DEBUTS
JANUARY ...
Dudley Moore teamed up with veteran conductor
Sir Georg Solti to investigate the history of the Orchestra! ... Remote
Control found hapless students being challenged on their knowledge
of pop culture by Tony Wilson and Frank Sidebottom ... while alternative lifestyles
were analysed in The New Age.
FEBRUARY ...
Amateur films were aired in the open access
topical magazine series Free For All ... and The Black Bag investigated
issues within the Asian community.
MARCH ...
Straightforward horticultural tips were dispensed
in Garden Club ... while a rather more eclectic style of learning was
practiced in Gazza's Soccer School.
APRIL ...
The world of the private investigator was uncovered
in Watching the Detectives ... and ENG dramatised life in a
fictional Canadian news TV station.
MAY ...
Laurie Pike introduced Manhattan Cable ... Friday
at the Dome featured alternative comedy and music ... British viewers
had their first experience of Kabaddi ... while Alex Langdon starred
as the eponymous Teenage Health Freak.
JUNE ...
Alan Bleasdale's GBH
began ... as did Family Pride, which examined life in three contrasting
Birmingham families.
AUGUST ...
Frank Skinner, Jenny Eclair and Henry
Normal wrote and starred in Packet of Three ... superior US comedy
Dream On debuted ... showbiz news and gossip were the ingredients of
sixthirtysomething ... and wheelchair basketball was featured in The
Big 8.
SEPTEMBER ...
Classic Cars surveyed historic motors ... Jools
Holland hosted music and stand-up cabaret The Happening ... while Paul
Merton - The Series premiered.
OCTOBER ...
Magazine series South presented the
work of filmmakers from the southern hemisphere ... and Laurie Pike invited
assorted celebrities to man the phones in Ring My Bell.
NOVEMBER ...
Tony Slattery and Mike McShane failed to make
a virtue of the fact they were making it up as they went along in S
& M ... while the highly-acclaimed Secret History kicked off its
re-examination of crucial controversies from the past.
FINALES
BANNED
Channel 4's three-week Banned season
in April 1991 almost never made it to screen at all. Comprising numerous
programmes and films tackling TV taboos, Banned had been conceived
not just as a showcase for notorious topics but also as a larger statement
about the censorship of broadcasting in the 1990s. The contents of the
season, however, provoked discord amongst C4's management team, the chief
concern being whether the message would be lost amidst inevitable press
controversy and potential legal fallout. So while Scum, Monty
Python's Life of Brian and Sebastiane were all transmitted,
Jo Menell's explicit film Dick was axed, Sex in Our Time
had a short sequence of gynaecological photographs cut, while WR: Mysteries
of the Organism had footage of intercourse layered with computer generated
goldfish, starbursts and rainbows. Moreover, the resultant publicity did
indeed overshadow more sobering items - such as the broadcast of an episode
of Secret Society police had previously confiscated from the BBC's
offices - and Scotland Yard's Obscene Publications Squad made headlines
when they threatened the channel with prosecution. Veneration eventually
came in the shape of an International Emmy for the film Damned in the
USA, but that itself had been at the centre of a $6m lawsuit which
it took C4 months to fight and ultimately win. Banned proved many
points, but was a venture that could never be repeated.
MISC ...
Michael Palin compèred 1001 Nights of
TV on New Year's Day ... special late night editions of Channel
Four News and early morning simulcasts from CNN were scheduled to
cover the Gulf War ... Frederick Wiseman's six and a half hour documentary
Near Death on life in a Boston intensive care unit was broadcast
in full on 30 March ... Tim Brooke-Taylor and Lisa Aziz hosted pilot quiz
show QD - The Master Game comprising mental and physical challenges
and which ran for five nights from 29 July ... the theme night returned
to C4 in the shape of A Night in Japan from 8pm to 6am on 14 September
... and Raymond Briggs' new cartoon Father Christmas premiered
on 24 December.
ON SCREEN
LAURIE PIKE
A native Long Islander and seasoned US TV reporter,
Laurie Pike became an unlikely C4 face in 1991 thanks to two short-lived
albeit highly influential productions. First came Manhattan Cable.
Together with co-host Bill Judkins, Pike introduced a selection of clips
from public access TV in New York. The random nature of the extracts usually
meant there was something memorable in store, be it Taxi Talk,
The Eric in His Underwear Show, Sing-A-Long-A-Lithuanian,
or Voyeur Vision in which a half-naked woman invited viewers to
phone in a fantasy for her to fulfil. The show also effectively profiled
and popularised a culture and industry unknown and alien to British viewers.
Later in the year, however, came Ring My Bell. Now on her own,
Pike introduced a number of deliberately controversial celebrity guests,
sat them in their own booth replete with a telephone, and invited viewers
to call them up. Remembered fondly in hindsight, and pioneering in its
crude "interactivity", at the time Ring My Bell was a
bit too disorganised for its own good. Laurie Pike made the most of it,
though - and got herself, the shows and C4 noticed.
GBH
Remembering Michael Grade's defence of his
work at the BBC, in particular The
Monocled Mutineer, Alan Bleasdale had been keen to engage the
new boss of Channel 4 to realise his latest creation. Grade in turn ensured
GBH would receive the largest ever budget allotted to a one-off
drama series, and made it the centrepiece of his 1991 schedules. The results
were breathtaking. There's a case to be made for GBH being the
best stand-alone production ever screened on Channel 4. It certainly gave
the network the kind of high-profile appointment viewing it had been lacking
for years. Its heady confection of tragedy, farce, passion and madness
was blessed with a superlative cast headed by Robert Lindsay, Michael
Palin, Julie Walters and Lindsay Duncan. Bleasdale himself described GBH
as, "one caring, liberal madman's odyssey through the vagaries of
life in Great Britain in the early nineties, trying to make some sense
of the place." But the finished product also captured one of those
rare moments when a writer, a director, a producer and a team of actors
all reach the creative and artistic peak of their professions at exactly
the same moment. The scope and scale of the piece were overwhelming, while
its cumulative impact and emotional power still defies adequate qualification.
As TV critic Patrick Stoddart concluded, "Words will never do GBH
justice."
OFF SCREEN
In August it was revealed that Channel 4
had lost £5m in the collapse of BCCI.
Viscount Whitelaw, the Tory minister who had overseen C4's birth,
unveiled a commemorative plaque in September to mark the start of work
on the channel's new headquarters, designed by Richard Rogers, in Horseferry
Road, London.
The press had a field day in October when it was announced that
Michael Grade had been paid half a million pounds to stay at C4 for the
next five years.
FOUR-WORDS
"Michael Grade was a great champion of
individual writers and their work. His style of patronage was definitely
in the Theseus mould. He never read scripts or asked questions about casting.
At my first meeting with him, he explained his approach: 'It's very simple,
Peter. If I see real enthusiasm for a project in your eyes, I'll give
you the money. If I don't, I won't.' He stuck to the bargain."
- Peter Ansorge, C4 Commissioning Editor for Drama
"The thrill of a great live gig, shoulder
to shoulder with dried sweat, matted hair and body odour. Trainers soaking
in puddles of piss. Twenty pound T-shirts that turn into confettit as
soon as you put them on. The distorted belch from the stage which loses
your interest sometime after the third number. A horrow show featuring
unsympathetically presented bands and presentation."
- Martin Cunning, journalist, on Friday at the Dome
"You cannot legislate for popular taste.
Schemes that bind Channel 4 to a certain view of the world or its audience
will end merely by tying the channel to its own past. No set of public
injunctions can ever encourage people to do more than get up every morning
and ask: what will be important for people in a year's time? Or in two
years' time? What will they want?"
- Nicholas Fraser, C4 Commissioning Editor for Religion, Talks and European Projects
MY FAVOURITE CHANNEL 4 MOMENT ...
THE CRYSTAL MAZE (1990)
Think of Channel 4's past and you can't help
but think of long cozy winter evenings with Ted Danson, Roseanne Barr
and Clive Anderson. But if there's one particular moment that sticks in
my mind, it's a particular episode of The Media Show. With the
supply/demand curve of entertainment news proving how devalued some topics
have become recently, it's difficult to imagine a time when a serious
analytical look at the media was actually quite novel - with perhaps the
exceptions of stablemate show Raymond Snoddy's Hard News and the
"why is this still going?" What the Papers Say.
And so it came to pass that a certain 16-year-old
school boy was passing the time watching Emma Freud wistfully, when a
report on a new trend of large-scale game shows came on the screen. There
were the usual Tarrant-style clips of wacky Germans flying across a swimming
pool using oversized butterfly wings, but there was also a location report
from the set of a new show called The Crystal Maze. It looked big.
It looked cool. I wanted to be there.
When the actual Maze series was broadcast
a few months later, it wasn't quite what I'd expected. The concentration
on lots of small "room games" rather than the larger inter-zone
excursions was a surprise - a nice one - and as I went to bed that first
night I sensed ideas popping into my head for similar challenges. On the
first show of the next series, my first Crystal Maze game was broadcast.
If it wasn't for that Media Show report,
my media career wouldn't have started ... and I'd be writing this article
about Chip's Comic instead.
- David J Bodycombe
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