Who remembers a time when there was a channel that showed, entirely for free and available to 90% of the country (sorry Wales), weird German opera, insightful documentaries about the projects in the United States, and comedy that would influence the trends for 20 years? It was called 'Channel 4', if I'm not mistaken. I admit, I do not remember, for I was born in 1994, twelve years after the channel had first aired and the channel was now at the point where it started its doomed trek to populism and 'balancing the books'. But it is important that it existed, not least because it provides a good point at which we can compare.
Indeed, we can compare these moments in television history, good ones might I add, to the current mess that is shown today. I look through the television listings and one could neatly summarise every day's worth of entertainment as lifestyle drudgery, freak-shows thinly veiled as informative programming ('infotainment'), and the odd rom-com from 2003. Day in, day out, with the same faces presenting with ersatz enthusiasm on mundane codswallop. Thank God no-one, apart from advertisers wanting to sell their wears to the paralysed visages on cream leather sofas, is paying for it. Actually, the fact that no-one apart from soulless conglomerates is paying for it is why Channel 4 has turned into the ungodly mess it is today - someone with a soul may have tried to stop this.
You see, when Channel 4 started, it was owned by the IBA, who also owned the infrastructure of ITV (please, don't let's start on ITV). It was the ITV companies that sold their advertising, and although they could not always sell enough (in the early days, you were sometimes met with a slide saying that a programme would resume in a few minutes), the slapstick entertainers on the other side would subsidise the 'artsy-smartsy' content, you know, documentaries about Bismarck, or Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy comedy routines. And, if you are a fan of such unconventional material, you would think the system worked well - the masses can watch Tommy Cooper; I, and my kindred spirits in Shoreditch lofts, can watch 'Drop the Dead Donkey'.
But then in 1993, this all changed. Channel 4 became its own public body, and although owned by the public, it had to sell its own advertising. And who would want to buy ad space on a minority-interest channel? So, Channel 4 had to become more popular under Michael Grade, and thus it sold its family silver to pay its way. We get 'Friends', 'Big Brother'. Of course, it was not all bad: 'Brass Eye', 'Father Ted', 'Spaced', 'Black Books' came on in the late-1990s and early-2000s, but the creation of such good contest could not be sustained, partly because there came a great drive from central government to create homegrown programming and be inventive - great - at a time when advertising space became hard to fill and thus lowering budgets - very very very bad.
So, how do you attract audiences to your increasingly scarce channel, without spending money? You sell your jewellery, your furniture, your land, and then your clothes, right down to selling your socks and pants, metaphorically of course, and create the current tribe of turgid televisual mind-occupiers. You make fun of minorities with whom you would previously have sympathised; you produce comedy that would be probably rejected by Sky, bloody Sky, let alone the BBC or HBO; and you get lazy, so so lazy, as you take concepts and transfer them to any sort of subject. It will only be a matter of time before 'One Born Every Minute' gets copied into a show where we watch old people with dementia or in a coma decay until the nurse comes in, feels no pulse and covers them with a blanket, over their cold corpse. The occasional flakes of gold - The Inbetweeners, Black Mirror - that are noticed in the river of horse manure that is the rest of the schedule are treated thus as a rarity, rather than a common encounter, and, because people use this not as inspiration or a template but as a mould, standards are lowered. It turns out rather like the London property market, where crappy bedsits become worth more than a three bedroom terrace in Bristol, due solely to the lack of any other forms of accommodation.
I like minority-interest programmes, and I am thus in the minority. I am in the minority because I want some television to be informative and interesting, to test the boundaries and to be unashamedly intellectual. Education is liberty, and one should pay for liberty. We are not in a custody centre trying to find bail money, and I will not end up approaching Rupert Murdoch through the guise of Sky Arts for a bail bond. If I were a prisoner, I would spend time in the exercise yard; that French film at two o'clock in the morning is the exercise yard of Channel 4. And just as I would be happy to walk around the exercise yard in circles, I would quite happily watch that French film over and over again, for the feeling of freedom.
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