Channel 4

A History: from Big Brother to The Great British Bake Off

Maggie Brown

• Verlag: British Film Institute
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781911239857
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Thema: Televisione

This book covers a dramatic decade in the fortunes of Britain's quirkiest broadcaster. It opens in 2009, with the realisation that Channel 4's biggest money spinner, Big Brother, had become a toxic asset and would have to be discarded, at the same time as advertising revenues were shrinking in the wake of the 2008 financial crash. Maggie Brown's compelling narrative, which draws on interviews with key players in Channel 4's story and unique access to the broadcaster's archives, takes us inside the boardroom battles, changes in senior management and commissioning teams, interventions by the media regulator Ofcom, and the channel's response to a rapidly-changing media and political landscape. Brown describes how the channel, under its new chief executive David Abraham, successfully fought off the threat of privatisation, which became a reality after the Conservatives' general election victory in 2015. The price for remaining publicly funded was a substantial relocation of Channel 4's operations, with Leeds announced in 2018 as a new 'regional hub'. The Channel 4 story is also one of ambitious and innovative programming, with a new director of content, Jay Hunt, instigating radical changes in commissioning and scheduling. Brown traces programming hits and losses during this period, with the departure to competitors of celebrity chefs, Black Mirror and Charlie Brooker, horse racing and Formula 1, and a reappraisal of the remit of institutions such as Channel 4 News and Film 4. But there were successes too, with the 2012 Paralympics helping to restore a public service sheen, and new programmes such as Gogglebox in 2013 connecting with younger audiences, and, in 2016, the coup of taking The Great British Bake Off from its home at the BBC.

1 BIG BAKE OFF BIG CHANGE

Nobody 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 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.

Jay Hunt (Adam Lawrence/Channel 4)

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 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 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.

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 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.

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 som...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Big Bake Off Big Change
• 2 No Escape from Big Brother’s Embrace Yet
• 3 Radio Adventure
• 4 The Rise of Fixed-rigs 2007–11
• 5 Channel 4’s Online Adventures 2007–10
• 6 Andy Duncan Sacking. Luke Johnson Overruled
• 7 David Abraham
• 8 Channel 4 Import after Chucking out the Chintz, and Bidding for Channel 5
• 9 The Challenge as Abraham Picks Jay
• 10 Jay Hunt in Charge
• 11 Attack the Hunt – Advertising Revolt Quelled
• 12 Gogglebox
• 13 Paralympics
• 14 Racing
• 15 How 4oD Became Smart
• 16 Drama To Impress
• 17 Comedy and No Black Mirror
• 18 Film 4 Starts to Add Up
• 19 News
• 20 Current Affairs and Documentaries
• 21 Privatisation
• 22 Big Break
• 23 Pandemic Crisis
• Conclusion: A Pirate Enterprise?
• Index
• eCopyright