History Box: Channel Four 15/8/90

CHANNEL FOUR: 15 AUGUST 1990

Let’s take a look at Channel Four in its relative infancy. Not the very earliest days when it resembled US public access, but before the Broadcasting Act 1990 came into effect and it was still run by the ITA and didn’t sell its own advertising. Wednesday, August the 15th, 1990: Two years into the reign of Michael Grade, still alternative but a little more relaxed about it, to the extent that people actually started watching it, deliberately even. He still shouldn’t have axed After Dark, though. This is a Channel Four evolving past its low-budget minority origins and embracing, to some extent, the mainstream - but which still showed programmes about Egyptian writers at prime time.

The day begins with something called Noah’s Ark, which seems to be an umbrella name for some bought-in nature documentaries, probably stock footage-based, and most likely just the kind of soothing viewing you need if you’re getting up at that time of day. Today, Chungará Lake in Chile, very beautiful if somewhat desolate with all that volcanic rock, and the animals you might find there. Which means flamingos, mostly, and also some frogs. Maybe the odd Andean fox and vicuña.

So that’s a nice and pastoral way to take your coffee and get dressed, but only for twenty minutes because after that is Business Daily with the young Dermot Murnaghan sternly listing stock numbers and takeover bids. Why this one iteration is on separately is unclear; apparently it’s extremely important that the Channel Four Daily starts at 6.30 on the dot.

Which it does! Not that anyone really notices; vanishingly few people watched the Channel Four Daily deliberately. It never quite got to the point of nearly rating zero, like the original TV-am, but that’s not exactly a bar. The Daily was essentially created because breakfast television was a full-fledged thing by now so it just seemed like the thing to do, whether they had any actual ideas for it or not. It initially consisted of a loose affiliation of news and features, all as separate programmes, which meant little or no cohesion and nothing for the viewer to hold onto throughout the morning. By this point, that had changed somewhat: they’d brought the whole thing into a single glass-panelled studio, made the individual programmes into something closer to “strands” and sliced off half an hour (hence Noah’s Ark and Business Daily). It worked better, but still felt somewhat superfluous with the BBC providing hard news and TV-am the entertainment fluff - even if the Daily did both better. I’m not saying it did, I just remember being bored by it at the age of six, but it might well have done. Either way no-one watched it and it was replaced with its almost complete opposite after three and a half years. Which is longer than RISE lasted. It was better, too. I can be certain of that.

As if to confirm the theory that Channel Four were only up that early because they felt they had to be, almost the entire rest of the morning is taken up by the legendary Art of Landscape. (Of course, the real reason is that it’s the summer holidays so there’s no Schools programmes.) If one programme defines the station in 1990, it’s probably Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out, but this is in the conversation. If you’re not familiar, it’s an hour and a half of picturesque nature footage accompanied by ambient and classical music without commercial interruption, kindly donated for the purpose by the Landscape Channel - which consists of the same thing all day forever.

The day starts in earnest, as it were, at eleven o’clock with As It Happens. This, as the title suggests, was a live OB show in which the likes of Andy Kershaw, Michael Groth and Victoria Studd stood around places where things were expected to happen and waited for them to do so, like Austin Tasseltine at a filling station. I don’t think anything quite as exciting happened on this show, or it would be better remembered, but generally speaking things did indeed happen while the cameras were there, so that’s something. This week we’re at a car rally, a circus and a fire station, which strikes me as flirting with disaster, or at least bad taste.

After that, Off the Page, a documentary strand-type-thing about writers, and a reminder of the days when Channel Four would give half an hour to an eminent immunologist and world-renowned poet. Even at 12 noon.

Business Daily pops up one more time like a rash at 12.30 for its main half-hour bulletin, after which Dermot Murnaghan can grab a quick cheese sandwich and a nap. After that, it’s Sesame Street time, horse dogg maniac! After close to twenty years of faffing about, Channel Four finally found a perfect slot for it, at lunchtime every weekday, for a full hour without commercial interruption, for 13 years before they apparently got bored, moved it around and finally kicked it to the kerb, to an ultimate and pretty heavy net loss to themselves and the nation.

At two, RETURN TO NURSING. An epic story of no it’s just some adult education. We appear to have been running low on nurses in 1990 - naturally I blame Thatcher, but it probably really was her fault. This was part of a campaign, including a set of courses, intended to encourage departed former Angels back into the fold. They probably quit because it was becoming increasingly stressful and thankless, but there don’t seem to be any reassurances about that having changed.

Followed by The World At Your Feet. A travelogue series, specifically about Dame Virginia McKenna hiking through the Himalayas. Today she finishes the walk with the help of Michael Green (not the Carlton one) and composer Naresh Sohal.

That takes us to 3.30, when Children’s programming starts to rear its head, so the perfect time for the obligatory obscure Czechoslovakian animation. This one’s by Jan Iván, it’s called Hamster Affair and sadly I haven’t been able to find it online, just its entry on the National Czech Film Archive. “When the pupil Honzátko brings home a hamster, he has no idea what he will cause” is its summary. It’s from 1987, so it’s probably not too Worker and Parasite.

After that, Oprah! Affording us all a glimpse into contemporary American culture and NTSC transfer. As a kid I had an image of America as being full of slightly blurred people in flat beige rooms talking earnestly because of programmes like that, and probably also my parents’ Callanetics video. Today she’s talking to Bob “What The Hell Am I Doing On Channel Four” Hope. Oprah ran on Channel Four from 1998 until they tired of it around 1995 and let the BBC (and Sky) take it on, whereupon they replaced her with Rikki Lake (about whom I will hear no bad said - she just had her house burn to the ground, for Christ’s sake. For the second time in her life).

At half past four, Countdown! No more need be said, except that this is the timeslot and length at which it belongs. Half an hour just before tea. Who even hosts it now? Colin Murray? Fair enough, works for me. Personally I think Countdown were the real victims of Richard Keys’ misogynistic outburst. Jeff Stelling was perfect.

At five, a programme for deaf and hard of hearing kiddiwinks called Storywheel. A sort of super-concentrated Jackanory with sign language. Four stories in half an hour, so it’s value for money. Not that they charge. Even better value! Repeated on Sunday morning, which is where these explicitly minority aimed programmes tended to go, on all four channels, because the ratings in that slot literally don’t matter.

At five-thirty, Flight Over Spain. Yet more traveloguing and narrated nature footage. This is literally what it sounds like, views of Spain from above with music by Jamie Perez and plum-voiced narration from some jobbing voiceover artist. Hard to see it as anything but filler, despite the fact that it’s airing, if not in prime time, then sufficiently near to it that people might be expected to watch. Then again, this slot contains Neighbours on BBC1, then at the height of its powers, so you can’t blame Channel Four for essentially giving up.

At six, yet another travelogue. This time it’s Leontyne, the story of a trip by barge from London to Vienna taken by film producer Richard Goodwin and boatly type Ray Julian. Today they finally reach Vienna and, being a movie person, play tribute to the Third Man.

After that, a bought-in American sitcom which frankly at this point makes a change from more glorious scenery and occasional backpacking rich folk. It’s A DIfferent World, the Cosby Show spin-off! Although its Cosby connections were largely moot by now after Lisa Bonet got pregnant and Cosby ordered her fired. We didn’t know he was a shuddering horror of a human being at that time, and indeed The Cosby Show was one of Channel Four’s most popular programmes, hence their being in for A Different World too. That one didn’t catch on the same, however. Today the successor lead character teaches ballet in the ghetto. May or may not be “Very Special”.

That takes us into Channel Four News, mostly watched by people who came home too late to catch the Six on BBC1, followed by the ten minute comment slot where members of the public were invited to point camcorders at themselves and bellow down the lens. At least this being Channel Four means some of them may have been relatively progressive.

After that, of course, is Brookside! Gritty Scouse soap opera that I actually kind of miss, despite never having watched it. Not sure why. Maybe it’s because without it, Channel Four’s only other soap is Hollyoaks, and they don’t even show that anymore on the actual telly. Anyway, today Billy and Sheila are enjoying their honeymoon (albeit at home), which means something terrible is about to happen.

Into prime time, for what it’s worth, with Europe Express. Europe was on everyone’s minds at the time because of the impending transformation of the EEC into the EU, after which as we all know the UK never made a single decision of their own ever again and every subsequent Prime Minister was literally whipped with a birch into following the orders of Jacques Delors, until we won our freedom in 2016 and everything has been perfect ever since. ANYWAY this was basically a round up of current affairs in Europe presented by various young journalists from various countries with various degrees of comprehensibility.

At nine, the peak of prime time: Rear Window. No, not Hitchcock. This is a heavy-duty documentary strand run by no less than Tariq Ali - the hard-left author and activist who would never be allowed anywhere near the back end of a TV camera in this day and age, no matter that he basically predicted the world we’re in today (cf The Radical Centre: A Warning). Rear Window covered politics, the arts and their intersection, and unsurprisingly usually did it from a left wing and/or Asian point of view. And they came in double bills. This episode has a profile of the Egyptian author Gamal el Ghitani, followed by an experimental student film about women in Islam. At 9pm on a weekday. Admittedly, it’s August, the ratings low point of the year, but still.

At a quarter to ten, something called He-Play: a showcase for new male writers who are men with cocks and balls and things. There were three runs of this, actually, starting the careers of…nothing and no-one. Alright, there’s one: Niall Leonard, who went on to be a utility script man with credits on the likes of Pie in the Sky, Casualty, Silent Witness, Monarch of the Glen, and the latter two Fifty Shades films - which seems a little out of leftfield until you realise that his TV CV was less of a qualification than his being married to Erika Mitchell herself. Anyway, today’s episode is by Paul Goetzee, who never wrote for television again but has a thick CV in the theatre, and stars that twat with the scratched table from the Yellow Pages advert. He also appeared in Press Gang, which is my excuse to bring up the fact that this first run also starred Dexter Fletcher and Julia Sawalha, but sadly not in the same play.

Ten o’clock is movie time! Well, TV-movie time. Inevitably William Devane is in it. Surprisingly Angie Dickinson isn’t. Instead it’s Jennifer O’Neill, who is the victim of a sexual assault but, as the advertisement put it, “she recovered. Her husband didn’t.” Already a bit yikesy, even without giving it the title “The Other Victim”. And lines like “that man took something that was mine”. Anyway, Devane proceeds to go full Paul Kersey, but it all works out in the end, although he doesn’t seem to learn any great lesson about his wife’s semiautonomous humanity or capacity to suffer. Hey, it’s on YouTube if you’re that interested.

That takes us up to the fairly wee small hour of ten to midnight, and An Evening With Raj Kumari. Not the rapper, the playback singer she may well have named herself after. Rajkumari Dubey, all told. If a singing voice in a Bollywood movie wasn’t Asha Bhosle, it was probably her. In this programme, probably made for Indian television, she steps out from behind the curtain and performs some of her most popular charts.

The day ends with another film, the Australian documentary How the West Was Lost. The TV Times listing generalises it somewhat - it’s about a specific incident in 1946, the Pibara strike. Over 800 indigenous workers on pastoral stations - shepherds and the like - walked off as one. I say “shepherds”, that’s what their job would have been if it counted as a job, with dignity and such, but in actuality they were basically slaves. They were whipped if they tried to protest and hunted down like dogs if they ran; basically the one thing separating it from actual slavery is that they were paid. In tobacco, flour and lint. And they weren’t considered to have enough value to be chattel. Hence walking off one day in 1946 and not coming back. Here’s a documentary about that bag of funnies, after which Channel Four closes down to let you THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU’VE DONE.

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