The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

Menu

Navigation

You are here: Home / Forum / Channel 4 to be flogged off

Comments

      • I think the apathy is due to a lack of understanding of the actual situation, as well as the fact that lots of other things are going on right now so it’s hard to focus on this.

        I’m guilty of this myself. I quite like Channel Four, but I don’t really understand what is actually at stake here. Happy to formulate an opinion if someone can explain it in simple terms for me?

        • Public service remit means certain types of programmes must be made. They can’t just show any old crap like game shows where contestants choose a date based on seeing possible suitors naked. There’s a law against it, well there should be. I guess It’s A Sin got made because of the remit but I knew it as an HBO show. See also End Of The Fucking World, also an award winning 4 hit but on Netflix too. Supposedly they can be like Netflix after the sell-off but Netflix benefit from Channel 4 having funded some of the innovative shows Netflix show. We’ll all be worse off, well those who appreciate quality drama will be. Most won’t give a toss.

          • There’s no way Channel 4 can be like Netflix. Netflix have built their business on an enormous debt mountain and are now in competition with 4-5 other gigantic media conglomerates to see who can be first to scale a financially viable global streaming platform. C4 aren’t at the races for that kind of thing, although they might find their content dragged into it depending on who acquires them.

            I have to confess, I find it hard to see this issue clearly. On the one hand, I used to work at Channel 4, I have huge affection for a lot of their output and I don’t like Nadine Dorries. On the other, I haven’t knowingly watched the channel in getting on for a decade (although I appreciate I’ve probably encountered the content in other settings).

            I don’t believe the Tories want to sell it because C4 news is mean to Johnson. I certainly don’t believe they want to sell it because it’s the only channel that features ethnic minorities and disabled people (come now). I think they want to sell it because it’s a publicly owned asset they don’t see a real use case for, other than providing warm, nostalgic feelings to the sorts of people who loudly proclaim they’ll never vote Tory.

            Would I keep it in government hands? Yeah, probably. Can I articulate a reasoned argument why. Not really. The closest I can come is the damage that’ll be done to the British production scene, but then we’re smack in the middle of a once in a generation production boom (there literally isn’t enough studio space to go around) so I suspect that might work itself out.

            In terms of the news stuff, one of the prospective owners also owns CNN, and they strike me as having done a pretty good job holding Trump to account. It’s not an impossible dream.

            I also, if I’m honest, find that the warnings that we’re about to be tipped into an authoritarian far right nightmare every time the government so much as breathes have probably desensitised me a bit to some of the reaction. My overall feeling is that it C4 didn’t already exist you might not feel the need to invent it, so maybe there’s a discussion to be had?

            • In terms of whether you would invent it, perhaps worth remembering it was crated at a time when there were literally three channels in the UK. I seem to recall that pretty much all production on those three channels was in house. And, the internet not yet existing, the range of news and views on offer was very limited.

              • Yep. Super different times.

                There was certainly a need for Channel 4 when it was first launched, and it produced some absolutely amazing content in its heyday, which I’d guess was the period from the mid 80s to the mid 00s.

                I suspect it’s that golden period that most people are thinking about when they bemoan this new development, rather than the stuff it largely broadcasts these days.

                Sad to see it go, but I’m not entirely convinced this week is the point at which it really went, so to speak.

  3. There is no good economic reason for the sale, as it’s profitable and receives no taxpayer’s money whatsoever.
    Competing with the likes of Netflix and Amazon has never been something C4 has ever aspired to.
    The Tories just have an ideological aversion to anything being publicly-owned when it could be privately-owned and making money for shareholders. And hedge funds. And private equity companies.
    It’s claimed the proceeds of the sale would be “put into independent production and creative skills in priority parts of the country”.
    I suspect they’ll just spunk it instead. The money will just disappear into a black hole in the Treasury.

    • “put into independent production and creative skills in priority parts of the country”.

      Sort of where it is anyway making programmes and films for Channel 4. And the turning a profit by selling in to other platforms and broadcasters, and the funneling funds back into more programmes and films.
      I’m sure they will maintain their competitive and original edge when in receipt of a repayable government grant

    • This is what I think about this too. Once Thatcher had finished costermongering with the silverware, they moved on to the fine china. Now they’re flogging off the contents of the library. Once C4 has gone they’ll probably investigate the potting shed; see if they can get something for that bottle of paraquat that’s no longer legally available, and those nice trowels and forks from the posh garden centre. Philistines and vandals, bashi-bazooks and pithecanthropi, Tory’s don’t give a shit who values anything, they just look at the price labels before they put the whole fucking country on eBay.

  4. Nad wants all those crips, queers and Asians off the telly. Not to mention the dangerously actual-journalism-adjacent C4 News. Sometimes they have someone reading the news wearing a headscarf, FFS. British it ain’t.

    • Nah. It’s just standard social media provocation. Almost nobody gives a toss about the ownership / governance of Channel 4 either way, but it’ll cause a Twitter war in which the sort of people who are identifiably Channel 4 types (ie wear the same kind of glasses as me) will thcweam and thcweam on Twitter and Nadine Dorries can point at them and say something about metropolitan elites and their weird cultural obsessions and “imagine getting het up about this when there’s a war on” etc.

      The Tories have had 12 years, and infinitely more political capital than now, with which to perpetrate the “Great British Flog Off”. Faux Geordie was certain “they” were going to do it back in the days of the coalition, any second now. They haven’t yet. Seems weird that “phase 1” would come 12 years in, with all their goodwill spent already.

      • I think this take may underestimate the sheer capacity for capricious pay back from a militant philistine such as Dorries.
        There is absolutely no economic case for selling off Channel 4, indeed the current ‘Culture Secretary’ revealed her monstrous ignorance of her her own brief by asserting in front of the parliamentary committee that it was publicly funded ( which it is not, of course). It makes money ( not a great deal) & is a platform for independent production companies to show their wares, which is surely a model of capitalist lean efficiency.
        However, Channel 4 ( apart from being the haven of pansies & non Caucasians) have an honourable news output – especially when measured against the supine BBC of recent times- which ran very illuminating & extremely unflattering pieces about Johnson’s gropey father & ran the widely viewed interview from with the Palace of Westminster with Dorries, who was so hammered she could barely stay on her heels & she made an enormous fool of herself – like somebody’s drunken Auntie at a wedding.
        This drew enormous attention & was shown online all over the world as an illustration of just how far this sceptred isle has sunk.
        She wants her own back & Johnson will let her have her way.
        There is talk of a back bench rebellion, so there may be a glimmer of hope but I wouldn’t bank on it.

        • All of which may be true, but I don’t think it’s a harbinger of some dastardly scheme to sell off all the things they’ve had 12 years to sell off already. And Dorries may have all the motivations you say, but from a pure PR point of view, Channel 4 is rightly or wrongly perceived as remoaner-metro-elite central and she’s probably perfectly aware than many people won’t make a distinction between “owned” and “funded” in the ensuing Twitter screamathon (which is all any political activist, in government or out, seems to want in 2022).

          She’s awful, of course, but every time she does something awful, the exact people she’s custom-designed to provoke say things which show at least as much about them as about her. And she gets to say “look how a northern working class woman with the wrong politics gets treated by these snobs” and not be 100% wrong.

          (Also: saying the Tories want policies like this cos they hate women and queers and brown people (not you) really doesn’t stick when they’ve had two female prime ministers, several high profile gay men and women in government, and probably more ethnic minority ministers than Labour have managed, particularly in the Great Offices.)

          So yeah, I’m pretty sure this idea is intended as pure social media culture war fuel. And is working well as such. After all: this thread exists and I’m spending time opining on something I don’t care that much about. 🤷‍♂️

          • 12 years during which Dorries was an inconsequential little turd floating in the polluted pan of the Conservative Party’s brick outhouse of ordinariness. Now she’s been promoted as one of Boris’s flak-catchers, she can throw her weight around.

          • Its also sparked a raft of comments amongst critics that seem to suggest that a government not controlling a TV station is in some way an affront to free speech, which is interesting. One can only assume this means that the Guardian/Observer, Mirror, Socialist Worker, Morning Star and websites like Byline Times, London Economic etc should immediately be nationalised.

    • I’ve not seen her discuss her political views other than the anti-antisemitism campaign against Corbyn’s leadership of Labour. Had a brief Google – still nothing. Got any receipts for “rabidly right wing”?

    • Who is Walter? On Channel 4’s first night in November ’82 there was a film called Walter, starring Ian McKellen. Still remember it vividly.

      I loved Channel 4 in it’s early incarnation. My parents had relocated to a different part of the country and I’d started a new comprehensive school at 14. I was pretty lonely and miserable and Channel 4 became a companion and an education. The channel made bold choices and had real personality. It also made judicious picks from tv’s back catalogue including the original The Avengers series, and I remember being absolutely mesmerised by Linda Thorson …

  10. Mark Davyd, CEO and founder at The Music Venue Trust had this to say yesterday on FB. A rather long read but a good exposition, I reckon.

    ———————

    Regular readers will know that it is my position that this current government is dangerous because of its incompetence. I recognise that many of you find them to be cruel, or their policies deliberately designed towards the vicious and unnecessary, but my own experience is that they haven’t got a clue what they are doing, don’t know how things work, and won’t listen when it’s explained patiently to them. This has the same outcome as a well designed attack on society, and the people in it, but lacks the motivation and organisation with which they are often characterised. They aren’t evil; being evil requires a level of planning, strategy and intelligence that is simply absent from the last twelve years. They are pompous, arrogant and, most of all, completely unsuitable for government.
    I can’t actually think of a better example of incompetent government than the current ludicrous case of Nadine Dorries and the plans to sell off Channel 4. How idiotic and incompetent are these plans? Well, let’s take a quick look.
    Dorries appeared before a select committee last year where she repeatedly revealed, unintentionally, that she did not know how Channel 4 was run, funded, managed or operated. Which is a pity, since she’s essentially in charge of it. Confronted by how it actually delivers its output, she became flustered and angry, dismissing further questioning, which she plainly felt to be a pointless exercise since she knew everything about everything.
    Unchastened by the humiliating experience of flapping about like a turbot on a sand dune, and certainly without considering that perhaps she might need to learn anything from having her ignorance exposed, she set about creating a sell off of Channel 4, mainly on the basis that its news programme will insist on asking Tories awkward questions they don’t know the answer to. Despite the news programming being less than 5% of their output.
    Yesterday she triumphantly declared that the sell off will go ahead, grandly announcing that the money it will raise will support ‘left behind areas, independent and creative skills’.
    All profits from C4, every year, already do all those things. In spades. Their entire commissioning budget pre-profit is invested in creative skills, most of it into independent productions, huge sums of it outside London. The entire operation of C4 in its current format has the purposes she claims to wish to achieve by selling it off.
    She then went on to boast about the films the U.K. makes, unaware that Film 4 exists, talked about studios opening, unaware that C4 is doing precisely that, and then finished with a flourish stating that creative skills are key.
    The sale of C4 will raise, she expects, £1billion. Once. Whether this is true or not (clue; it isn’t – the only way it would raise £1billion is if it is sold without any restrictions on what it does), the fact is that C4 already invested just under £600million into creativity, skills and independent productions in 2020 alone. Or to make the maths simple, without being sold off C4 will invest every penny the government thinks it’s going to make from a one off sale in 2024 before 2024. And then do it again every two years. I’ll just repeat that because it’s really quite startling; the government plans to sell off a national asset investing £1billion every 20 months into creativity and culture so it can make £1billion once, and never again, to invest in creativity and culture.
    And who will spend the £1billion one off windfall? Why, Nadine Dorries of course! The incredibly gifted and knowledgeable person behind the £120million Festival of Brexit, who just before Christmas commissioned a £2million study into whether Liverpool would benefit from a Beatles museum… to go with the five it already has.
    Dorries’s plan to sell off C4 may seem like a cunning and evil plan to undermine democracy by removing an independent broadcasting voice. I wish it were that clever. It’s short termist, economically vapid, blinkered pig ignorance from a party that simply won’t listen.
    C4 is being sold off because the Tories are unbelievably shit at maths, came bottom of the class at economics, don’t have the slightest acquaintance with understanding how the creative industries work, and have appointed someone to be in charge of culture you wouldn’t leave in charge of some blunt pencils in case they accidentally started a war. And who, if you try and help by explaining any of that, sticks their fingers in their ears and starts shouting about ‘lefties’.
    The Brexit government. It’s the villages of England I feel sorry for; they must be sorely missing their idiots.

  11. I’m trying to remember some classic Channel Four shows, as I feel I have taken the channel for granted. So I looked up an online list of the best ever CH4 shows and here are the ones which stick out for me as truly brilliant, unbeatable telly:

    – The “This is England” shows
    – Father Ted
    – The IT Crowd
    – Spaced
    – Peep Show
    – Brass Eye
    – Phoenix Nights
    – Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out
    – Queer As Folk
    – Stath Lets Flats

    Mostly comedy, which shows my preference I suppose.

      • Forgot about the Comic Strip, but apart from a few highpoints (Bad News in particular) I always felt that was a bit patchy and amateurish – but then I don’t think anyone involved would disagree with that!

        I didn’t even think about movies, which just occurred to me. Channel 4 have funded quite a few British films haven’t they?

    • Two things:

      1) All the above lists are mainly things which were broadcast 30-odd years ago or more.

      2) They’re a very good case for C4 *existing* (or having existed). Nobody on this thread has suggested why it needs to be publicly owned, though.

        • I don’t think anyone on this thread is aggressively arguing for it to be privatised.

          A few of us are simply querying why, given some of the uproar over the decision, so little of this thread consists of practical arguments as to why the channel needs to remain in public hands, rather than a load of name calling and pathologising Tory motives, with the odd suggestion that no news organisation other than C4 can possibly be relied upon to critique the government.

          I can think of a handful of arguments to keep it public, but find it curious that for all the stomping and wailing, none of them are being articulated here. This feels less a practical debate, more one centred around political identity (on both sides).

        • I don’t think anyone’s trying to make that argument. But if it’s a scandal that it be privatised, isn’t it rather on the people claiming it’s a scandal to demonstrate why?

          I have no dog in this one. I don’t really care who owns C4, especially when I look at the actual listings. I think the Tories assume private ownership is always a good in itself, which I think is silly and dogmatic. But that’s their reason, and it’s consistent with what Tories do. Probably not a good enough reason to do it, but they don’t mind about that.

          But I think people who seem super keen for C4 to remain in public hands should probably explain why they think this, or else look a bit like they think *public* ownership is always a good in itself, which to me is equally silly and dogmatic.

          (Btw: the news coverage definitely isn’t the reason. It’s produced by ITN.)

          • It may be produced by ITN but it has a different editorial slant. You’d get more from Newsround than watching ITVs ITN produced news at 10.

            We already have ITV and – god help us – C5 showing us the kind of pap privately owned, advertising led TV looks like. C4’s public service remit gives a breadth of programming that won’t sustain under a purely commercial owner.

            • You may well be right that being publicly owned is the only reason Channel 4 produces good public service programming. (“Advertising led” is a surely a red herring here, though, since C4 is already funded solely by advertising.)

              I don’t think you’ve shown that public ownership is the only way you get great investigative journalism or public service broadcasting, though. Tonight on C4, there’s the news, Unreported World and Grayson’s Art Club. Cool cool. Very service, much public. There’s also, from 3pm:

              – A Place in the Sun
              – A New Life in the Sun
              – Sun, Sea and Selling Houses
              – Hollyoaks
              – A Simpsons repeat from 1998
              – Gogglebox
              – The Great Sex Experiment in which some people “need help navigating their first threesome”
              – 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown
              – Jimmy Carr’s I Literally Just Said That

              Compare with ITV’s listings over the same period and I don’t think they look significantly different: racing, news, Emmerdale, Corrie, Grantchester*, news, reasonably big-ticket film (21 Jump Street).

              If the thesis is that public ownership guarantees thoughtful quality and private guarantees trash, I’m not at all sure you’ve made it. Sure, Friday night ITV doesn’t have Unreported World or Grayson, but then neither does BBC1, which by the “public=good / private=trash” rationale ought to be the pick of the bunch.

              Meanwhile, high quality arts and factual documentaries are thick on the ground over on Netflix and – you have to admit – on Sky. (And so is a lot of trash, of course, but to my eyes BBC1 is 90% trash too.)

              So I suppose my question is this: what would C4 have to stop doing if it were in private hands? What aspects of its 2022 programming are only possible thanks to its public ownership?

              I don’t know. Like I say: no dog in the fight. You might be absolutely right that Grayson only gets on telly on a publicly-owned, ad-funded C4. But I think both the government and people who are outraged at the government are largely leading with their identity on this one, which brings with it a good bit of motivated reasoning.

              *Grantchester doesn’t look like my kind of thing, but has decent Metacritic scores, so fair play.

              • So, “to my eyes BBC1 is 90% trash” you say.

                I’d agree. I almost never watch BBC1 for that very reason.

                But that’s not a justification for selling it off.

                Public investment (which isn’t always and exclusively a financial investment, sometimes it’s a cultural investment) belongs to everyone, it’s not in the basket for Tories to sell off on a whim just because “it’s consistent with what Tories do”.

                • If the argument is that public ownership of media companies is always better than private ownership, that’s fine. I think it’s a tough case to make, though, since the corollary seems to me to require nationalising all the currently private ones. Because why would that principle apply to Channel 4 and not ITV, or Netflix? Or media companies and not car companies? Or is it the exact status quo that’s somehow right? In which case, good old Maggie!

                  I’m not sure what a cultural investment as distinct from a financial one means. What does “belongs to everyone” mean, and how would an asset which “belongs to everyone” operate, if the elected government can’t manage it as it sees fit? Who’s “everyone”, if it’s not the elected government, and what if that “everyone” doesn’t want to own it? Would we become, in some senses, constitutionally socialist? Enshrine public ownership of cultural institutions such that no government, no matter the size of its mandate, could never privatise any of them? That seems… big.

                  Like I say, I don’t know whether C4’s public ownership is a big deal or not. I’m quite struck by the number of people who do.

                  • The argument isn’t that it’s better. It’s much more simple – public service broadcasters have a remit to inform, entertain and fully embrace the “broad” bit of broadcasting. Advertising led broadcasters are there to make as much money as they can, so they commission shows that have the best ratings to cost ratio.

                    Chasing ratings doesn’t encourage taking any kind of risk or diversity of content. A public service broadcaster – as C4 and BBC have – will create content that doesn’t have the mainstream appeal but meets the wider criteria. In the worse case scenario (as has happened in the US), advertising led broadcasters will shy away from anything controversial because of a fear of advertising boycotts or tabloid campaigns.

                    There’s no coherent case for the sale of C4. There’s no problem that it solves. It’s going to take something that’s working just fine and stands out because it’s not like the others, and almost certainly make it just another anodyne rating chaser. I’m quite struck by the number of people that don’t see this.

                    • Channel 4 is an advertising lead broadcaster. It’s literally funded by advertising.

                      I agree with the comment about breadth of content, although when I actually look at what’s on Channel 4 these days I’m not convinced I see much evidence of it in practice. Look at the shows hedgepig lists above; if that’s not anodyne ratings-chasing, I don’t know what is.

                    • I agree Bingo – the point that I’m labouring is that C4, whilst funded by advertising, has a charter that means what they show isn’t just about maximizing advertising revenue. As they say of themselves (I’m sure you know this from your time there)

                      ” We do this by representing unheard voices, challenging with purpose and reinventing entertainment.

                      Our unique model – commercially-funded but publicly-owned – means that we’re able to offer independent and distinctive, universal content reflecting the interests of different communities across the UK.”

                      They are going to commission stuff that solely commercial outfits like C5 and ITV never will. Sure, one days partial schedule can be held up to suggest they are ordinary, but look at their output across the last 5 years and it’s a mix of things that I find toe curlingly dismal (Made In Chelsea, Naked Attraction) through to truly outstanding (The Help, The Virtues) plus plenty of well established, long term shows that entertain many (Goggglebox, Grand Designs, Car SOS).

                      And I think that’s why they should remain as they are. They are no burden to the taxpayer, so other than dogma, why sell it?

                    • Here’s my take: I wouldn’t privatise it if it were my decision, but nor do I consider it a moral outrage if they go down that path, and I’m not seeing arguments here that justify the idea that this is some sort of National travesty, per the tone of some of the criticism.

                      25 years ago, Channel 4 provided something that you genuinely couldn’t get anywhere else; it opened a window inside the mainstream for voices and experiences you genuinely otherwise wouldn’t have heard. Nowadays, those voices have far less trouble finding themselves expression: we have more than 4 channels and the internet means we live in a deeply pluralistic culture. Media companies are super focused on programming for minorities of all descriptions. All of the shows you list above could comfortably have been commissioned by other channels or the streamers. None of them are things that only C4 would dare air. That’s a big change.

                      Personally, the bit I do worry about is FilmFour, which remains a jewel in the crown of British film. It could be sensibly protected with conditions on sale, but I have little faith that Dorries will have the sense or sensitivity to build those in.

                      Per the discussion on the BBC thread, the media sector is in absolute turmoil at the moment: there’s an explosion in production, but distribution is being turned upside down. If Channel 4 stays as is, it’ll be largely obsolete within a decade unless it has a super smart strategy. That’s also the logic for far larger entities: there’s a question mark over how anything survives without either scale or subsidy. That’s the backdrop to this decision.

                      So – it’s not what I would do, but I do understand it, and I think a lot of the outrage is based in a lack of understanding. I also recognise that my own instincts are somewhat compromised by C4 having been a huge part of my youth. It certainly plays little or no part in my adulthood.

                      I also strongly disagree that ad funded services will always go lowest common denominator, and that private companies can’t do balanced, informative news. That’s not my experience. Nor is it my experience that organisations always run worse once a profit motive is introduced.

                  • Why should we assume that a government, always a temporary, ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ kinda thing, has any right or responsibility to ‘manage’ a long standing cultural asset like a publicly owned broadcaster in order to meet its own ends – i.e. ‘as it sees fit’?

                    If the government wants to make such a ‘management’ decision, it’s up to them to make the case in favour of change, not up to anyone else, let alone everyone else, to make the case for the status quo. FFS they call themselves conservatives.

                    • This whole thing has come up because the government has introduced a bill in parliament to privatise Channel 4. So, they will have to make their case for privatising it in the Commons and the Lords – just as a bill had to be passed in parliament to set up the channel in the first place.

                    • Oh, and by the way, hanging C4’s raison d’etre on the observation that back in the day there wasn’t much choice, but that nowadays ‘we have more than 4 channels’ hardly cuts it! From memory, on Freeview TV I can currently watch many dozens of other channels. But I don’t. They are almost all full of utter crap. I probably watch no more than 2 or 3 others on anything like a regular basis.

                    • This government doesn’t have to make any meaningful, reasoned, fiscally or rationally pursuasive case in the commons or in the lords. They’ll nod it through while consulting their investment advisers on their mobiles.

                    • I’m afraid that the fact that there are more and more diverse media channels available in this country than there were 20-30 years ago is not undermined by the fact that you don’t watch them. Would that it were otherwise; what a far simpler, albeit alarmingly Vulpes-centric, world that would be.

        • I can’t remember the last time I watched anything on C4 but my view is along the lines of “If it ain’t broke..”. I think it’s that simple a case.

          I don’t think there’s a sound economic case for selling it off. Unless you consider the fact that some investors would like to get their hands on it as Sound Economics.

    • It’s a properly incredible legacy of programming, plus the movies (albeit a lot of those were co-productions).

      Channel 4 was a lifeline when I was a teenager; great US imports, fantastic British comedies, excellent youth programming (no one has mentioned The Word, but it was ace if you were young at the time), etc. If all they’d ever done was Brass Eye, I’d say the entire endeavour would have been well worth it.

      Plus, hard not to love an organisation whose main office building has a you entering via a giant phallus, replete with testicles.

  15. I can’t really work out what’s being sold, probably because I know nothing about the media. But as far as I can tell, Channel 4 doesn’t make programmes but commissions them. So, I assume they won’t own any studios. It might own its buildings, although offices are normally leased, and I suppose they have licenses currently for the channels they transmit on.

    Does that mean that the main asset is the people? If they’re not happy with the new management arrangements, they will probably move on, as the TV marketplace seems to be expanding rapidly at the moment. If they do jump ship, and I’ve seen this happen in other sectors, the company could end up with no buyers, as it has nothing to offer

  16. Has anyone mentioned Countdown yet? Not the Jimmy Carr version – I mean the solidly boring one with the occasional bout of gentle humour. Richard Whiteley was the guvnor of course but I think Jeff Stelling did a good job.

Leave a Reply