economic contribution and return by key programme type and channel and contribution to remit and licence obligations. Additionally, an assessment of the challenges of meeting the remit and licence obligations, highlighting particular requirements that are easier or more difficult to meet. 5. An assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the publisher-broadcaster model and ways in which C4 might look to capitalise on any changes to these requirements. 6. An assessment of the costs of relocating to the north, including costs of effecting a move, potential upsides from any property realisations and other implications for the channel’s delivery of its remit and financial sustainability. 7. A copy of the Oxford Economics 2015 report for Channel 4 (which analysed its positive contribution to the British economy). Question 6 made it clear that moving from London to the north was now on the agenda. But it was Question 4 that made nerves jangle and hackles rise. By asking the channel to provide specific figures on which programmes made the profits from advertising, DCMS was seeking highly sensitive information that could have a bearing on a sale valuation. The channel operates on a cross-subsidy business model. Much of its public service programming is loss-making. After 2010, the surplus, or subsidy, was mostly generated by the digital channels, headed by E4. These were the key to keeping aggregated audience share and share of advertising buoyant. Channel 4 responded by laying on seven two-hour sessions to brief officials led by Alistair Jones, seconded from the Treasury, and Emily Ashwell, who worked for the Shareholder Executive (about to be folded into a renamed UK Government Investment body – UKGI). The themed sessions expanded on information already provided to the formal quarterly meetings held with the DCMS, Ofcom and UKGI. It took a while for the team to digest the information. “We did all of this, and then there was a deafening silence at the end of it, after they ended in January,” said Brooke. “I don’t know what they did with it. Periodically questions would come back. I assume they analysed it.” In November John Nicolson, a Scottish National Party MP and a member of the Culture, Media & Sport Committee, was randomly picked at Prime Minister’s Questions. He is a close friend of the Channel 4 news presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy, and godfather to his son. “I decided to ask a question about Channel 4,” he said. “I repeated John Whittingdale’s words to the committee that there

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were no plans for privatisation. You always knew if Cameron was in trouble. He swung away and started blustering about how Channel 4 was a Conservative invention, while thinking about how to answer. He then announced they were exploring all options. He didn’t want to use the P word, so he talked about injecting extra finance to assist long-term stability.” But Cameron also said he was a big fan of Channel 4 – a phrase its lobbyists pounced upon gleefully. Enders Analysis summed up the year’s developments: “2015 will go down in history as a branch-shaking year in which the Government set itself the mission of reforming the tree of public service broadcasting… . In order to reform it [Channel 4] by placing it in private hands requires the Government to conclude it is unsustainable with its current remit.” But that flew in the face of the evidence of the past thirty-three years, that showed so far it had the flexibility to adapt. The Oxford Economics report demanded by the DCMS reviewers was the first of three reports from outside experts commissioned by Channel 4 to buttress its case against privatisation. It was a time-honoured means of setting the agenda (also favoured by the BBC). Channel 4 could hardly hire a top PR firm to assist it in thwarting a Government initiative, but this was an acceptable alternative. The report concluded that Channel 4 sustained as many as 314 independent producers, surviving on very thin profit margins, supporting 18,652 jobs. Privatisation could cut its contribution to the economy by 35 percent. In March 2016 Ernst & Young weighed in to answer a question fairly raised in the debate: whether Channel 4’s delivery of public service broadcasting could be financially sustained by its existing ownership model as advertising fluctuated, digital television allowed viewers to skip adverts and young viewers drifted away from being tied to watching TV in “real” time. Their report concluded that the channel had, in recent years, “successfully adapted to a changing and challenging market place”. It pointed to the degree of discretion and freedom it enjoyed in flexibly interpreting its remit, and concluded that a decision about its future could not be taken in isolation because it co-existed with the BBC – and to a lesser extent Channel 5 – in delivering public service broadcasting. “If the Government is considering privatisation,” it warned, “considerable thought should be given to the implications for remit delivery.” Any potential benefits of privatisation must be balanced against the uncertainty created by a complex change. The third and final report, from the London Business School in May, was led by Patrick Barwise, a seasoned champion of public service broadcasting. Unsurprisingly, then, it came to some robust conclusions in dismissing the privatisation case. It found no need to privatise Channel 4 to protect its distinctive remit, which was likely to be comfortably sustainable over the next ten years. It regarded the longterm prospects for TV advertising as excellent, and pointed to ways the channel could raise more money from its commercial airtime including increasing advertising minutes. Privatisation “would almost certainly make the remit less sustainable, thereby damaging news, current affairs, and programmes tackling social and

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cultural issues”. It would be hard to attract credible bidders without dropping the 100 percent publisher-broadcaster model, since most potential bidders had their own production businesses. And the remit would be an irritating constraint on maximising shareholder value. Whittingdale, by being handed the cabinet post, had been presented with an unexpected opportunity to fulfil his ambition to change Channel 4 but found, in his own words, “resistance at every stage”. He believed he had just two sympathisers on the board. “My friend Paul Potts – we go back thirty years to journalism days – certainly didn’t swallow the ‘Channel 4 is wonderful’ line, how many BAFTAs we have won this week. The other one was Stewart Purvis.” The former ITN chief executive and editor of Channel 4 News had built a substantial reputation as a knowledgeable independent. Other members, though, had their doubts or were openly hostile to privatisation, while the deputy chair, Mark Price, outgoing managing director of Waitrose and deputy chair of the John Lewis Partnership, was preoccupied with his campaign to replace Burns as chairman. Abraham became so concerned about the pressure from Government and the potential for a board split during the autumn of 2015 that he decided, after consultation with Burns, that the corporation’s lawyers needed to remind board members of their duties and obligations “in particular with the DCMS review process in mind”. He asked the external legal team to attend the December 2015 board meeting. The advice they supplied created, in his opinion, “a Magna Carta moment”, for a broadcaster challenging the extent of the Government’s power, which should serve as a useful guide to any future challenges. The five-point “Summary of Channel 4 Corporation Board Member Obligations/Duties”, safely filed in the archive, contained the following points: • Board members have to act in the best interests of the Corporation and have a duty to put interests of the Corporation ahead of personal interests. • They have a duty to ensure confidential information belonging to the Corporation is disclosed only to the extent required by law, and a duty to avoid and disclose any personal conflicts of interest. • Their duties and obligations are owed to the Channel 4 Corporation and not to the Government, Parliament, DCMS or Ofcom. The Corporation is a separate legal entity. It is not the agent of Government or Ofcom. Members are agents of the Corporation and have to have the best interests of the Corporation in mind at all times. The Corporation’s role is to perform its statutory functions. • In the context of the current DCMS process, where the board is being asked for specific information, there is a clear duty on members to protect Channel 4 Corporation confidential information and to limit disclosure, while complying with its statutory duties. • The board is not precluded from forming its own view on what is in the best interests of Channel 4 Corporation. To the contrary it is incumbent on the

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board to form a view as to what would be in the best interests of C4C and to pursue action … which it considers appropriate to give effect to that view. In other words, board members were told to stiffen their resolve, stand up to the Government if required and not to leak. Whittingdale had informal talks with potential buyers. Merchant banks and private equity firms were sniffing around for business. “There were lots, considerable interest,” he maintained. “Basically people came in to talk to me, particularly some of the media companies, international media companies that have reached their ceiling in America: Liberty Global, NBC, Disney, Discovery Communications… . It was not a serious negotiation; it was their first expressions of interest. All the potential interested parties said they were not going in there to asset-strip, but saw it as a long-term investment.” He pointed out that he was not intending to weaken Channel 4’s remit. “I am quite attracted to strengthening it, as I don’t think they are fulfilling it… . Luke Johnson and Michael Grade, who had opposed privatisation, changed sides. Sir Michael Bishop. now Lord Glendonbrook, came to me and said he had now changed his position.” The Conservative peer had decided that Britain did not need two publicly-owned public service broadcasters – the BBC was enough – but he was cautious and advocated a scheme to protect 4 through a golden share arrangement. In December 2015 Michael Grade, who as chief executive had fought off the two debates about privatising Channel 4 and was now Lord Grade of Yarmouth (Isle of Wight), came out in favour of privatisation. Hosting a Broadcasting Press Guild lunch at Pinewood film studios, he said the channel had been a brilliant experiment, but that it needed to be freed up. “What you would gain from privatisation is you could build a really big media business around Channel 4. I think the channel needs to be freed up really to move ahead. The fact is the world has changed dramatically.” He dismissed Abraham’s concern that Channel 4 News would suffer. “Those were the old arguments of the 1980s.” Regulation and statute law would protect Channel 4 and preserve the brand if it moved to private hands. But the tide against privatisation started to rise. The following March Abraham, addressing an Enders Analysis conference, made a direct reference to Grade and Luke Johnson. Calling privatisation a solution looking for a problem, he said that Grade “changes his mind on this issue more often than he changes his socks”. Pointing out that Johnson’s answer was to get out the begging bowl to move away from self-sufficiency, he said: “Luke’s inability to stick to one line and Michael’s many changing positions over the years have made them the flip-flop of British broadcasting. I want to give them a message today. Cheer up. Stop worrying so much – and in Michael’s case, go and enjoy your Channel 4 pension. The model is working. You don’t have that just on my say-so. That is Ofcom’s verdict and that of Enders Analysis, too. The BAFTAs and Oscars

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tell the same story. So do the revenues.” He also spoke passionately at a packed public parliamentary discussion chaired by David Putnam, who was preparing an analysis of public service broadcasting which he viewed as a turning point. Meanwhile headhunters had been busy identifying Burns’s successor as chairman. The selection panel had rejected Mark Price, who, as consolation, was appointed Minister of State for Trade and Investment and made a life peer. The post at 4 instead went to Charles Gurassa, who had been approached. He combined an interesting and wide mix of commercial and public sector experience building on a mainstream career in the travel industry primarily as chief executive of Thomson Travel Group and executive chairman of TUI Northern Europe. Now in an à la carte stage, after achieving financial independence, he’d broadened out with roles ranging from deputy chair of the National Trust to chairing the Genesis Housing Association. I was very clear with both the interview panel and Secretary of State that I have experience of 21 years working in recently-privatised organisations. I had a deep knowledge and insight of their behaviour. I was in a position to advise governments of the consequences of their actions. I was also chair of Virgin Mobile when we floated it on the stock exchange. My blend of experience was across the spectrum, flotations, privatised businesses, not-for-profit enterprises, it enabled me to form a rounded view.

This combination of experience was relatively unusual, and more varied, commercial and nitty-gritty than his predecessor, Terry Burns. He had no set view on Channel 4’s ownership and no track record of involving himself in the debate. “We were all quite pleased with him,” said Ed Vaizey. “He gave an impression in the interview that he would challenge the status quo.” Gurassa, new to broadcasting, calm and unshowy, made an independent appraisal as promised. This he did in months. He assiduously attended some heated debates taking place in early 2016, studied the accounts and came to his own conclusion: the Channel 4 model basically worked and it was well run, if not perfect. The key insight was: “There is no sustainability issue.” Whittingdale recalled bitterly: “I had never heard of him… . I could, as Secretary of State, have said no; but that would have caused consternation. As far as I could see he went native – he was under the control of David Abraham within weeks. They took him off to jolly Channel 4 things: they take people to the BAFTAs, book ten tables at the Royal Television Society Awards. They know how to entertain.” The channel had by now seized the initiative in a campaign that stretched through 2016 and up to March 2017, when privatisation was formally abandoned by the Government. In this Dan Brooke played a key role. He had been appointed director of marketing and communications in 2010, after he had helped Abraham win the race to become chief executive, orchestrating his campaign. He had previously worked at Channel 4 from 1998 to 2005, responsible for a small team

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developing Film4, E4 and More4. He was passionately committed to the channel’s ethos but that was widespread at 4. A seat on the board followed in February 2012, and he later took on responsibility for diversity. His principal strength, when it came to heading off the privateers, was not executive skills, but social ones, that he was equally at home among the upper strata of the Conservative Party as at Horseferry Road. He was educated at Marlborough College. His father, Peter Brooke, and grandfather, Henry Brooke, had both served in Conservative cabinets and both had been ennobled. “David, knowing I am well connected in those circles, thought I’d be a good person to oversee this.” With a team of eight in-house public relations officers, the campaign with leading roles played by Sophie Jones and Lynette Huntley (later promoted to chief of staff) and James MacLeod began by targeting three groups. They were decision-makers – Conservative MPs and senior civil servants; influencers – the press and leaders of the TV industry; and opinion-formers – a less easily-defined group. Brooke accepted that a third of Conservative MPs were unlikely to engage with Channel 4, because they were ideologically opposed to it (and suspicious of Channel 4 News), or have no interest in public service broadcasting; but that left two thirds, numbering 220, who were probably biddable, including some on the Culture, Media & Sport Committee. Between June 2015 and March 2016 he and team had contacted half of those approachable Conservative MPs, some at round-table discussions of issues picked by the channel, such as the future of news. Alongside this delicately-nuanced strategy there were screenings of Film4 hits and events featuring Dave Fishwick, the self-made businessman who presented the Channel 4 show, How To Get Rich Quick. As Whittingdale observed, there was plenty of hospitality offered, including days out at Royal Ascot, the Grand National and the Cheltenham Gold Cup. As usual DVD recordings of some of the channel’s best shows continued to be sent out to 140 members of the House of Lords. From January to April 2016 the battle was waged heatedly. The writer and Wolf Hall director Peter Kosminsky wrote an article in The Guardian in January warning against repeating the mistakes of ITV. “A quirky, brave and occasionally brilliant broadcaster will be reduced to a profit centre. Hundreds of millions of pounds currently used to make programmes will be diverted to shareholders.” He also mounted a defence of public service broadcasting to a live television audience at the BAFTA awards in May. On 3 February there was a short debate in the House of Lords where Michael Grade spoke in favour of privatisation, arguing that a selloff would allow Channel 4 to become a media powerhouse and that the opposition of management flew in the face of commercial logic. Two former Conservative ministers, Lord Fowler and Lord Inglewood, opposed him. The Upper House aired the controversy again through an inquiry by its select committee on Communications. The report, “A Privatised Future for Channel 4”, concluded: “It is our clear preference that the status quo be maintained as there

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are more risks than benefits involved in privatisation.” If privatisation were to be proposed by Government it would expect a full public consultation on the evidence for change. Though the summer recess was imminent, the report solidified political opinion. It also revisited in detail the weaknesses of the broadcasting regime under the past fifteen years of Ofcom licensing, which, despite its duty to foster public service broadcasting, had allowed ITV plc to retreat from some of its regional bases and cut children’s programme production. What hope for Channel 4’s schedule and protecting the remit under such a regime? By now Gurassa, too, had come down against privatisation, and the pressure eased. A MORI poll showed that 42 percent of Conservative MPs wanted the channel to remain in its present form, while 40 percent were still undecided – even though many in the party were and are convinced that Channel 4 News is biased against them instead of being impartial. The principal argument for no change was that the channel would not be able to maintain the level of spending on public service programming if tinkered with. It could bring a great deal of grief without much financial return. Whittingdale, though, had not yet thrown in the towel on a privatisation option, as was apparent when in June he appeared before the parliamentary select committee. Within days, though, he was in no position to affect the outcome. The referendum on membership of the European Union resulted in a narrow majority for leaving it, prompting David Cameron’s instant resignation. His successor, Theresa May, dropped Whittingdale from the Cabinet, probably because in April he had been caught up in press stories about an ill-judged sexual liaison. He was not much mourned, but he had a benevolent image, was well informed and made time to attend industry events and chat to journalists. John Nicolson believed that he was an ideologue who wanted the privatisation of 4 to be his “Thatcherite legacy”. In the event his sole achievement arose from his sensible belief that the channel was regulated too lightly. Under the microscope of the privatisation debate, the channel’s model had not received an entirely clean bill of health. The Ofcom annual critique of its statement of content policy was to become lengthier and accompanied by objective independent research into whether it was adequately fulfilling its public-service remit. There was fair criticism of its failure to cater for older children with specific programmes. Colette Bowe, the Ofcom chairman who stepped down in 2014, had recorded over three years her concern around this specific issue and frustration that it had not been corrected. So although the ground war waged by Brooke and team had apparently been won, there was still pressure on the channel to change its ways. The focus now shifted from private ownership to delivering favours to the deprived English regions and nations by moving its headquarters out of London. Whittingdale’s less ideological successor Karen Bradley, MP for Staffordshire Moorlands, saw this as a priority. Soon after her appointment, 4 rolled out the red carpet. She attended the Rio de Janeiro Paralympics in September on a three-day

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package, where she visited the Channel 4 operation, and Clare Balding, their lead presenter, helped show her around. When Bradley appeared before her first select committee in September, the indefatigable Nicolson asked her about privatisation and she winked at him, implying all was well. Nonetheless, Channel 4 would experience an anxious autumn. It was an open secret that Abraham, frustrated by the politics and itching to step down, was waiting for final confirmation that his legacy would be to have saved the channel from a sale. He was also far more hawkish about the potential for relocation, as the next chapter will explain, but he was told to keep his counsel. He and his colleagues were shaken by the level of cross-party support for relocation evident at all the party conferences, and were disappointed when what they thought a generous offer to stimulate regional production to head this off was ignored. In March 2017 Whittingdale, now a backbencher, appeared onstage at the Oxford Media Convention and conceded that the game was over. A week later, on cue, Abraham confirmed that he would step down towards the end of the year, to launch a media production venture. During the protracted debate, the question of whether Britain needed two publicly-owned public service broadcasters had been ventilated. The controversial decision to snatch The Great British Bake Off from the BBC in September 2016 had momentarily rocked the political boat and was the subject of a bad-tempered public spat between the BBC’s James Purnell and Jay Hunt at the Royal Television Society’s London conference. For Purnell it showed that Channel 4 was too lightly regulated, while Jay Hunt argued that Bake Off had been saved for the nation. The commercial truth was that Channel 4 needed a big hit to fire up its ratings and preserve its share of audiences, and was desperate to ensure the associated advertising it would garner was kept from ITV. Karen Bradley, for her part, was happy with the switch: as a former accountant, she was interested to see how TV’s most popular show worked with adverts. Ed Vaizey, another backbencher with a former ringside seat, summed up the roles of successive ministers in the privatisation saga: “Francis Maude really wanted to privatise Channel 4. Matt Hancock was only briefly involved. I wasn’t hugely fussed – I saw privatisation as a way of looking under the bonnet. For John [Whittingdale] it was an article of faith: he felt incredibly strongly about it. He also wanted the BBC to sell off UKTV. John’s trump card was Channel 4 not adhering to its remit – it had left it behind long ago – and its obsession about this hugely expensive building.” The Horseferry Road headquarters had been carefully planned by former chairman Sir Michael Bishop as a freehold asset, security in a financial storm. Channel 4 intended to fight for its inheritance.

Notes 1 John Whittingdale interview, March 2017.

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etween autumn 2016 and March 2018, moving Channel 4 – or some parts of it – out of London replaced privatisation as the Government’s goal. Relocation did not pose an existential threat to the channel, nor to its public-service remit, which could even be enhanced by a move; but it led to a protracted period of haggling and uncertainty. The new chairman, experienced business executive Charles Gurassa, had joined in January 2016 with an agnostic view; but he had concluded by early summer that 4 benefited from “a brilliantly flexible model”. If anything, he believed it had erred on the side of prudence, by always keeping a large amount of cash in the bank, usually hovering around £200 million. Based on his direct experience of two privatised businesses – British Airways and Thomas Cook – he was convinced that it would be impossible to protect the hallowed remit if an all-out drive for profit took over.1 The business model included its wholly-owned headquarters, no debt and few fixed costs after £80 million a year on salaries and £100 million on distribution of content. This left plenty of discretion over spending, given an annual income approaching £1 billion a year. It meant that 80 percent of costs, basically programming-related, could be cut back should advertising collapse. That flexibility meant it was able, for example, to commit £75 million for a three-year contract for The Great British Bake Off at short notice in 2016, which would be renewed again for two years in 2019 with a brand extension of Junior Bake Off. But he and Abraham had now to figure out how to handle the politically popular bandwagon that relocation had become. It was rattling along at increasing speed and could not be forced off the road. Many of the politicians who lined up with the channel’s executives to resist a change in ownership were firm believers in its moving out of London (preferably to their constituency). Paul Potts, a non-executive board member between 2012 and 2017, observed: “If you don’t back privatisation, and win that point, you are into the politics of relocation. We did not play those politics smartly. Moving from London is something nobody wants to do if it damages Channel 4. I did understand why people were

worried … but we got ourselves into the wrong position. If C4 had opted for a more constructive and realistic approach, I believe a deal could have been reached earlier.” He was just one of the influential voices on and off the board who by 2018 were rueing what they saw as two wasted years. Ed Vaizey, the former culture minister, had tried to advise the board informally to take a more nuanced stance but his advice had not been taken: “I told them from the get-go, when plan B of moving was on the cards, to open up an office in another city, make it a meaningful presence – consumer-facing, commissioning. I told Dan Brooke this at a Christmas party in 2016. They didn’t understand it was political, that’s what seemed so odd. They didn’t come up with a wheeze to help politicians save face.” Others, though, thought that it was only through playing hardball that Gurassa and Abraham’s successor Alex Mahon eventually came away with a deal that avoided major damage. Channel 4 was still in battle gear when the 2016 referendum vote in favour of leaving the European Union hardened the Government’s stance. The Leave majority was interpreted by many as a protest against the neglect of the regions by the London elite that included accurate reporting of concerns. Broadcasters were being urged to pump in more money for programmes made outside London, to better reflect the interests of those neglected areas. This would inevitably raise questions about how genuinely regional those current programmes were. Relocation moved up the Government’s agenda that September, when Abraham had an uncomfortable meeting with the newish Culture Secretary Karen Bradley and her minister Matt Hancock – regarded as a “super meddler” within 4. A month later Hancock remarked in a Sunday Times interview that if Channel 4 did not do something to stimulate the out-of-London TV industry, privatisation would remain a live threat. Abraham continued to view a large-scale relocation as creating substantial risks and feared that the pressure for it would undermine the channel’s independence. “We were preparing for mortal conflict,” he said. “For Bradley partial relocation meant 500 people.” (There was never any question of the bulk of the sales force quitting the capital: London remained media city for those activities so that almost everyone else would leave.) Abraham insisted that a move could not be forced upon him. In this he was backed by the biggest programme producers. Channel 4 consulted about 200 of them and until the very last the established ones, including Gogglebox’s Studio Lambert, favoured the status quo, i.e. staying conveniently in London. This would lead to a split between the big independents and hungry regional tigers led by formidable Cat (Catriona) Lewis of Salford-based Nine Lives Media, a key supplier of Dispatches to 4. After serving as six years as chair of PACT nations and regions she established the Indie Club, arguing correctly not all out-of-London commissions were what they seemed. She said PACT was run to serve the super-indies, that Channel 4’s public utterances of good intentions had not delivered a step change. They were frequently made with talent brought in from the

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capital – as happened with the Scottish survival show, Eden. Or they might be shows simply “lifted and shifted” to meet the quota, as had been the fate of Time Team. She came to the sombre conclusion there was an unspoken cartel of vested interests favouring the status quo and that regulatory quotas in place to balance out production were got around. Martin Baker, 4’s commercial director confirmed: “Channel 4 can’t claim to have cracked it. In returning series (the gold dust commissions) we just haven’t. Not because people didn’t try. Confidence levels were not high enough. It’s a long game.” Commissioners had to be sure the finished programmes would be up to standard and often insisted on experienced executive producers based in London, where editing then took place. The bald data did show a steady increase in spending but Channel 4 accepted a lot of this was driven by one-off small commissions. What Ofcom wanted to see was a sustainable production industry, with existing genuine regional producers getting bigger. Channel 4 had to report annually to Ofcom on this area and picked two or three programmes for its own checks to ensure they indeed passed two of the three out-of-London tests: location of the main office; location where the production was based, reported by the broadcaster; and location where off-screen talent was hired. In 2016–18 C4 found one programme that failed the test and went back to Ofcom. The guidelines, Channel 4 agreed, were very loose. This disquiet led to Ofcom’s review of TV production and programming guidance, which was eventually published in December 2018, proposing to tighten rules against widespread slippery behaviour introducing its own spot checks by 2022. Independent research noted that the initiatives so far had “only a subdued effect on the independent sector and audience perceptions”. At the Creative Cities Convention in Cardiff in April 2019, John McVay, the chief executive of PACT, acknowledged the need for change: “the current criteria are not fit for purpose.” Meanwhile back in the autumn of 2016 4’s board made its Creative Nation offer which it optimistically expected to be acceptable to the government but which actually demonstrated how it was out of touch. To boost production outside the M25, Channel 4 would set up a £100 million investment fund to help establish independent producers, a serious step up from the £20 million indie growth fund it founded in 2014. Half of the £100 million would come from 4, the balance from commercial backers. It suggested raising the equity stake it could take in companies from the existing level of 25 percent. The amount it spent on programmes made outside London and the south-east would be increased from the current 35 percent in value of programme budgets to near 50 percent, to bring it into line with the BBC, which had trebled its programme spending in the north in seven years – but had done little for the Midlands and East of England. In this offer 4 would retain its London headquarters but could increase its presence in Manchester – where a small group selling regional advertising was already based – to between 50 and 100 people.

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Abraham discussed the offer with Bradley’s top officials, but it fell into a black hole: they maintained that it did not transfer enough jobs. Of the channel’s 819 staffers in 2015, only 25 were based outside London. The aides also dismissed the finance pot because the broadcaster’s existing indie fund did not impress them at all: only two of thirteen producers backed so far were based outside the south-east. (In 2018 the indie fund was re-directed to invest only in regional and national producers.) Abraham pressed on but the day before he was due to meet Bradley she asked to see sensitive board papers and detailed budgets. He again felt he had to refuse. He phoned Ofcom’s chair, Patricia Hodgson, for advice, and was supported. “We kept on being accused of hiding things,” he said. It was an illustration of the breakdown in trust. “I felt I was in a souk, haggling with senior civil servants, along the lines: ‘You offered 150–200 people; can you get it up to 250?’” The stand-off was especially frustrating for Abraham because it interfered with the future career path he’d mapped out for himself. He had envisaged leaving 4 in December 2016 to set up a TV production business; but he felt he could not quit while relocation remained unresolved, and in the event stayed for an extra ten months. To complicate matters, there had been a three-month delay – from September until December – in appointing four new non-executive directors to the board, which meant it was barely quorate and lacking a chair for its audit committee. The new directors were having to be hurriedly briefed in the days before Christmas for a January meeting. At an awkward dinner with the new directors in January it became clear that Abraham and Gurassa now had different priorities. Abraham talked informally to them about having face-to-face discussions with key government officials about relocation, but the chairman cut across and said there had to be no detrimental effect on 4 or its bottom line. Damage was tricky to define because, although relocation involved extra costs, these might be offset by long-term savings and benefits, introducing younger and more socially diverse staffers happy to live outside London. The channel’s median pay levels, at £59,000 a year, were significantly higher than the BBC’s and that went all up the scale. Its workforce, defined by parental status and education, was picked out as the poshest of the broadcasters by a London School of Economics study when published in 2018. Relocation could also be a path to introducing smarter networking, with updated technology systems. At Horseferry Road executives were accustomed to clattering up and down the metal staircases between three floors – programming, business and advertising – for face-to-face exchanges. In a speech in Salford in March 2017 Karen Bradley finally and formally buried the idea of privatisation but added that on relocation the Government and 4 were far apart. No progress had been made in the past six months. Five days later she visited Birmingham City University to make encouraging remarks about the city’s potential to be a creative centre, encompassing Channel 4. “I have been impressed

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with how quickly Birmingham has been off the blocks on this,” she said. What a reward 4 would be. On 12 April she published the terms of a relocation consultation. It asked three questions: 1. To what extent should C4 be based outside London, potentially moving its HQ. 2. Whether more programmes shown on C4 should be made outside London. 3. Whether C4 should be able to make larger investments in production companies, up to 49 percent from the then limit of 25 percent.

It stated: Public assets should deliver for the public in every possible way. That is key to building an economy that works for all, not just the privileged few. The Government recognises that the growth in the broadcasting and production sector has not been evenly distributed, with more than two thirds of producers based in London and the southeast. This limits the spread of jobs, prosperity and opportunity, not only in terms of regional growth but also the representation of local views and interests on television.

Now a Campaign for Regional Broadcasting Midlands started to pressure the Government, claiming that the region had been the victim of shortfall in BBC programme investment because of the focus on Salford, while the Birmingham Mail reported that early-stage discussions had taken place about relocating 4 to the city. (Birmingham lobbyists hopes were boosted because voters had narrowly elected a Conservative candidate, Andy Street, as West Midlands mayor.) Meanwhile Ofcom published its review of the channel’s performance during 2016: its research showed significantly greater audience declines in north-west England, Scotland and Northern Ireland (between 3.5 and 3.2 percent) than the rest of the country and it was perceived as being focused too much on London. Answering a question from a journalist at the presentation of 4’s annual report, Gurassa took a hard line again drawing on the legal advice Abraham had sought: “We said a full or substantial relocation would create significant difficulties. We set out to be constructive, asking how can we do more, by making a bigger contribution in the nations and regions. I remain positive. It is up to us to decide what we spend, where we spend it within our remit, and where we are located. We were set up by Parliament to be an independent media organisation to challenge orthodoxy, hold the powerful to account, as part of our DNA. If the Government wanted us to do something that would damage our remit, that requires primary legislation.” He pointedly referred to the Horseferry Road building as a very helpful asset on the balance sheet for the pension fund. The two sides were still at cross purposes when Theresa May called the snap general election in April 2017. The advertising market had stalled into uncer-

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tainty after the referendum of June 2016 and the financial climate became significantly more clouded for Channel 4. In the year up to the vote the market had grown by 4.6 percent. In the twelve months after it fell by 4.2 percent and the flexible model was tested as at least £50 million was taken out of the programme budget as the spending brakes were applied. It transpired in July that sponsorship of the forthcoming Great British Bake Off – from Lyle’s Golden Syrup and the baking powder sales company Dr Oetinger – would be raising only half the sum originally expected. The election wounded the Prime Minister’s authority (and removed her key advisor, Birmingham-born Nick Timothy, a key advocate for boosting the regions) but the manifesto pledge to relocate Channel 4 north of London survived. Abraham, now in his final months, enlisted as consultants the former Ofcom chief Ed Richards and Howell James, once the BBC’s corporate spin doctor. At their urging he reluctantly adopted the role of the bargainer in the bazaar that he had formerly decried, and proposed moving 250 people out of London – more than double his original offer but still only half of what Bradley had demanded. Meanwhile, Whitehall’s own consultation had attracted plans to house the channel from more than twelve local authorities, including Birmingham, Brighton, Cardiff, Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield, Nottingham and Manchester. Some identified potential sites for offices and studios. Abraham’s new proposal went to the July 2017 board, his swansong. It was clearly moving in the right direction but it deferred the decision and said it was one for Mahon, the next chief executive, to make – appointed in June, she was arriving in October. Some directors felt he would be unable to close the deal because of the legacy of distrust. He had at various times been asked to stop campaigning in public but used the freedom of a last appearance at the parliamentary select committee in October to repeat his opposition to a full relocation. In September Bradley told the Royal Television Society’s Cambridge Convention that 4 needed to establish a “major presence outside London”, stressing that programming decisions should not all be made in the bubble of Westminster. She was now less worried about the precise location, ultimately conceding that 4 had the right to choose. But 2018 started with an unexpected Cabinet reshuffle that saw Bradley despatched to Northern Ireland and Matt Hancock promoted to Culture Secretary, the third to hold the post in three years. He had been a hawk on the question of privatisation and would take an equally firm stand on relocation. Some suspected that his hand was behind a Daily Telegraph report in February that a private member’s bill to order Channel 4 out of London was being prepared. Birmingham still believed it was the Government’s favoured destination and some of its supporters sporadically demonstrated their ardour by picketing outside Horseferry Road. On 28 February The Times ran a letter from the new West Midlands mayor, Andy Street, and a hundred grandees making its case. Yet when the deal between the channel and the Government was finally announced

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in March, there were no details of the cities that would benefit. The deal was an ingenious advance on the basic foundations of Abraham’s proposal. Channel 4 would establish a new national headquarters, to comply with the Government’s manifesto pledge, and two new creative hubs, in total employing 300 people out of its then headcount of 850. Those involved in the diaspora would include “key creative decision-takers” – programme commissioners with money and technology teams, not just administrators. The new HQ would have a studio with the potential to insert live news and host live shows, while co-presenting Channel 4 News with ITN’s existing London base. News was already beefing up its network of British correspondents and had closed its Bangkok bureau to help fund the changes while retaining correspondent Jonathan Miller. Final decisions on locations would be made by Channel 4, releasing politicians from the ire of spurned suitors. And it kept its prized London office, which could offer vacated space to smaller independents. It was widely seen as a success for the new chief executive. One board member commented: “Alex Mahon had no legacy. She was dealing with a new Secretary of State. They were able to have a dialogue and a grown-up conversation, and we got an agreement over the line… . It was always going to be a compromise. The outcome reflects well on Alex, who made a pragmatic proposal and had a knowledge of what Government wanted.” In truth she did the minimum she could get away with, without affecting the business’s sustainability. A spell acting as part of a group of industry advisors to the DCMS as the BBC’s new charter and agreement was negotiated had assisted. She held a packed briefing at Horseferry Road for the out-of-town bidders in April. She is an expert in dressing for the occasion and she chose power dressing mode: black alpine stilettos, black skirt, white fitted couture jacket with red and black bands. She came across as tough, no-nonsense, in control. The bidding cities had a week to ask questions and a deadline of 11 May for a submission, capped at 5,000 words. No national HQ would be considered further away than a three-hour journey from London and the successful city needed a minimum population of 200,000. She said: “Unlike many public bodies we do not receive a penny in financial support. … That means we have to design a plan that is financially sustainable for us, especially at a time, let’s face it, when there is increasing macro-economic uncertainty and digital uncertainty.” And she promised that the out-of-London sites would play a vital role in the longer term in the way 4 spent half of its programme budget, bringing new talent and jobs into the industry without people having to come to London. Her practical approach was reinforced by Jonathan Allan, the Yorkshire-raised commercial director, now her deputy, who took the lead in sifting bids. In dressed-down jeans, trainers and stubble, he stressed that the winners would have to offer offices that could be quickly occupied; fast fibre broadband; a well-developed creative ecosystem and culture; and a quality of

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life to lure and keep the best talent from London. Bars, restaurants, theatres, live music, attractive housing – they all counted. There were 33 responses from towns and cities. By the end of May the first shortlist of thirteen cities were invited to enter the second stage of the pitch. In July the six cities in the final process were picked: Birmingham, Bristol, Greater Manchester, Cardiff, Leeds and Glasgow. Eventually the choice narrowed to Manchester and Leeds. Birmingham, which had lobbied so persistently for the prize, was eliminated because its TV production base was so modest. Channel 4 News, the awkward squad, initially favoured Greater Manchester, as did several key executives. But Leeds, in the final tense weeks, had drawn together a hundred or so of its creative companies and agencies and composed what amounted to a love song to Channel 4. Local TV producers dropped everything to film a Gogglebox-style sizzle tape in six days to convince the channel that the West Yorkshire city, formerly an industrial powerhouse and now an important financial centre, was ripe and ready to consummate this exciting new relationship. The campaign team came up with a final heartfelt plea: “Be the Spark.” The deadline slipped by a month, but at the end of October Leeds was declared the winner, with creative hubs in Bristol (centre of natural history production, thanks to the M4 corridor and toll-free Severn Bridge within easy reach of Cardiff) and Glasgow (where Channel 4 already had an office). It had taken two years and a month after relocation replaced privatisation as the Government’s priority, and seven months since terms were agreed with Whitehall. The extra investment in moving to a 50 percent share of programme spending would by 2023 inject £250 million extra into out-of-London production, with support for 3,000 jobs. The moves would start in the autumn of 2019. Mahon summarised the decision this way: “Leeds put forward a compelling and ambitious strategy for how they could work alongside Channel 4 to further build the strong independent production sector in the city and develop new diverse talent from across the region. Locating our national HQ in Leeds enables us to capitalise on a strong and fast-growing independent production sector in cities across the north of England – and also has the potential to unlock growth in the north-east and east of the country, an area without a major presence from other national broadcasters. Establishing a creative hub in Bristol gives us the opportunity to build on thriving production communities in the city and to partner with Cardiff and harness the power of the wider creative industry across the southwest and Wales… Glasgow has a well-established production sector across multiple genres and locating a creative hub in the city will give Channel 4 the opportunity to tap into the rich cultural diversity of Scotland and allow us to exploit the city’s strong connectivity with Belfast and the Northern Ireland production sector. The quality of pitches from all the cities involved in the final stage of the process was exceptionally high… I hope

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we can continue discussions with all of them about how we can develop new partnerships with each of their cities – particularly since we will be spending up to £250 million more in the nations and regions over the next five years and want to work with producers and talent in all of these areas.

The dawning reality that programme-making funds would be redirected led to a wave of successful production companies opening branch offices. Channel 4’s prickly and haughty sense of its independence ultimately served it well in striking this agreement. The idea of political interference was anathema, conflicting as it did with its founding principles. Its negotiators acted tough and were listened to. But where the battle-hardened Abraham had seen threats and ghosts from the privatisation battle hovering over the relocation haggles, Mahon was able to visualise an opportunity to refresh her new channel. After all, the daily regional news programmes on the BBC and ITV were very popular. Dispersing it around the UK might also protect it from any government’s future attempt to sell it: American conglomerates had not swooped on ITV and were unlikely to want to tangle themselves in regional commitments. The channel remained publicly owned, with a much more tightly-drawn programme remit to deliver than either ITV or Channel 5 – the latter revitalised since it was bought by the New York-based owner of MTV in 2014. And now 4 had to reconfigure into a geographic federation, and over time foster a network of genuine regional and national suppliers, without stalling its creative or business engine. So the new chief executive, first woman in the post, had passed the big test impressively, stilling the doubts that many in the industry had expressed on her controversial and largely unexpected appointment.

Jay Hunt Leaves The warm favourite to succeed Abraham as the seventh chief executive had been Jay Hunt, the chief creative officer, who had boosted her credentials at a key moment by masterminding the acquisition of The Great British Bake Off, and its ongoing extension into Extra Slice, Bake Off: The Professionals and Celebrity Bake Off. Food programming at weekends and prime time was a crucial Jay Hunt success. The departing Abraham, who had recruited her to the channel, lobbied on her behalf until the final decision, believing that paired with Jonathan Allan the duo would carry the channel forward, but he was not a member of the selection committee. Chaired by Stuart Purvis, the former head of ITN, it comprised Roly Keating, a former BBC executive now chief executive of the British Library, Simon Bax, chair of Archant, and M. T. Rainey, deputy chair of 4. When it came to the final decision only Rainey – the sole woman on the panel and long-time acquaintance of Abraham – backed Hunt.

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“There was noise around Jay’s behaviour but she wasn’t sunk by that. If Mahon had not been such a strong candidate, Jay would have got it,” observed a board member. The others plumped for Mahon because of her business experience, running Shine, most recently as chief executive of special effects companyThe Foundry. In so doing they maintained the channel’s historic record of never appointing a chief executive from inside the company. Word of the decision, ultimately unanimous on a second vote, reached Hunt before the formal announcement on 5 June 2017. Some concluded that her direct manner and often divisive approach had told against her. She had tried to mitigate this by calling time on the famously dysfunctional programme review where point-scoring could take over. Instead she founded Creative Breakfasts in 2013, every Tuesday, where heads of department were regularly gathered to exchange and debate ideas, after receiving stimulus material, about how to address a strategic need, for example, the gaps on Sunday night, or respond to trends, like the wealth gap. Over time advertising sales executives were invited in, and audience researchers, who might brutally destroy an idea because they didn’t get it or said no one would watch it. It was extended to the rest of the commissioners: she regarded it as her secret weapon. Hunt swiftly decided that she had no future at the channel and called the workforce together in the meeting room on Friday 2 June to announce that she was resigning. She had become such a dominant figure during her time at Horseferry Road that many of her colleagues arrived expecting to be told she was the winner, and found the news hard to believe. The most straightforward reaction came from the advertising sales force who went to the pub to celebrate: no more would so many programme schedules be rejigged at the last minute. Hunt then threw herself into marshalling a dazzling August programme schedule, pulling forward an entertainment series from the autumn and personally introducing the controversial ISIS drama The State, which was stripped across the week for maximum effect. The joint farewell party, held in October, was a triumph. It saw Abraham, Hunt, Burns and Gurassa smiling benignly and striking positive notes. This was a moment to treasure, the first time in Channel 4’s history that such an outwardly amiable uncontentious regime change had taken place. The tradition of bad handovers had started in 1987 when an emotional Jeremy Isaacs had threatened successor Michael Grade in a confrontation: “If you screw it up, if you betray it, I’ll come back and throttle you!” Grade had a mixed departure, while Michael Jackson, Mark Thompson and Andy Duncan had left in various degrees of unhappiness, and so with minimal fuss, though Duncan had a generous pay-off as comfort. The Abraham/Hunt farewell was a celebration. It was enhanced by the successful launch of The Great British Bake Off, which far exceeded deliberately modest predictions, and the stars turned out. Along with programme suppliers and agents they toasted the departing duo, as tributes rolled across the screen. It had all come good, or at least as good as could realistically have been expected. Channel 4 had

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retained its independence and could boast of assets approaching £500 million, and Ofcom had recently confirmed it was financially secure for the next few years. When Abraham finally left in October the staff thronged the balconies and steps to say goodbye. The new regime was careful not to spoil the harmonious effect by rounding on the old one – not least because they had not found the cupboard bare of fresh programming. They could build the schedules during the next around an inheritance of sixteen returning successful series led by The Great British Bake Off which topped the annual ratings in succeeding years, just as it was supposed to do. Love Productions, which made it, was very happy with its new home, and opened a social initiative to train young people, The Love Academy, on extending the contract to 2021. Jay Hunt moved on seamlessly to a new European job with Apple TV, based in London, to set up a programming slate but had a far lower to invisible public profile. In several exit interviews in 2017 and 2018, she gave a summary of what in effect had been her pitch for the top job. “I am pleased with what I have achieved here,” she said in September 2017. The outcome is that I am going, and I feel happy about that… . I do think that Channel 4’s success relies on creative success. Its ability to resonate commercially is entirely dependent on that. So whoever runs it in the next five years has got to have a strong creative pedigree because in the end that is all we are. You know how painfully simple this organisation is: money in, money out. We don’t do anything else. So being creatively at the top of its game will be critical and it is about the only measure of success because without that you can’t monetise anything, and then you haven’t got the revenue. It has never been more important.

Was she saying they chose the wrong person? I am pragmatic about these things. Regime change is almost nothing to do with what I do or don’t say in an interview process, it’s about the make-up of the board at the time, the make-up of the panel. I am not an idiot, I was very close to David – that probably counted against me. My tenure here in many ways is defined by big returning shows that have been exported around the world, up to 200 territories, which has made those individual producers a huge amount of money. I am thrilled about that, genuinely. Gogglebox, First Dates, Hunted, The Island are all huge franchises. Fantastic for the indies. But has their success future-proofed Channel 4? No… . The issues are very clear: it’s a small portfolio of channels at a time when there are digital giants marching around the world. The key thing is around brand attribution and brand relevance. The end point of some conversations with digital giants is that Channel 4 is becoming less and less potent as a brand and as a creative powerhouse. That is what this broadcaster needs to wrestle with in the next four to five years.

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She foresaw a point when Channel 4 ended up as a research and development laboratory for the global subscription video-on-demand giants led at this point by Netflix and Amazon but was unable to benefit from co-produced programming beyond a restricted number of broadcasts, because it did not control the rights and they did. “In some respects this organisation is straightjacketed, and that will become an interesting debating point in the next few years ahead. Channel 4 is not a producer and it is very hard for it to control intellectual property rights. We are not able to make our own content. It is about freedom: either Channel 4 is going to have to work in a slightly different way, or it has to be given the freedom to renegotiate with the independent sector or move into in-house production.” To some extent this was addressed by Alex Mahon in June 2019, when Channel 4 and PACT radically reshaped their terms of trade. The broadcaster gained far greater freedom to exploit programmes across all its platforms, so it could box-set all new titles ahead of linear transmission, while relinquishing its share of secondary revenue from international sales. The deal also included its money-spinner, E4. A programme could stay on All4 for three years with a renewable licence for returning series. It was a major simplification, and confirmed repaired relations between the two sides. Hunt predicted the arrival of the end of the period where a national broadcaster such as Channel 4 could buy a stake cheaply in a multimillion-pound drama aimed at global audiences and negotiate a favourable first transmission deal for its home market. This was partly based on what an Amazon executive at that time, Roy Price, had said to her on a public platform at the Edinburgh Festival of 2017: “Don’t think you can go on paying me a million dollars as a UK broadcaster for a $5–8 million-an-episode drama.” All4 needed attention, technical upgrades, and much more investment to develop into a platform younger viewers might choose to select among all the streamers because it captured the mischievous Channel 4 spirit. “It can’t be the biggest, won’t have more content, not going to move into incredibly expensive drama to the detriment of the main channel, but can bring some cheekiness and wit to it,” she said. Hunt’s commissioners recalled that criticism had tortured her. They gossiped about her anguished emails and texts at 3am, proof that she stayed awake worrying about the previous evening’s output. She wanted to be the ultimate decision-maker on everything, but that is never possible in a broadcaster. In one interview she recalled her disappointment at not really cracking the duty she had assumed of mentoring commissioners to take responsibility for their own decisions. But several of the people being mentored said the answer was simple: Jay terrified them. When people she rated and earmarked for advancement left for other jobs, there were occasions when she interpreted it as a personal betrayal and lashed out. In some ways the fascination with this empress of Channel 4,

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who left a large legacy and imprint, has echoes of the central role Jeremy Isaacs took in the 1980s. Channel 4 is a small broadcaster where large personalities can dominate – until they are deposed. * * * The change in personnel that accompanies each new regime accelerated under Hunt’s successor, with the appointment of articulate director of programmes, Ian Katz, in post from January 2018. Commissioning executives at Channel 4 always knew their time was limited and were often eager to return to production, especially if they had ushered hits on air. They had already started to leave in 2017 if they could. Those with previous TV production experience who now knew how 4’s commissioning worked and its problem areas were valued and sought after and could attract funding to set up as production companies. Only the heads of comedy and news and current affairs were unchanged by the start of 2019, as Hunt’s structure was partly demolished. In one significant change, E4 was to be recharged under a new head, with extra money for a big new reality show, more comedy and low-budget easy-to-repeat factual entertainment along the lines of Tattoo Fixers. A month after he arrived at Horseferry Road, Katz called in Ralph Lee, Hunt’s deputy – who had stood in conscientiously as acting chief creative officer in the autumn of 2017 – for an informal chat to discuss the demands of a relentless job, a huge step-up from editing Newsnight and very different from his previous responsibilities at The Guardian. Unlike newspapers, television has long lead times for scripted programmes and to allow pilots to test ideas. Power had to be shared. Katz strengthened his immediate support team by promoting Kelly Webb-Lamb to deputy programme director, running popular factual programmes. She was then made head of commissioning in the nations and regions and the drive for diversity. It was an apt choice because her experience complemented that of Katz: she had run The Apprentice when it transferred from BBC2 to BBC1 and, when at Shine TV, she had provided Channel 4 with hits including The Island with Bear Grylls and Hunted. A prominent role, head of features and formats, the Channel 4 money-makers, was handed to Sarah Lazenby, who had handled the GBBO transplant, ensuring it was still appointment to view. Nick Mirsky, head of documentaries for six years, whose team had been pushing out the fixed-rig juggernauts, left in May 2018 to found an independent in Bristol. The key replacement was Danny Horan, recruited from the BBC to head up an expanded factual programming commissioning team, responsible for spending a third of the programme budget. He advocated a reduction in factual series that “feel like a warm bath” and a rise in those with the potential to upset or disgust or provoke the comment: “I cannot believe Channel 4 showed that last night.” At the BBC he had overseen outstanding documentaries on BBC1 and BBC2, including the series Hospital, using hand-held cameras and rapid newsy turnarounds. At the

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Grierson British Documentary Awards in November 2018 the BBC carried off the main prizes for 2017, by marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the murder of Stephen Lawrence with a three-part series, as well as a praised exploration of the legacy of the Northern Ireland peace deal. Other key recruits from the BBC in the factual area, where five posts were vacant, included Fatima Salaria who, as the Corporation’s commissioning editor for religion and ethics, had won a BAFTA for a series about British Muslims, and Black and British: A Forgotten History, made and presented by David Olusoga, a popular British Nigerian historian. The daughter of Pakistani immigrants, she was asked to take over specialist factual and find “noisy films about religion and ethics” – topics that Channel 4 had largely neglected, and to lead a revival in history programmes provided they avoided the Nazis and the Titanic. Dispatches was handed over to Louisa Compton, the driving force behind BBC2’s lively daily Victoria Derbyshire show. Caroline Hollick was picked to run drama commissioning. Drama, though scanty, had a key role in defining Channel 4 but had been one of the erratic and sometimes disappointing areas of programming in recent years: Jay Hunt’s attempts to crack the 9 pm slot were hit-and-miss. Hollick is the daughter of Sue Woodford, a member of the Channel 4 launch team in 1982, and Lord Hollick, chairman of several ITV regional companies in the 1990s. She had spent sixteen years at the Manchester-based Red Production Company, most recently as creative director overseeing the BBC1 hit crime drama, Happy Valley. Her appointment coincided with embarrassing failures on 4 of co-productions, The First, with Hulu, marketed as a near-future drama about the first commercial flight to Mars where the audience fell to 250,000 and the even worse performer, Chimerica, a confusing adaptation of a play about the quest to find Tiananmen Square’s Tank Man. Katz took executive responsibility for drama policy and said a priority was: “stories that resonate with people’s lives … local stories”. He saw no sign that co-productions with American partners were coming to an end but said much cheaper dramas, of the kind that Channel 5 and S4C/BBC Wales had pioneered, were one way forward. His appointments reflected a belief that commissioners needed to be experienced programme producers, in touch with talent and with an emphasis on British stories. Their task remained a difficult one, involving dependency on others to deliver what they promised. Channel 4 dealt exclusively with independent suppliers and was now facing the challenge of adding new ones to the most favoured. The positive side was that Ralph Lee had left behind a nearly full commissioned programme schedule for 2018, ensuring a breather for the newcomer, a smoother handover than in any other of the previous regime changes. Among the high points of January 2018, for example, was the comedy Derry Girls, watched by 70 percent of viewers in Northern Ireland and an enthusiastic audience elsewhere. It was recommissioned after the first episode aired: a second series arrived in spring 2019.

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The first time he briefed staff members, in January 2018, Katz talked of bringing back “the imp in the mechanism” – challenging orthodoxies, being disruptive, mischievous and fun. He also wanted to inject energy into programme commissioning and add more live debate. On his second day he gave the go-ahead to an inherited project, Brexit: The Uncivil War, a £2-million drama running to two hours written by the fashionable West End playwright James Graham, who specialised in plays about politics and the media. Screened on 7 January 2019 at the height of political confusion, it starred Benedict Cumberbatch as Dominic Cummings, and Rory Kinnear as Craig Oliver, the heads of the rival Leave and Remain campaigns. In making this his first commission, which Hunt had declined to green light, Katz was reverting to the channel’s history of mounting passionately-argued political dramas. In his first major public appearance since landing the job, he delivered a speech to potential suppliers in May 2018. Producers were eager to learn about his vision for 4 as their new patron. The South Bank’s Queen Elizabeth Hall was so crowded it needed an overflow, and the channel,s employees were ejected from their seats. He announced a further £10 million for “youthful original British comedy” and for new faces, including Grime MC, Big Narstie and side-kick Mo Gilligan, who was handed his own show as a result of its success. An experimental and expensive (£4 million) social media-themed reality show called The Circle was confirmed for the autumn after winning Ralph Lee’s backing, again developed while Hunt was running 4 but not approved by her. In his first initiatives on screen in May was a live debate on gender, part of a controversial season whose low point came when audience members shouted “You are a man” and “You have a penis” to transgender panellists. The flagship shows still in favour included 24 Hours in A&E and 24 Hours in Police Custody and the “utterly joyous” (in his words) First Dates. One Born Every Minute was retired. It was becoming clear that some of these 9 pm broad-brush factual staples were enjoying a lift in popularity at a point when most returning shows were down by at least 10 percent and new launches were, as always, difficult. This was The Great British Bake Off bonus, just as Hunt had anticipated: Bake Off fans were tempted to give other Channel 4 programmes a try. Some inherited series – for example SAS: Who Dares Wins – were expanded in length. Grand Designs sailed on to its twentieth anniversary in 2019, and Location, Location, Location celebrated twenty years in 2020. Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer adapted to the housing market with a Canadian format, Love It or List It in 2015. The new brooms in 2018 were able to claw back some more programme money. Katz had an extra £1 million for current affairs. He was devising a new arts strategy because arts had virtually vanished from the channel with the departure of Tabitha Jackson in 2013. Revived arts would not be based on performances, but expert presenters who were back in fashion. Universities were being trawled for talented communicators.

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Young people had to be wooed; so there was an extra £10 million for a 2019 commissioning blitz at the youth network E4, overtaken by ITV2 due to the devastating success of Love Island. This 15 percent boost took E4’s annual budget to £75 million and a dedicated controller was restored in the shape of Karl Warner, a former BBC entertainment commissioner with a taste for loud jackets. “We are the youngest public service broadcaster and we have to maintain that,” he said. Warner would report directly to Katz, who described him as “one of the most inventive, intelligent and impish figures in British television.” At a Voice of the Listener & Viewer conference in November, a year after landing the job, Katz explained: “It is the duty of all Channel 4 channels to be saying important things about our society, in all genres.” That included popular factual series, current affairs and Channel 4 News – which was, as ever, he said, central to the remit. As a mark of his intent, he had insisted that the documentary, The Massacre at Ballymurphy, about the day in 1971 that troops opened fire on Catholic residents of West Belfast, was broadcast on a Saturday evening in September as the inquest opened forty-seven years later. But serious longer documentaries were still most likely to be scheduled at 10 pm, on subjects in 2018 ranging from families coping with a still birth, gender reassignment, the impact on a family when a member is a convicted paedophile and life in North Korea. “It is undeniable that subscription video-on-demand services are posing huge challenges for all of us, pushing up the cost of production in scripted areas, competing for talent. But after the first year in the job I am much more bullish about where the public service broadcasters are in relation to streaming channels. PSBs are coming back into fashion. There was a powerful reminder of the importance of them in news, in the Brexit coverage, in Channel 4’s reporting of Cambridge Analytica. They are part of the glue that sticks society together – which streamers cannot deliver.” After the speech Michael Darlow, one of the channel’s founders, told him: “I welcome a lot of what you have to say. Well done – a return to what Jeremy and I campaigned for.” But the pioneers of Channel 4 had led a charmed life compared to the current crew.

Notes 1 Charles Gurassa interview, January 2018.

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23 PANDEMIC CRISIS

O

n a miserable morning in January 2020 Ian Katz and Alex Mahon invited the media to a briefing on their programme plans for the year ahead. It was a Channel 4 event to savour in a trendy bar at the grungy end of Belgravia. The last big one before Covid-19 struck. Here Katz as programme director declared his New Year aim was to inject “noise, scale and fun” into the schedules with a “sparkling” slate. So he was looking forward to the Tokyo Paralympics, a roster of coverage around the International Climate Change conference in Glasgow, a new AIDS drama from Russell T. Davies and the return of fancy chef Heston Blumenthal after a long absence in Crazy Delicious, a series hosted from an edible set, with chocolate earth, a babbling drinkable stream. On the fun front he promoted an “exciting” new dating format, 5 Guys a Week, joining the charming First Dates and Naked Attraction, which had normalised full frontal nudity on mainstream TV. Each episode would feature a single woman who invites five men into her home to see which one might be Mr Right. The clip showed a woman’s mischievous mother hosting a Sunday meal for them all, asking one “what has been your sexual experience in life?”. The event also marked the end of phase one of Channel 4’s move across the UK. It had settled on three bases outside of London and now it had to bring them to life. The new big noisy commission was a live weekday show to ginger-up moribund daytime. It would come from Leeds, the designated national headquarters and the host was the forthright Steph McGovern, who had made her name on BBC Breakfast. She was in possession of a prize asset – a Yorkshire accent. Chief executive Alex Mahon’s presence handily scotched the rumours buzzing during 2019 that Katz might not be that secure in his post. Because, though he might lack Jay Hunt’s obsessive concern about overnight ratings and drive for broad appeal new programmes, she had bequeathed him solid hits underpinned by The Great British Bake Off and Gogglebox. So there he was, the eloquent survivor. The reality was that the past year had been challenging due to Brexit uncertainty while advertising income – weakening since 2017 – had continued its descent: £50 million had been quietly withdrawn from some worthy unprofitable parts of

the programme budget. Still, it had won 96 awards, the most for five years, ranging from the Syrian war film For Sama set in Aleppo, to Best Soap for Hollyoaks. Audience share had held steady on the main Channel 4, it was connecting well with BAME viewers though E4 was down a bit. So bonuses had been awarded, bringing annual pay for Mahon to £936,000 and £506,000 for Katz. 1 But the December general election had armed Prime Minister Boris Johnson with an 80-strong majority to get Brexit done while the campaign had reinforced his belief that Channel 4 (alongside parts of the BBC), had abandoned its requirement to exercise due impartiality in news and current affairs. Johnson had been replaced with a slab of ice when he refused to appear in a Channel 4 leader’s debate on climate change and his senior team were now following their leader in snubbing its 7 pm hour-long news. The head of news and current affairs, Dorothy Byrne had that autumn promised to her seniors not to call Johnson a liar again, after she spoke her mind during a MacTaggart industry session at the Edinburgh Television Festival. This was deemed as damaging. There had long been a view among Channel 4 board members that her two decades years at the broadcaster was too long for any commissioner. She would shortly be replaced, allocated a new role and then retire in 2021. While the final stragglers turned up that grey morning gloomier executives and producers from the business end of television chewed over the key problem, which was a lack of fresh hits. Channel 4 always needed to keeping driving forward with the new. To keep people, especially young adults, checking it out. Whatever the new slogans and talk of changes to programme strategy, the Katz regime had failed so far to find new popular entertaining programmes, on the scale of Gogglebox or the now retired One Born Every Minute. Instead it would be taking on another established success to shore itself up in 2020 in the footsteps of The Great British Bake Off. This was Taskmaster – a show challenging comedians to complete silly tasks – which was the most popular show on niche Dave, the male-skewing digital commercial channel. This kind of poaching was a contradiction of its mission to be risky and find new talent. But a clear sign it needed the comfort of guaranteed performance. The trend was one of which the regulator was well aware, and in February when Ofcom published its critique of heavily regulated Channel 4’s delivery of its remit over five years to 2018, it contained an uncanny warning of what was about to happen commercially. It said “a prolonged advertising market downturn was a threat. It could force cuts affecting range and quality”. Risks to C4 delivery of its duties were growing and already it did not show as many new ideas on screen. “Young people are at the heart of what Channel 4 does but they are turning away from broadcast TV”, presenting an “acute challenge for Channel 4”. It voiced the ultimate commercial fear: in the ever faster shift of viewing habits would Channel 4 lose its commercial prop, an enhanced advertising premium for delivering a mass audience skewing younger than others?

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It also had to make relocation work (all those costly new offices plus new hires) and could not diversify its revenue with a production arm because it was set up as a broadcaster. Wearily it then administered Channel 4’s annual spanking for its obtuse neglect of bespoke programmes beyond cartoons for older children and teenagers … who in a few years would grow up to be target viewers! The lockdown on 23 March caused by the pandemic was unprecedented in peacetime. Channel 4 faced the biggest crisis in its history. Advertising fell by 50 percent in April and in May (compared with the previous year), moderating to 30 percent in June and displaying a few green shoots in July. Commercial director Jonathan Allan said it was extreme, never seen before. In previous crises of 2001 and 2008 a sudden 15 percent drop had been enough to cause consternation. Suddenly Channel 4 had to plan for potential catastrophe. It was the worst hit compared with ITV with half its revenue from studios, Channel 5 now owned by Viacom and the licence fee supported BBC. As the Enders Analysis consultancy observed: “A 95 percent reliance on advertising and zero operating surplus left it more exposed than fellow broadcasters”. Auditors combed the books making a lengthy risk assessment, and its annual report and accounts for 2019 were delayed until ten months of 2020 had passed. It drew down a prearranged £75 million line of credit in case there was a run on the banks. In April it had slashed the programme budget by £150 million, roughly a quarter, which was such a massive jaw-dropping cut it staggered everyone acquainted with it. A further £95 million was hacked from overheads. All broadcasters were hit by the grim production shut down and restrictions, accompanied by a scheduling scramble to fill thousands of hours at cut price tariffs. Channel 4’s savings came from postponed Paralympics and programmes around it including The Last Leg, less Formula 1 racing, cuts to E4’s budget, cancelled first run originals, panel shows, live debates, documentaries and scripted programmes including Hollyoaks. In short, almost everything. News and current affairs drawing larger audiences, were protected and Dispatches excelled, with 20-plus pandemic, Brexit and food standards themed explanatory programmes. The evening schedule had to be reinvented with cheap turnarounds at around £50,000 an hour, a fraction of normal tariffs to fill holes. “Very painful” Katz told the August Edinburgh Festival, pointing to the twin headache of replacing the hours while making substantial savings, “doing much more for less” with a fragile and scared production sector desperate for work, many dependent on hand-tomouth freelancers. One successful independent, trying to bring in programme sponsorship money from an advertiser to halve the cost of a series being touted was surprised at the passivity in parts of Channel 4’s well-paid team, some at their second homes, in the face of this existential threat. Crisis can be the mother of invention. Fast, rough-and-ready and low-budget did have a place. Some Channel 4 stars stepped up for a strand of “Lockdown Academy”. Jamie Oliver filmed home-cooking slots for Keep Cooking and Carry

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On with an iPhone. Kirsty Allsopp offered a jolly Keep Crafting and Carry On series. Grayson’s Art Club at 8 pm worked well, encouraging people to create topical art and share their thoughts: a near blind woman drawing trees from memory advised viewers: “stop, appreciate nature and beautiful things”. Former daytime hosts Richard and Judy returned with Keep Reading and Carry On, sharing their passion for books. Repeats, archived films and “best of ” cuttings programmes were scrambled in editing suites. Cameras were strapped to dogs looking for new owners in The Dog House. A More4 series about Devon and Cornwall was shifted onto Channel 4 at 8  pm and thrived as families cooed over wild native breed ponies and out-of-reach beaches. There was heart-warming Lodgers for Codgers, a sort of speed dating family show where young people needing a place to live paired up with older people, who tended to become life coaches. Not everything worked. The Steph Show was an April starter in part of this hand-to-mouth approach with daily broadcasts from her Harrogate kitchen, but it was (mercifully) paused. The Bake Off producers improvised by isolating the entire production at a hotel able to transplant the tent. It started a month late, in October rather than September but went on to achieve BBC1-sized audiences, increased by about a fifth on previous bests, very handy for sponsor Aldi. Gogglebox adapted with remote filming instead of production staff in the homes and rode peaks of popularity as the sofa commentators revealed more of their lives. Television was bringing a little joy to the world. These two strands, with repeats and spin-offs enabled Channel 4 to gloss over the schedule’s weak points. In August Channel 4 felt confident enough advertising was picking up for the pre-Christmas season to pay back £1.5 million for furloughed staff and reinstate £11 million for new programmes. Much of this was too hurriedly directed at plugging a gap in out of London productions to fulfil one of Ofcoms quotas. The most expensive was The Bridge, a reality show located on a reservoir in North Wales, where a team had to construct a bridge of logs to an island then compete for the £100,000 treasure chest. Commissioned and delivered in twelve weeks, it started slowly at 9   pm on Sundays, partly because some thought it was a show about engineering while others assumed a dark Nordic drama. It never gained traction. But in the short-term it had shown it could survive a sudden shock because it has a great deal of discretion over programme spend. With overheads of £235 million and an income in excess of £900 million there was plenty of scope to turn down the content tap for a while. There were three lessons from lockdown. Audiences initially rose and the period of 5–7 pm, known as “shoulder peak” for a time became as important as prime time. Second, there was a renewed appreciation of trusted news and of British public service broadcasters, reflecting the country’s worries and interests spanning nature, cooking, gardening, homemaking, heritage, education (BBC Bitesize), and books. Channel 4 saw a 2 percent rise in audiences during lock-

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down in line with others, while eight in ten said it was a trusted supplier of news, whatever the politicians believed. But the key change was the swoosh of acceleration and increasing dependency on subscription video on demand (SVOD) across the UK. ITV and BBC had launched SVOD BritBox in November 2019 with Channel 4 making a modest contribution mostly with films. When lockdown arrived in March 2020 almost half of Britain’s 27.8 million households were subscribing to a streamer, led by Netflix and Amazon. In a brilliantly timed move, another portal, Disney+ then launched in March 2020 igniting lockdown adoption. By May a quarter of UK homes subscribed to two or more services if they could afford it and the migration of younger viewers away from the established broadcasters accelerated. Drama is the big draw for steamers led by Netflix, and it was an area the BBC’s free iPlayer could still compete in. But Channel 4 is essentially a factual broadcaster, whose largest drama investment is Hollyoaks. Despite that, All4, its advertising-funded digital portal was steadily if unspectacularly growing in use at much the same rate as the iPlayer. This stemmed from Channel 4’s early-start determination to exploit online delivery with 4oD back in 2006 and David Abraham’s determined drive from 2010 to push forward by utilising audience data and relaunching the portal as All4. Demand for All4 rose from 620 million views in 2016 to 935 million in 2019 and began to touch a billion views in 2020, as people with little to do started to dip into its archive box sets. Use during lockdown briefly peaked with a 54 per cent increase before settling to 27 percent. In 2020 it contributed 12 percent of Channel 4’s viewing, compared to 9.5 percent in the year before, and thanks to its targeted delivery of commercials accounted for a fifth of Channel 4’s advertising revenue during 2020. Canny Channel 4 had also been investing in old series of its own shows and favourite US series including Seinfeld, Dawson’s Creek, West Wing and, most recently, global foreign language series from partner Walter Presents. It devised another new marketing slogan “Biggest free screening service”. But it retreated from a policy of bespoke All4 programmes despite the success of The End of the F***ing World, a drama about two disturbed teenagers on a road trip, which was All4’s most binged box set (though shared with Netflix). By 29 October, when the much delayed annual report was published chairman Charles Gurassa estimated that advertising revenue would be down between 8 and 10 percent on the previous year, The detailed risk assessment said Channel 4 could operate for another 12 months. But the headquarters building was due to be revalued downwards, since offices were losing out to working from home, which also raised a question about the tens of millions investment on devolved out-ofLondon centres. It was also unclear how badly the crisis had reduced its safety net of a cash cushion.

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Channel 4 had reason to stress its flexibility and resilience that autumn. At a fringe meeting of the Conservative conference in early October John Whittingdale (frustrated in his push for privatisation in 2015/16) but now back as government minister for Media and Data said: I think there is a very important debate to be had about Channel 4. It is under increasing strain. I am not sure it is sustainable. Do we need in future a second publicly owned PSB (as well as the BBC), That is something we are giving a lot of thought to.

Let battle commence? During October Ofcom ran a series of Small Screen: Big Debate debates preparing for its strategic and broad review of public service broadcasting across BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 and its long-term future. Mark Thompson, Channel 4’s fourth chief executive (2002–04) expressed fears that advertising-funded broadcasting was in real trouble, and that small broadcasters such as Channel 4 were in a tough environment, could need external finance to survive and would have to broaden their programme appeal, a theme taken up by Michael Grade, Channel 4’s second chief executive (1988–97). Thompson went on to compare traditional broadcasters as stuck in the coach-and-horses era battling the age of the motor car. The answer from its current chief executive Mahon was that the future lay in switching the business to digital portals such as All4 serving programmes on demand, moving faster than others, while lobbying for protection by being afforded the right of “due prominence” on search handsets and opening pages of competitors. And keeping a tight grip on its broadcast channels, to avoid the oblivion of becoming a digital orphan, as had happened with BBC3. “We have to ride two horses at the same time”, she said. Spurred by the lockdown and anticipating challenges to its status quo Channel 4 had been working on a self-help plan, built on doubling its online streaming business through All4 by 2025, boosting it to near equal importance to the scheduled linear channels, while also placing snippets of content on other apps as they went in and out fashion. This was broadly the same conclusion the BBC’s new director general Tim Davie had reached, by deciding to alter commissioning priorities and abolish channel controllers. At Channel 4 there would be much more focus on picking new programmes to drive this digital growth by using data it mined, for audience insights about what would work before making creative decisions. This would identify targets, the sorts of people who would want to watch this or that. Data would not displace experience nor robots the role of programme commissioners (who were always accompanied by a business expert when striking deals and given feedback on commercial performance), but, this was an undeniable shift away from personal preferences. There had traditionally been a barrier between content and advertising but that had been changing as advertising/brand sponsors put

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funds into programmes. Under Mahon Channel 4 had struck a deal with Sky for access to its established Adsmart data tool, which only plays adverts to a specific target audience, ensuring it is effective. Second, it was planning to modify its business model to eventually reduce the total dependency on advertising. It would invest £30 million into a global format fund to invest in new programming for factual programmes. In return for giving financial support to the development stages of the format plus guaranteeing the finished programme would be given the best scheduling slots for a Channel 4 launch, it would share format fees and net receipts with the production company, when it was sold outside the UK to international broadcasters. It was in tune with its output of factual programmes, spanning reality entertainment formats and was not intended for scripted comedies or drama. A venture of this sort did not affect the established terms of trade within the UK. In arriving at this diversification Channel 4 rejected making its own productions to build up a library of assets because of the risk, its modest size and lack of sufficient capital. It would also have meant a complete revision of its publisher-broadcaster model and require legislation. But it would take a lot of global hits to make a significant impact on the advertising model. The forecast was that advertising would drop from the current 95 percent of income to 90 percent over five years. Another piece of commercial self-help was to focus the new Leeds 4Studios on making online content and advertiser-funded projects for social media platforms, exploiting its long-standing strength in marketing to young people. A relatively modest investment in the Indy growth fund and a reworked C4 Venture fund would continue: both offered the chance of capital growth. It would also reaffirm its belief in its overall model which had been seriously tested by the bombshell of pandemic but not broken to the point of requiring a rescue by an external investor. So it crystallised and simplified its mission. This was to represent unheard voices, challenge with purpose and create change through entertainment, the later to remind commissioners it was having to compete with the giant streamers. These goals seemed to be speaking more to its own staff and suppliers and would be introduced regardless of the Ofcom led review of public service broadcasting and the Government’s own debate. But it would be seeking to modernise its remit and the web of performance metrics it had to measure itself against. Channel 4 was riding two horses at the same time, running scheduled TV channels with access to every UK home and the increasingly prominent All4Digital portal. One would be friskier, more youthful and called the future. But it was not time yet to call the older more stable nag the past.

Notes 1 Median annual salary for Channel 4 employees was £61,000 in 2019. 2019 C4 annual report

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CONCLUSION: A PIRATE ENTERPRISE?

R

ight from the start a pattern emerged. After the interviews were over, contributors to this history tended to open up for a private word. They wanted to talk about the things that Channel 4 was no longer doing. For many it boiled down to programmes that made you think – about the arts, music, religion, science, history, archaeology, books, live and commissioned opera, dance – or making a date with an engaging presenter with a point of view to debate. A lot of people seemed to have fallen out of love with the broadcaster, quite apart from Conservative politicians huffing about Channel 4 News. There was a strong cultural drive behind the Channel 4 of the 1980s and 1990: tantalizingly it lingers diluted, with occasional series such as Grayson Perry’s Rites of Passage bang in the bloodstream. Edgy things were fondly remembered too. Tyne Tees’s anarchic music show, The Tube, which ran out of juice in 1986, cheeky young Jonathan Ross on The Last Resort, the bad taste stuff for Friday night lads in the 1990s led by The Word when there was an edition which dared people to put on sandals filled with dog excrement. A fresh-faced Chris Evans was paired too briefly with doomed Paula Yates on The Big Breakfast as it tried to open up the morning to light-hearted pranks in 1992. I saw her once tottering over a canal bridge in a skirt fit for an angel on a Christmas tree, before skipping to the studio – equipped with a hen coop. Then in 1998 Channel 4 struck gold with the 11 O’Clock Show which launched Sacha Baron Cohen, alias Ali G. But I also heard tributes about more recent output. Channel 4 did break its addiction to Big Brother after eleven years in 2010. It had the resolve to nail Michael Jackson as a predator in 2019. Film4 kept up a trickle of outstanding films in between. Investigative reporters exposed the uncomfortable truth of gangs of Asian men sexually exploiting vulnerable white girls, forced marriages and recorded extremist preaching in British mosques. Channel 4 was clear sighted in observing the flaws of multicultural Britain while wooing minorities. It upped its caring charitable side by introducing the moving Stand Up To Cancer crusade.

Channel 4 never gave up on its hunt for fresh comedy or the occasional tough drama, as this book chronicles, but it frittered away its advantage in daytime television, built up over three decades. It probably shouldn’t have poached the Great British Bake Off in 2017, but the happy cake baking show warmed up the channel and provided a vital commercial anchor, combining irresistible appeal to sponsors, advertisers and viewers alike. The catch was that with audiences exceeding ten million in 2020 for the main baking competition and hours of spin-off Bake Off programmes it had probably become too prominent, perhaps even dangerously addictive, a sugary repeat of the addiction to Big Brother? Adam Hills, the cheery Australian presenter of The Last Leg entertainment show launched alongside Channel 4’s inspired coverage of disability in the Paralympic Games in 2012 observed: ”You guys have one of the most powerful microphones in the world and you have used it to change lives the world over. That is what television is for and I don’t think you will ever realise the impact you have had.” But it was David Glover, the celebrated Channel 4 commissioner who put Gogglebox on air – the most successful and perky new format of the 2010–20 era – who conjured up an image that kept me smiling. “If the BBC is the Royal Navy, Channel 4 should be like a pirate enterprise,” he said, a nippy craft, flummoxing stodgy rivals. He identified the central challenge. It had to be commercial and attract audiences advertisers wanted while always making sure it has something worth saying, to justify public ownership and not paying cash dividends. I revisited Anthony Smith, arguably the most influential of the founding fathers who first wrote about the need for an independent new broadcaster as an “imp in the mechanism”. Now in his eighties, he said the mission was essentially unchanged, as stimulating fresh ideas and programming. “Its soul is research and development, that is the essence of it.” The former President of Magdalen College, Oxford still watched Channel 4 News and his particular regret of recent times was the straying into “semi-pornographic” content headed by Naked Attraction. These contrasting views and affectionate nostalgia, built up over almost 40 years, informed the extended debate and political opposition which helped save Channel 4 and its model from the put down of privatisation between 2015 and 2017. At this point it seemed to be adapting to the challenge of the global streamers with its All4Digital platform though the disaffected contributors were not wrong: there was a marked decline in spending on arts, music, entertainment and drama and a collapse to zero on religion by 2017 as advertising income came under pressure. Instead of losing its not-for-profit status Channel 4 was required by Government to adapt and redirect its energy and funds into better representing unheard voices and neglected nations and regions of the UK, part of the social and political agenda of levelling up British society. When its current licence expires in 2024 this will be an important factor in deciding the future.

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The Achilles heel of Channel 4’s model, its near total reliance on advertising, was brutally exposed by the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. The fears of the 2004–10 era, that it would need a subsidy, had turned out to be premature but questions about its small size and resilience returned as advertising income hit the floor. Put crudely, any Government would be wary about it requiring a bale out. During 2020, the number of households flocking to watch one or more subscription video-on-demand services jumped to 60 percent from 50 percent. Channel 4 had already started to adapt further, with a strategy to pivot towards making digital service a priority, planning programming more appealing to younger adult audiences, while doubling down on All4’s capacity to capture targeted advertising to the 22 million people who had registered their details with the portal. This was the 4Future strategy launched in November 2020, just before Ofcom opened a forensic review of the regulatory regime covering all the UK’s public service media in the following December. The solution it had proposed in pre-pandemic times for Channel 4 was for it to aspire and put clear water between it and global competitors – with high-quality programmes. Now it was warning that the entire system was unlikely to survive in the longer term, in a world of streamers, unless a drastic overhaul took place. The regulator pointed to a declining hold on viewers and young people in particular: broadcast television accounted for just 38 percent of viewing for the 16–34 age group. Channel 4 may be a nippy Jolly Roger, but it is a domestic broadcaster – number three after the BBC and ITV – operating in an era of global streaming giants, several of which have also opened production studios in the UK, pushing up programme costs. Channel 4’s wise former chairman Terry Burns summarised the position when he stepped down in 2017 this way: The fact is, Channel 4 is a miracle. It was created all those years ago and against all the odds it remains a major player. Ultimately there is only one test for Channel 4: can it provide great television, so that you can hand it over ready to face the future in better shape than you found it.

This history ends as it faces this test in bracing times in an imperfect world, where even if you believe in miracles, they cannot be relied upon.

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INDEX

4Creative 132 4Digital 21, 22 4DVD 200 4IP 43 4Learning 17 4Music 13, 53, 71 4oD xii, 14, 37, 38–9, 41, 44, 50, 53, 106, 129, 149, 150, 153, 154–6, 163, 165–6, 172, 182, 217, 269 4Seven 103, 120, 126, 165 8 Out of 10 Cats 92 10 O’Clock Show, The 84, 93 11 O’Clock Show, The 9, 181, 273 12 Years a Slave 199 24 Hours in A&E 3, 33, 34, 35, 95, 104, 116, 123, 126, 263 24 Hours in Police Custody 3, 33, 35, 116, 126, 263 45 Years 204 999: What’s Your Emergency? 116 1066 (online game) 42, 43 2012 Meet the Superhumans 132–5, 136 A Abbott, Paul 171, 175 Abraham, David xiii, 1, 4, 5, 42, 43, 44, 48, 57–63, 64–71, 72, 73, 75–9, 80, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89, 91, 96, 97, 101, 102, 103, 105, 109, 120, 126, 131, 134, 141, 142, 145, 146, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 155, 157, 161–4, 166, 170, 196–8, 200, 201, 202, 204–8, 213, 215, 220, 237–9, 240, 243, 244–5, 248, 249, 250, 252–5, 257–9, 269 Abrahamson, Lenny 204 Abramsky, Jenny 22 Ackerman, Roy 65

Ackley Bridge 176, 196 Ad4You 160 Adepitan, Ade 128–9, 130–3, 136, 137, 139, 234 Adsmart 151, 271 Afternoon Show, The 132 aggregators 38, 155 Aherne, Caroline 112 Ahmed, Samira 214 Airey, Dawn 49, 70–2 Aitchison, Jamie 128–9, 133, 141, 143 Alan Carr: Chatty Man 92, 136, 145, 154 Alexander, Danny 237 Alexander, Tania 109, 111, 112 Alibi 66 al-Kateab, Waad 217, 219, 232 All3Media 80 All4 xii, xiv, 44, 106, 114, 118, 137, 149, 153, 155–64, 166–7, 183, 231, 260, 269–70, 275 All4Digital 271, 274 Allan, Jonathan 1, 4, 105–8, 120, 144, 153, 255, 257, 267 Allen, Kenton 183 Allen, Shane 83, 93, 100, 102, 182–5, 187, 198 Allsopp, Kirstie 113, 263, 268 Amazon 3, 106, 149, 152, 159, 162, 183, 187, 191, 197, 199, 202, 207, 260, 269 Amazon Prime Video 161, 177 AMC Studios 174, 177 American Honey 203 American School Massacre, The 227 Am I Normal? 42 Amos Pictures 231 Amy 203, 204 Any Human Heart 82, 83, 170 Apple TV 4, 162, 230, 259 Apprentice, The 33, 45, 261

apps 40, 43, 44, 156, 270 Archant 257 Armstrong, Jesse 183, 185 Arnold, Andrea 203 Aronson-Rath, Raney 231 Arqiva 26 Asante, Amma 197, 204, 208 Ashwell, Emily 241 Attenborough, David 213 Attenborough, Richard 5, 193 Attwood, Margaret 178 Audioboo 43 Aukin, David 170, 193, 194, 195 A United Kingdom 197, 204 A Very Social Secretary 189 Ayoade, Richard 186 B Babylon 173 Back 184 Baddiel, David 168 Bad Sugar 185 BAFTA 30, 32, 42, 123, 134, 168–9, 170, 172, 174, 179, 187, 194, 199, 200, 204, 208, 234, 246, 262 BAFTAs 41, 187, 194, 195, 199, 206, 208, 243, 244, 245 Bain, Sam 183, 185 Baker, Martin 19, 95, 127, 141, 143, 145–8, 155, 198, 251 Baker, Matt 10, 11, 54, 88 Bala, Sanjeevan 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 166 Balding, Clare 132, 136–8, 142, 248 Banks, Morwenna 189 BARB (audience ratings) 151, 161 Barnard, Clio 196 Barnes, Andy 12, 13, 19, 23, 48, 50, 66, 75, 82, 105 Baron Cohen, Sacha 273 Barraclough Carey 212 Battlefront 42 Battsek, Daniel 205, 206, 207, 208 Battsek, John 205 Bauer (Magic) 26 Bax, Simon 200, 257 Bazalgette, Peter 16 BBC xi, xii, 1, 2, 3, 6, 9–21, 22–5, 26, 28, 34, 37–9, 42, 45, 48, 49, 50–2, 55, 58–9, 61, 65–6, 68, 71, 77, 79–82, 85, 87–9, 90, 91, 93–5, 99, 100, 104, 107, 112, 113, 117,

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121–2, 127–9, 132, 134, 137–9, 141–3, 145–6, 153, 155, 158, 160–4, 166, 171, 174, 176–7, 183, 186–7, 189, 190, 195–7, 198, 203, 206, 209, 211–15, 220, 227, 230, 232, 239, 240, 242, 244, 248, 251–5, 257, 261–2, 264, 265–70, 274–5 BBC1 1, 12, 32, 65, 66, 78, 79, 80, 81, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 97, 100, 102, 107, 144, 149, 171, 172, 174, 175, 190, 211, 212, 261, 262, 268 BBC2 1, 5, 33, 58, 65, 107, 118, 175, 183, 261, 262 BBC3 4, 11, 94, 185, 190, 270 BBC America 190 BBC Daytime 65, 88, 97, 211 BBC, Director-General 48, 58, 80, 88 BBC Five Live 22, 23 BBC iPlayer 14, 37, 39, 149, 151, 155, 160, 190, 269 BBC Radio 1 23 BBC Radio 4 22, 23, 218, 239 BBC Trust 48 BBC Worldwide 13, 18, 19, 39, 47, 48, 49, 50, 55, 58, 59, 65, 66, 151, 174, 199 BBC Worldwide Content 78 Beattie, Anna 1 Beaver Falls 94 Beckett, Professor Charlie 212, 213 Bedlam 123 Beesley, Damon 198 Being Human 185 Bellamy, Julian 11, 15, 30, 33, 54, 75, 77, 80, 86, 89, 93–4, 96, 128–9, 130 Benefits Street 100, 122, 123, 188 Bennett, Ronan 127, 171 Berry, Mary 2–3 Berry, Matt 185 Bertlesmann 49, 70 Big Art Mob, The 41 Big Bang Theory, The 82, 97, 167, 184 Big Breakfast, The 101, 109, 273 Big Brother xii, xiii, 3, 5, 9–21 27, 28, 30, 34, 40, 48, 51, 52, 54, 57, 60, 67, 68, 70–1, 73, 75, 77, 78, 80–2, 91, 94–7, 99, 100–3, 105, 109, 115, 118, 127, 129, 152, 172, 181, 225, 273–4 Big Data 106, 161, 165 Big Fat Gypsy Weddings 90 Big Fat Quiz of the Year, The 81 Big Fish Fight, The 94 Big Talk Productions 183, 188, 190

Bingham, Georgie 132 Bird, Dominic 94 Bird, Simon 84, 198 Birt, Lord 2 Bishop, Sir Michael 5, 237, 244, 248 Black and British: A Forgotten History 262 Black Mirror 92, 159, 161, 177, 181, 182, 183, 188 Black Swan 201 Blair, Tony 13, 14, 189 Blakeway Productions 228 Blandford, Ian 1, 213 Blast! 116 Bleakley, Christine 89 Blighty 59 Blitz Street 110 Blumenthal, Heston 94, 265 Bodyguard 175, 177 Boston Consulting Group 151 Bowe, Colette 43, 46, 50, 51, 53, 247 Bow Street Runner 42 Boy A 168 Boyd, William 82, 170 Boyle, Danny 83, 173, 194, 206, 207 Boyle, Frankie 83 Boys and Girls Alone 118 Boy Whose Skin Fell Off, The 127 Bradbury, Julia 88 Bradley, Karen 5, 235, 247, 248, 250, 252, 254 Brady, Karen 45 Brand, Jo 189 Brand, Russell 25 Brassed Off 194 Brass Eye 185 Breakfast News 87, 97 Brent, Richard 95, 190 Brexit 179, 208, 218, 222, 223, 232, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267 Brexit: The Uncivil War 179, 208, 263 Bridge, The 268 Brindley, David 31, 117 Bristol 6, 118, 168, 256, 261 Britain’s Sex Gangs 229 BritBox 162, 269 British Entertainment Films Production Company 203 British Film Institute (BFI) 6, 196, 197, 200, 202, 203, 205 British Journalism Review 226, 235 Britz 164, 168

broadband, high-speed 15, 18, 19, 40, 76, 255 Broadcast 93, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 183 Broadcasting Act (1996) 72 Broadcasting Press Guild 102, 244 Brooke, Dan 59, 64, 103, 120, 129, 200, 215, 238, 239, 241, 245, 246, 247, 250 Brooker, Charlie 84, 92, 100, 131, 133–4, 181, 182, 183 Brown, Derren 82 Brown, Gordon 14, 48 Brown, Louise 41 Bruce-Smith, Sue 195, 203 BT 107, 132, 144, 157 BT Sports 107 Bulford, Anne 17, 37, 40, 49, 53, 66, 71, 73, 143, 198 Burns, Terry xiii, 51–4, 58, 60–1, 67–9, 70–1, 73, 77, 86, 101, 104, 107–8, 130, 198, 201, 205, 215, 237–9, 240, 243, 245, 258, 275 Butler, Katherine 201 Bwark Productions 184, 198 Byrne, Dorothy 90, 134, 209–11, 214–15, 220–2, 225, 229, 230–3, 266 C C4 International 17 C4 USA 71 Cadwalladr, Carole 222 Cain, Matthew 168–9, 199, 214 Call the Midwife 32 Cambridge Analytica 222, 232, 264 Cameron, David 19, 48, 53, 133, 238, 239, 240, 242, 247 Cameron Mitchell, John 207 Campaign 64, 94, 105, 134 Campbell, Camilla 90, 94, 101, 104, 171 Campus 184 Cannes Film Festival 134, 201, 203, 207, 232 Cannes, Palme D’Or 207 Cardinal Burns 184 Carol 204 Carphone Warehouse 21 Carr, Alan 76, 97, 136, 145, 154, 155 Carter, Stephen 13, 14, 18, 19, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50 Castaway 121 Cast Offs 127 Catastrophe 160, 187, 188, 191, 192 Catch-22 168 Catching a Killer 230

INDEX

279

Catch Me Daddy 201 catch-up TV xii, 37–9, 40, 44, 47, 77, 103, 137, 149, 153, 155–6, 158, 162, 170, 182, 187 Cates, Kelly 132 CBBC 107 CBeebies 107 Celebrity Bake Off 257 Celebrity Big Brother 9, 11–12, 13, 75, 83, 92–3, 115, 136, 143, 158, 221 Celebrity Big Brother Hijack 11, 13, 92 Celebrity First Dates 117, 120 Celebs, Brands and Fake Fans 228 Chalmers, J. J. 136 Chambers, Meredith 119 Channel 4+1 210, 219 Channel4.com 37, 38, 39, 40, 42 Channel 4 Education 42 Channel 4 News xiii, 9, 13, 41, 79, 90, 103, 135, 137, 169, 209, 210, 211–23, 227–8, 232, 233–5, 239, 243–4, 246, 247, 255–6, 264, 273–4 Channel 4 Radio 21, 22 Channel 5 xiii, 3, 10, 13, 17–18, 19, 49, 50, 58, 63, 65, 70–3, 75, 78, 88, 93, 97, 106, 115, 118, 125, 131, 136, 151, 158, 176, 211, 218, 242, 257, 262, 267, 270 Charlotte Street xi, 5 Chewing Gum 190, 191 Chiat Day (advertising agency) 64, 73, 200 Child Genius 118, 119 Child of Mine 230 Children in Need 137 Childs, Darren 65, 73 Chiles, Adrian 89 Chimerica 177, 262 Chosen 226 Circle, The 115, 263 City of Vice 42 Clarke, George 124, 183–6, 187, 188–9, 190, 191–2 Clarke, Phil 175, 182, 183 Classic FM 23 ClearStory 113 Clews, David 31, 116 Coach Trip 93 Coel, Michaela 190 Cohen, Danny 10, 209 Cohen Media Group 205 Coltrane, Robbie 175 Come Dine with Me 93, 95, 136

280

CHANNEL 4: A HISTORY

Company Limited by Guarantee (CLBG) 237, 238, 239 Company Pictures 168, 185 Considine, Paddy 201 Coogan, Steve 114 Corbyn, Jeremy 216, 232 Core4 153 Coronation Street 12, 112, 228 Cosgrove, Stuart 43, 91, 102, 128, 130, 133 Coulthard, David 147 Countdown xiii, 93 Countryfile 78, 88, 89, 143 Covid-19 xiv, 265, 267–74 Cranford 78 Cranston, Bryan 177 Craven, John 88 Creative Nation 251 Cresswell, John 68, 69 Crick, Michael 214, 222, 228 Crossing the Wild Frontier 124 Crown, The 158, 159, 170, 226 Crozier, Adam 61, 69 Cucumber Banana Tofu 174, 175, 178 Culture, Media & Sport Committee 52, 72, 238, 241, 246 Cumberbatch, Benedict 179, 208, 263 Cummings, Dominic 179, 208, 263 Currie, David 10, 20, 46, 47, 55, 58, 61 Curtis, Chris 101 Curwin, Nick 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35 Cutting Edge 64 D Daglish, Simon 23, 24, 25, 26 Daily Mirror 89 Daily Telegraph 2, 33, 144, 182, 216, 254 Dale, Peter 196 Damazer, Mark 22, 23 Damned 189 Dark Horse 145, 204 Darlow, Michael 125, 264 Darlow Smithson 125 data-led broadcasting xii, 14, 16, 39, 43, 50, 61, 77, 106, 150–4, 160, 161–3, 165, 166, 222, 251, 269–71 Dave xiv, 59, 66, 179, 246, 266 Davidson-Houston, Richard 39, 42, 43, 44, 156, 159, 163, 164 Davies, Evan 23 Davies, Russell T. 23, 138, 174, 265

Davies, Terence 201 Davie, Tim 270 Dawson’s Creek 159, 269 Day the Immigrants Left, The 79 Deal or No Deal 82, 181 Delaney, Rob 187 Deley, Ortis 131 Department of Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) 14, 19, 20, 49, 104, 161, 237, 238, 240, 241, 242, 243, 255 de Pear, Ben 209, 214–16, 218, 219–22, 233 Derek 185 Derry Girls 185, 186, 262 Desmond, Richard xiii, 70, 71, 72 Deutschland 83 157, 158, 162, 165 Devil’s Whore, The (The Devil’s Mistress) 169, 171 Dick, Philip K. 177, 183 Dickson, Simon 27–30, 32–5, 109, 120 Digital Britain 18, 48, 49, 50, 51, 55 Digital Economy Act (2010) 44, 49, 197 Disabled Fight Club 156 Discovery Network 18, 58, 59, 65, 102, 124, 159, 244 Disney 21, 244 Disney+ 269 Disney Kids 21 Dispatches 217, 225–8, 230, 234–5, 250, 262, 267 Dixon, George 33, 80, 91, 95, 102, 133, 194, 208 Dog House, The 268 Douglas, Lesley 22 Drifters 184 Dr Who 171, 174 Duke of Burgundy, The 204 Duncan, Andy xii, xiii, 5, 10, 11, 13, 15, 17, 22, 24–6, 38–40, 45–9, 50, 51–5, 57, 58, 60–1, 64, 66–8, 77, 150, 151, 194, 209–10, 238, 258 Dyke, Greg 22 E E4 xi, 3, 11, 12, 13, 24, 25, 43, 53, 59, 71, 77–8, 83, 91, 94, 97, 105, 114–15, 126, 134, 159–60, 165, 168–9, 174, 183–4, 190, 198, 212, 241, 246, 260, 261, 264, 266–7 E4 Radio 21, 22, 23, 24 EastEnders 12, 79 East Is East 194 Eden: Paradise Lost 121, 251 Edge of the City 229

Edinburgh International Television Festival 28, 51, 52, 80, 104, 109, 190, 201, 211, 221, 232, 238, 266 Educating Cardiff 117 Educating Essex 31, 95, 116 Educating Greater Manchester 117 Educating the East End 117 Educating Yorkshire 31, 117 Edwards, Jonathan 132 Edwards, Rick 132 Egon Zehnder (recruitment consultant) 57, 59, 77, 79 Ejiofor, Chiwetel 199 Elbagir, Nima 211 Elba, Idris 78 Electric Dreams 177, 183 Elsley, Bryan 168 Embarrassing Bodies 41, 43, 79, 95, 155 Emmerdale 6 Emmys 42, 182, 187 Endemol 11, 12, 34, 48, 54, 70, 72, 75, 93, 181, 182 Endemol Shine 121 Endgame 170 End of the F***ing World, The 160, 177, 269 Enfield, Harry 168 England, Kersten 6 Evans, Chris 89, 109, 273 Evans, Nerys 184, 185, 187, 192, 198 Event, The 76, 81, 95 Ex Machina 204 Express Newspapers xiii, 70 Extra Slice, Bake Off: The Professionals 257 F Facebook 42, 106, 119, 149, 160, 217, 218, 221, 222 Factcheck 216, 217 Fairley, John 142 Faking It 99, 109 Family, The 28, 30, 31, 179 Famous and Fearless 83, 84 Fargo 82, 162, 167, 178 Farnaby, Simon 125 Farr, David 200 Father Ted 92, 162, 165, 185, 186 Favourite, The 206, 208 Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hugh 11, 94, 95 Fear, The 171 Fewell, Martin 214

INDEX

281

Fielding, Noel 3, 165, 184 Film4 xi, xiii, 13, 71, 78, 91, 93, 98, 103, 170–1, 193–208, 246, 273 Film Council 196, 197 Financial Times 213 Fincham, Peter 66, 88, 185, 192 Firecrest Films 91 Firefly Productions 27, 28, 29 First Cut 69 First Dates 119, 120, 160, 162, 163, 259, 263, 265 First Dates Hotel 120 First Dates: The Proposal 120 First, The 167, 177 Fish Tank 203 Flanagan, Amy 123 Flannery, Peter 169, 171 Fleabag 190 Fletcher, Jane 89 Flowers 187, 191 Fonejacker 184 Food Fight 11 Forge, The 175, 176 Formula 1 racing 146, 267 Four in a Bed 115 Four Lions 199 Four Weddings and a Funeral 193 Fox, Camilla 6 Fox Searchlight 194, 203 FoxTel 157 Franses, Gary 131 Fraser, Ed 125, 219 Free Fire 203 Freesat 40 free-to-air 145, 147, 151, 178, 197 Frei, Matt 213, 219, 227, 233 Fremantle Productions 4, 72, 190 Fresh Meat 91, 94, 184 Friday Night Dinner 83, 84, 92, 160, 183 Friends 43, 82, 91, 97, 105 Frontier Economics 151 Fry, Graham 142, 143, 145, 146, 148 Fudge Park Productions 203 Full English 187 G Gadget Show 131 Gallagher, Ray 9, 20, 52, 234, 238 Garden, The 33, 34, 104, 116, 123, 229 Gardiner, Sophie 94 Garland, Alex 204

282

CHANNEL 4: A HISTORY

Garnett, Rose 200, 201–2, 204–6, 208 Garvie, Wayne 78, 80 Gavron, Sarah 204 Geater, Sara 37 Gee, Adam 41 Gervais, Ricky 185 Gibbon, Gary 218, 239 Gibb, Robbie 214, 218, 233 Giedroyc, Mel 2 Gisby, Jon 38, 40, 44 Glasgow 6, 91, 200, 256, 265 Glazer, Jonathan 203 Glee 83, 105 Global Radio 23, 25 Global Services Network 157 Glover, David 69, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 274 Gogglebox xiii, 69, 99, 109–15, 121, 138, 160, 162, 250, 256, 259, 265, 266, 268, 274 Gogglesprogs 115 Going Cold Turkey 28 Goody, Jade 9, 10 Google 41, 106, 151, 158, 161 Gorman, Justin 93 Grade, Michael xi, 19, 60, 237, 244, 246, 258, 270 Graef, Roger 85 Grand Designs xiii, 90, 94, 187, 263 Grange Hill 176, 197 Gray, Jim 209, 210, 214 Grayson’s Art Club 268 Great British Bake Off: An Extra Slice, The 189 Great British Bake Off, The xiii, 1, 1–4, 2, 3, 108, 122–5, 164, 184, 248, 249, 254, 257–9, 263, 265–6, 274 Green Wing 183, 184 Grierson British Documentary Awards 262 Grimmond, Claire 90 Grisoni, Tony 169, 177 Group M 105, 106, 107, 121 Grylls, Bear 120, 261 Guardian Media Group 57 Guardian, The 5, 25, 41, 44, 57, 89, 148, 169, 172, 178, 181, 184, 190, 211, 216, 246, 261 Gurassa, Charles 4, 204, 220, 245, 247, 249, 250, 252, 253, 258, 264, 269 Guru-Murthy, Krishnan 35, 213, 219, 234, 241 H Haigh, Andrew 204 Hall, Anna 229

Hall, Tony 45, 51, 54, 58, 60, 71, 229, 230 Hancock, Matt 5, 161, 237, 238, 248, 250, 254 Handmaid’s Tale, The 156, 167, 178 Happy-Go-Lucky 195 Happy Valley 176, 262 Harcourt, Tim 109, 110 Hardcash 225, 226, 229 Hardie, John 209–12, 214, 216, 219, 223 Harrington, Julia 91, 172 Harris, Bob 37, 40, 41, 150, 152, 154, 155, 161, 166 Harris, Hugh 240 Harrison, Dominic 125 Harris, Sean 172 Havard, Ed 93, 136, 138, 146, 147 Have I Got News for You 113 HBO 175, 184, 202, 231 Heggessey, Lorraine 66 Hicks, Carl 142 Highflier Productions 142, 143 High Rise 204 Hill, Matt 26 Hill, Michael 23 Hills, Adam 134, 274 Hincks, Tim 11, 12, 20, 54, 182, 192 Hodgson, Patricia 239, 252 Hollick, Caroline 175, 179, 262 Hollyoaks 11, 42, 91, 97, 127, 153, 159–60, 162–3, 167, 171–2, 212, 266–7, 269 Hollywood, Paul 2, 108, 165, 202, 204 Holmes, Chris 70, 129, 131, 133, 134, 137, 139 Holt, Nick 125 Homeland 82, 95, 162, 167, 178 Horan, Danny 261 Horgan, Sharon 185, 187 Horseferry Road 5, 17, 18, 22, 38, 51, 54, 61, 73, 89, 101, 102, 136, 148, 152, 209, 214, 220, 238, 246, 248, 252, 253, 254, 255, 258, 261 Host the Week 114 Hoult, Nicholas 168 House Productions 179, 208 House That Made Me, The 81 Howard’s End 194 Howell, Juliette 208, 254 How to Get a Council House 123 How to Look Good Naked 42 How to Talk to Girls at Parties 207 How To Win the Grand National 145 Hulu 18, 167, 170, 177, 178, 262

Humans 156, 160, 174, 176, 178 Humphreys, Liam 121 Hunger 195, 196 Hunted 122, 259, 261 Hunt for Britain’s Sex Gangs, The 229 Hunt for Jihadi John, The 231 Hunt, Jay xiii, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 33, 34, 35, 42, 57, 61, 65, 71, 73, 77–81, 84, 85, 87–99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 107–9, 111–13, 115, 116, 118–20, 122–4, 126, 130, 132–4, 137, 139, 142–4, 146, 148–9, 155, 156, 159–0, 162, 165–6, 170–3, 177, 178, 182, 183, 185, 187–9, 190, 196, 200, 211–13, 215, 216, 220, 221, 228, 230, 231, 233, 248, 257–63, 265 Hunt, Jeremy 48, 71, 91 I I Am Not a Witch 207 Ice Road Truckers 88 IDS (ad sales house) 66 I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! 114, 174 IMG Sports Media 130, 131, 142, 143, 144 Inbetweeners, The 43, 78, 83, 84, 91, 100, 105, 160, 183, 184, 197, 198, 203 In Bruges 195, 203 Independent, The 11, 94 Indian Summers 158, 173, 174, 178 Indie Club 250 Inside Aleppo 219 Inside Nature’s Giants 110 Insiders, The 42 Inside with Incredible Athletes 131 Interrogation, The 125, 179 Iron Lady, The 199 Isaacs, Jeremy xi, 60, 85, 193, 258, 261 ISBA (the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers) 165 Island, The 259 Island USA, The 159 IT Crowd, The 84, 92, 186 ITN Productions 216, 217, 227 ITV xi, xiii, 2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 11–14, 17–19, 25, 39, 44, 48–9, 51, 61, 66, 68, 70–1, 81, 86, 89, 97, 100, 102, 104, 106, 108, 114, 118, 127, 129–30, 141, 145–6, 157–62, 164, 166, 173–6, 212, 228, 230, 237, 246, 247–8, 257, 262, 267, 269–70, 275 ITV2 3, 53, 78, 159, 264 ITV Studios 34, 69, 102, 116, 189 Iuzzolino, Walter 157, 158

INDEX

283

K Kapadia, Asif 203 Kaplinsky, Natasha 88 Kashmir’s Torture Trail 227 Katz, Ian 5, 126, 179, 230, 235, 261–7 Kavanagh, Damian 4, 94 Kay, Peter 92, 100, 186 Kearney, Martha 80 Keep Cooking and Carry On 267 Keep Crafting and Carry On 268 Keep Reading and Carry On 268 Kelly, Dennis 121, 123, 132, 175, 261 Kerbaji, Richard 231 Killing Eve 190 Killing of a Sacred Deer, The 207 Killing, The 95, 157 Kinnear, Rory 173 Kiri 176, 179 Kiss, Jemima 41 Kiss Me First 160 Kleeman, Nicole 91 Knappett, Jessica 184 Kosminsky, Peter 83, 94, 168, 170, 176, 246 Kosse, David 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 207, 208 Kudos Film and Television 174

Last Leg, The 131, 134–5, 136, 137, 138, 163, 267, 274 Last Resort, The 273 LA Vice 156 Leaving Neverland 231 Lee and Dean 159, 189 Leeds xiii, 6, 83, 175, 179, 209, 223, 229, 254, 256, 265, 271 Lee, Ralph 4, 34, 111, 113, 115, 124, 126, 133, 156, 261, 262–3 Leigh, Mike 127, 195, 201, 206 Leith, Prue 3 Leventhal, Colin 194 Lewis, Cat (Catriona) 91, 147, 161, 243, 250 Liberty Global 244 Liddiment, David 48 Lime Pictures 172 Linehan, Graham 92, 186 Live from Space 110 Loach, Ken 201, 206 Lobster, The 204 Location, Location, Location xiii, 90, 94, 113, 163, 263 lockdown xiv, 267, 268, 269, 270 LOCOG (London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games) 128, 129, 137 Lodgers for Codgers 268 Loehnis, Dom 59 London Irish 185 Lost Girls of South Africa 226 Lovegrove, Stephen 18 Love Island 3, 69, 159, 176, 264 Lucas, Matt 11 Luck, Nick 141, 144 Luther 78 Luxury Comedy 165, 184 Lygo, Kevin xiii, 10, 11, 22–3, 28–30, 34, 45–6, 49, 52, 54, 57–61, 68, 75–7, 86, 89–91, 93–4, 96–98, 100, 128, 130, 141, 183, 210, 225 Lyons, Sir Michael 53

L Ladybird Ladybird 194 Lambert, Stephen 33, 34, 81, 86, 90, 99, 109, 110, 111, 112 Landlords from Hell 227 Lane Fox, Martha 46, 54, 58, 60–1 Lanthimos, Yorgos 204, 206, 207 Last King of Scotland, The 194, 195, 200

M MacKenzie, Kelvin 218 Maclean, John 204 MacLeod, James 102, 238, 246 Macqueen, Angus 28 MacTaggart Lecture series 80, 190, 221, 232, 237, 266 Made in Chelsea 160, 162, 163, 165

J Jackson, Michael 15, 87, 212, 233, 258, 263, 273 Jain, Angela 78, 90 Janrain 155 Jimmy’s Hall 201 Johnson, Boris xiv, 232–3, 266 Johnson, Luke xii, xiii, 10, 15, 17, 40, 45–55, 57, 58, 60–1, 66–7, 130, 232–3, 244, 266 Joly, Dom 156 Jones, Alistair 241 Jones, Annabel 24, 181, 246 Jowell, Tessa 14 Junior Bake Off 249 Jupp, Rachel 210

284

CHANNEL 4: A HISTORY

Madness of King George, The 194 Mahon, Alex 4, 5, 6, 126, 147, 166, 178, 235, 250, 254, 255–60, 265–6, 270–1 Make Me Normal 127 Manchester 6, 168, 175, 229, 251, 254, 256, 262 Man Down 188 Man in the High Castle, The 177 Manji, Fatima 218 Marchant, Tony 168 Mark of Cain, The 168, 169, 199 Married at First Sight Australia 159 Marshall, Liza 168 Mason, Paul 216 Massacre at Ballymurphy, The 264 Masterpiece PBS 173 Matthews, Eamonn 233, 234, 235 Maverick Television 41 Maxwell, Simon 177 May, Theresa 214, 218, 233, 247, 253 McCall, Carolyn 57 McCririck, John 141, 143–4 McDonagh, Martin 195, 203 McGee, Lisa 185 McGovern, Steph 265 McGrath, Jo 157 McKay, Neil 169 McKerrow, Richard 1, 2, 122–3 McQueen, Steve 195–6, 199, 206 McVay, John 40, 44, 251 Meadows, Shane 82, 199, 200 MediaCity, Salford 6 Medicine Man 42 MGM Studios 178 Microsoft 39 Midgley, Neil 80 Midsomer Murders 173 Milliband, Ed 115, 237 Milligan, Nick 50, 66, 184 Million Pound Drop, The 42, 83, 92, 155 Mill, The 172 Miramax TV 205 Mirsky, Nick 118, 119, 122, 125, 261 Misfits 94, 160, 169 Mitchell, David 184 Mitte, R. J. 136 Mo 169 Moran, Caitlin 92, 188 More4 xi, 13, 53, 69, 71, 78, 94, 124, 126, 136, 139, 158, 165, 169, 209, 210–11, 246, 268 More 4 News 210

Morgana Show, The 83 Morgana’s Very Important People 185 Morgan, Sophie 136 Morning Line 141, 144 Morning Show, The 132 Morris, Chris 199 Morris, Iain 198 Morris, Juliet 88 Moss, Elisabeth 161, 178 MPs: Are They Still at It? 227 Mr Turner 201 Mullan, Peter 171 Mulvey, Sarah 69, 73, 78, 84 Mulvihill, Daraine 132 Munden, Marc 168, 169, 175, 177, 199 Murder in the Family, A 125 Murder Trial 125 Murdoch, Elisabeth 4, 31 Murphy, Sue 4, 90, 97 Mutiny 121 My Bad Fat Diary 94 My BBC 160 My Beautiful Friends 83 My Beautiful Laundrette 193, 205 Mykura, Hamish 31–4, 35, 69, 78 N Nahal, Shaminder 216 Naik, Prash 89, 113, 119, 229 Naked Apes 83, 94 Naked Attraction 5, 108, 114, 119, 160, 163, 265, 274 Nath, Dave 123, 179 National Film & Television School 131, 204 National Geographic Films 78, 102, 177, 205 National Lottery 197 National Television Awards 117 National Theatre 190, 193, 201 National Treasure 163, 175, 178, 199 NBC 76, 121, 191, 244 Neighbours 88 Netflix xii, 3, 18, 39–40, 50, 106, 115, 149, 154, 157–9, 161, 162, 173, 177, 181–3, 185, 189, 190, 197, 202, 207–8, 232, 260, 269 Newell, Rosemary 29, 76, 90, 96, 98 Newman, Cathy 139, 183, 213, 223 New Pictures Productions 173 News at Noon 209, 210, 211, 213 Newsnight 5, 87, 97, 212, 214, 215, 216, 261 New York Times, The 159, 222

INDEX

285

Nicolson, John 247, 248 Night Manager, The 200 Nine Lives Media 91, 250 Nix, Alexander 222 NoHo Productions 189 No Offence 147, 175 Norman, Archie 42, 68 Northern Powerhouse 5 Norton, Graham 92, 137 Nowhere Boy 196 Nyoni, Rungano 207 O Objective Media Group 183 Observer, The 222 Occupation 2009 78 Ofcom xiii, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18–21, 38, 40, 43–4, 46, 47–8, 50, 53, 58, 104, 123, 150, 170, 176, 207, 211, 216, 221, 226, 229, 230, 233, 238–9, 241, 243–4, 247, 251–4, 259, 266, 270, 271, 275 Office of Fair Trading 39 Ofsted 43 Old House, New Home 124 Old People’s Home for 4 Year Olds 118 Oldroyd, Jules 90 Oliver, Jamie 11, 90, 94, 95, 267 Oliver & Ohlbaum Associates 151 Olusoga, David 262 OMD UK 105 One Born Every Minute 32, 33, 34, 84, 126, 263, 266 O’Neil, Kathy 69 One O’Clock News (BBC) 87, 97 One Show, The 89, 212 One Word (radio) 21 Open the Box 110 Operatunity 127 Optomen Group 97 O’Reilly, Miriam 86, 88, 89, 90, 143, 144, 211 Osborne, George 48, 202, 240 Oscars, The 193, 194, 195, 199, 204, 206, 207, 208, 244 Osmond, Louise 204 P PACT 37, 39, 40, 49, 103, 155, 250, 251, 260 Palace Pictures 205 pandemic (Covid-19) xiv, 139, 183, 265–76

286

CHANNEL 4: A HISTORY

Panorama 85, 87, 97, 210, 227 Paralympics xiii, 93, 127–40, 142, 213, 234, 247, 265, 267 Parfitt, Andy 22 Parsons, Charlie 100, 101, 102, 103 Patel, Dev 168 Patten, Lord 48 Pattinson, Charlie 173, 175 Paxman, Jeremy 5, 216 pay-per-view 151, 197 paywalls xiv, 3, 157 PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) 105, 170, 173, 231 Peacock, Jonnie 130, 136, 138, 139 Peaky Blinders 177 Pearl, Daniel 220, 228 Peep Show 39, 84, 92, 162, 163, 183, 185 Perkins, Sue 2 Perry, Grayson 124, 273 Peter’s Friends 194 Pete Versus Life 83, 184 Phone Shop 83, 184 Plane Crash 110 Planet 24 Productions 101 Poldark 174 Popper, Robert 183 Portas, Mary 83, 92 Post Office Undercover 227 Potts Dawson, Arthur 94 Potts, Paul 243, 249 Poulton, Deborah 128, 129 Poverty in Britain 100 Powerhouse Productions 5, 210 privatisation xiii, 4, 5, 48, 50, 55, 63, 139, 162, 210, 237, 238, 239–51, 252, 254, 256–7, 270, 274 Project Benson 17, 45, 194 Project Dovetail 151 Project Haussmann 44 Project Kangaroo 18, 39–40, 50, 51, 162 Project Panda 50, 66 Project Passport 161 Promise, The 83, 94, 170, 179 Property Ladder 90 Public Service Provider (PSP) 13, 14 Pure4 Music Radio 21 Purnell, James 2 Puttnam, Lord 11, 45, 46, 47, 51, 54–5, 58, 67, 71, 80, 86, 194, 198, 200

Q Queer as Folk 174 Quicksilver Media Productions 164 R Rainey, M. T. 73, 200, 257 Raised by Wolves 92, 188 Ramsay, Gordon 84, 90, 94, 97, 113, 207 Ramsden, Sarah 118 Raphael, Mark 125 recoupment 197–8, 201, 202 Red Bee Media 17 Redmond, Phil 172 Red Productions 168, 176, 262 Red Riding 169 Red Road 203 Reed, Dan 231 Referendum Debate Live, The 216 Renegade 122 Returned, The 167 Richard III: The King in the Car Park 124 Richards, Ed 13, 14, 15, 18, 38, 58, 254 Richardson, Anna 42 Riley, Rachel 93 Riseborough, Andrea 171, 175 Rites of Passage 273 Robey, Simon 71 Robinson, Tony 110, 124, 125 Room 204 Root, Jane 58, 65 Rose, Sarah 37, 41, 154–5, 162–3, 165, 166, 193 Ross, Jonathan 25, 61, 68, 114, 273 Ross, Tessa 68, 78, 93, 168–71, 175, 179, 193–9, 200–5, 208 Royal Television Society 20, 40, 72, 73, 150, 166, 170, 194, 208, 212, 219, 245, 248, 254 Royal Television Society Awards 245 Royle Family, The 112 RTL 49, 50, 70, 72 Run 172 Ryanair: Secrets from the Cockpit 228 S Sama 232, 266 Sambrook, Richard 220, 221 Santander 54, 58, 60, 67, 70, 71, 101 SAS: Who Dares Wins 121, 263 Saturday Kitchen at the Grand National 145 Schoolscope 43 schools programming 42–3

Schwarz, Nathalie 21, 22 Scottish Screen 43 Screen West Midlands 43 Scrotal Recall 189 Second Coming 204 Secret Life (drama) 168 Secret Life of 4, 5 and 6 Year Olds, The 118 Secret Life of 5 Year Olds, Boys and Girls 118 Secret Life of the Zoo, The 116 Secret Millionaire 127 Secrets of Coca Cola 230 Secrets of Poundland 227 Secrets of the Discount Stores 227 Secrets of Your Missing Mail 227 Secrets of Your Supermarket Shop 227 Selfish Giant, The 196, 199 Seven Days 33, 42, 81, 109 Sex Box 113, 114 Sex Education Show, The 42 Sexy Beast 203 Shallow Grave 193 Shame 199 Shameless 83, 94, 160, 164, 171–2, 175, 176 Sharpe, Will 187 Sheldon, Andrew 6 Shennan, Bob 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 Sherlock 70, 171 She’s Got To Have It 127 Shetty, ShiIpa 10, 67, 92, 221 Shine TV 4, 261 Shreeve, Matt 23, 82, 105 Simpsons, The 82, 132 Singer Takes It All, The 155 Sirieix, Fred 119 Six O’Clock News (BBC) 87, 97 Skins 78, 94, 168, 169, 175 Sky 3, 4, 6, 13, 20, 21, 50, 64, 66, 105, 116, 127, 129, 147, 150–1, 154, 157, 164, 189, 209, 212, 214, 215–16, 238, 271 Sky Atlantic 71 Sky Sports 146 Slow West 204 Slumdog Children of Mumbai, The 227 Slumdog Millionaire 193, 194, 195, 200, 207 Smack the Pony 184 Smith, Anthony 274 Smith, Charlotte 88 Smith, John 18, 66 Smith, Will 18, 19, 28–9, 48, 55, 66, 88, 123, 179, 189

INDEX

287

Snapchat 160 Snow, Jon 23, 68, 76, 97, 211–13, 215–16, 218, 219, 220, 221, 223, 227, 239 Snowman and the Snowdog, The xiii Sony Pictures 78 Sorrell, Martin 105 South Bank Show, The 214 Southcliffe 94, 172 Spaced 183, 185 Spencer, Phil 152, 263 Star Stories 184 State, The 164, 179, 258 Steele, Sam 23 St Luke’s (advertising agency) 59–60, 64–5, 82 Stone Roses: Made of Stone, The 200 Strachan, Michaela 88, 89 Streetmate 114 Street-Porter, Janet 11 Strictly Come Dancing 143 Studio Lambert 33, 90, 109–11, 114–16, 123, 250 STX Entertainment 204 subscription services xi, 3, 15, 18, 37, 38, 150, 159, 164, 196, 197, 207, 260, 264, 275 subscription video on demand (SVOD) 269 Suffragette 204 Sugar, Alan 45 Sunday Brunch 136 Sunday Times 44, 53, 231, 250 Sunset+Vine 130, 131, 142 SuperVet, The 116 Survival: The Island with Bear Grylls 120 Survivor 101 Sutcliffe, Kevin 226, 227, 235 Swarup, Vikas 194 T T2 Trainspotting 207 T4 43, 94 Tagholm, Tom 132, 134 Talkback Thames 4, 185 Talk Radio 21 talkSPORT 26 TalkTalk 157 Taskmaster xiv, 266 Taylor, Joyce 65 Taylor Wood, Sam 196, 201 Teachers 94 Temple, Magnus 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 35 Thatcher, Margaret xi, 67, 112, 199, 237

288

CHANNEL 4: A HISTORY

That Paralympian Show 131 That Peter Kay Thing 186 The Only Way is Essex 81 ThinkBIGGER! (training and consultancy) 131 This Is England ’86 82, 83, 94, 171, 199 Thompson, Mark 10, 13, 15, 18, 48, 50, 80, 87, 88, 139, 195, 212, 258, 270 Thorne, Jack 82, 127, 175–7 Thorp, Jason 157 Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri 203, 207 Tiger Aspect 186 Times, The 89, 188, 232, 254 Time Team 110, 124, 251 Timothy, Nick 201, 254 Titanic: The Mission 81 TLC (The Learning Channel) 65 Toast of London 162, 185 Today 22, 23, 218, 219 Toksvig, Sandi 4, 184 Top Boy 83, 94, 171 Train Journeys from Hell 227 Trainspotting 193 Tramadol Nights 83 Trial of Tony Blair, The 189 Tribe 122 Tricks of the Dole Cheats 227 Trigger Happy TV 156 Troni, Roberto 171 True Vision Productions 227 Truth about 5 a Day, The 227 Turgoose, Thomas 83 Twenty Twenty Television 119 Twitter 106, 119, 144, 160, 187, 216 Two Boys 190 Twofour Group 116 Tyrannosaur 201 U UKTV 48, 49, 59, 65–6, 68, 77, 82, 86, 105–6, 162, 248 Undateables, The 127 Undercover Boss 84, 90, 99, 110, 111 Undercover Mosque 225, 226 Undercover Mosque: The Return 226 Undercover Retirement Home 227 Under the Skin 200 Underwood, Keith 150 United Pictures 202 Universal Television 202

Unloved 169 Unreported World 134, 164, 213, 217, 230, 232–5 UN Sex Abuse Scandal, The 231 Upfronts 82, 84, 107, 153 Utopia 94, 175, 178, 199 V Vaizey, Ed 91, 197, 205, 237, 239, 245, 248, 250 Vault, The 155 Viacom 3, 72, 267 Viewer Promise 154 Virgin Media 37, 65, 66 VOD (video on demand) 40 VoggleBox 115 W Walker, Janey 43, 69, 90 Walking the Americas 124 Walking the Himalayas 124 Walking the Nile 124 Walking Through History 125 Waller-Bridge, Phoebe 190 Walsh, Alison 128–35, 137, 139 Walter Presents (VOD) 147, 157–9, 269 Walters, Julie 138, 170, 173, 174, 175 Wan, Gok 42, 82, 146 Warner, Helen 90, 93, 119, 264 Warp Films 200 Wasp 203 Watch 66, 111 Waterloo Road 176 Watts, Edward 232 Wax, Derek 174 Weakest Link, The 88 Webber, Mark 147 Webb-Lamb, Kelly 121, 261 Webb, Robert 184 Webster, Paul 194 Wenger, Piers 171–5, 178, 200 We’re Going on a Bear Hunt xiii West Wing 269 Wheatley, Ben 203, 204 Whisper 147 Whitehead, Gill 18, 71, 150, 161, 166

Whitehouse, Amy 203 Whittingdale, John 20, 52, 63, 72, 238–41, 243–8, 270 Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? 193, 194 Widdicombe, Josh 134 Widows 206 Wife Swap 99, 109, 143 Wikileaks 5 Williams, Arthur 132, 134, 137, 197 Willimon, Beau 177 Willis, Beth 175, 176 Willis, John 175 Wilmot, Mike 131, 132, 133, 139 Wilson, Benji 33 Windsors, The 184, 189 Wogan, Terry 97 Wolfe, Daniel 201 Woodford, Sue 176 Wood, Levison 124 Woolcock, Penny 176, 196 Woolf, Suzie 147 Word, The 101, 273 World Productions 171, 177 WPP Agency 105 Wright, Joe 181 Wright, Roger 22 Wulff-Cochrane, Robert 171 Wuthering Heights 203 Y Yates, Paula 273 Year with the Queen, A 88 Younghusband, Jan 196 Young Sheldon 167 YouTube 40, 41, 51, 106, 117, 133, 149, 164, 168, 216, 221, 223 Youview 40, 84 You Were Never Really Here 207 Z Zeff, Jon 49 Zeiler, Gerhard 49, 70, 72 Zeppotron 181

INDEX

289