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DEBUTS
JANUARY ...
Lisa Tarbuck challenged contestants to judge
each other Without
Prejudice ... couples exchanged partners and obscenities in equal
measure for Wife Swap ... and life behind bars was laid bare in
the brutal drama Buried.
FEBRUARY ...
20 Things to do Before You're 30 was
C4's latest youth comedy drama effort ... groundbreaking coverage of the
Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca was relayed in the nightly programme Hajj
- The Greatest Trip on Earth ... couples seeking to buy new properties
were the subjects of Relocation Relocation ... and 100 finalists
competed for the chance to sing on stage with the English National Opera
in Operatunity.
MARCH ...
Boys and Girls spectacularly failed
to re-define Saturday night live entertainment, leaving its creator, Chris
Evans, publicly contemplating life as a market trader ... one of the 20th
century's greatest scientific discoveries was re-told in the four-part
DNA: The Story of Life ... military feats were charted in Last
Missions Of WW2 ... The Clinic documented numerous encounters
with cosmetic surgery ... and joyless spoof game show The People's
Book of Records began.
APRIL ...
Matt James demonstrated provincial horticulture
in The City Gardener ... Eddie Izzard, Hugo Speer and Joanne Whalley
turned 40 in a glossy three-part adult drama ... Georgian Underworld
explored the often-grisly social history of the 1700s ... and Armando
Iannucci attempted a satirical reflection on daily events in Gash.
MAY ...
Marc Morris recounted the history of Britain's
fortifications in Castle ... and three families allowed a panel
of adolescents to resolve their domestic disputes in Trust Me, I'm
a Teenager.
JUNE ...
Grand Slam pitted TV quiz show veterans
in a contest to win £50,000 ... culinary etiquette was scrutinised
in The Dinner Party Inspectors ... Under The Knife With Miss
Evans boasted the titular urologist addressing delicate medical conditions
... Jon Snow put Tony Blair On Trial ... a competition was launched
to find Britain's Best Home ... and Bernard Manning took his stand-up
act to India in Bernard's Bombay Dream.
JULY ...
No 57: The History of a House traced
200 years of interior design ... the history of English fiction was profiled
in The Story of the Novel ... and Outside was a new late-night
strand for alternative, experimental films, drama and documentaries.
AUGUST ...
Recorded shortly before his death, Married
to Maggie: Denis Thatcher's Story featured the husband of the former
Prime Minister talking to daughter Carol in the only TV interview of his
life ... 30 GCSE students were put through four weeks of 1950s education
in That'll Teach
Em ... Some of My Best Friends Are ... featured celebrities
speaking about their personal faith ... families from opposing ends of
the social spectrum took turns in playing Masters and Servants ...
and The Big Monster Dig excavated prehistoric animal remains across
Britain.
SEPTEMBER ...
10 celebrities competed in The
Games, a week-long tournament of Olympic-style events ... the
discipline of free running was illustrated by a team of French athletes
leaping across the capital's rooftops in Jump London ... the clash
of Eastern and Western youth cultures formed the backdrop to drama Second
Generation ... yet another "dark" comedy, Peep Show,
turned up on Friday nights ... the full story of The First World War
was re-told in 10 parts ... the Archbishop of Canterbury aired his thoughts
on contemporary moral and spiritual matters in Conversations With Rowan
Williams ... and the relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown
was dramatised in The Deal.
OCTOBER ...
Hitler: The Rise of Evil starred Robert
Carlyle in the title role ... and Teen Big Brother: The Experiment
was pre-recorded, but boasted the first on-screen coupling in the series'
British history.
NOVEMBER ...
The science of the universe was explored in
The Theory of Everything ... Brits go to Hollywood charted
the fortunes of UK film stars in America ... famous episodes from classical
civilisation were recreated through computer effects in Ancient Egyptians
... celebrities were tricked into participating in bogus programmes in
the dreadful The Pilot Show ... and social history was the subject
of Seven Ages of Britain.
DECEMBER ...
Andrew O'Connor was behind the hapless Bedsitcom
which mixed reality television with scripted actuality.
FINALES
BROOKSIDE
After years of increasingly irrelevance, tawdry
storylines and a startlingly frenzied decline in the standard of acting
and production, the plug was finally pulled on Phil Redmond's soap. Once
groundbreaking, once even awe-inspiring, it had of late failed utterly
to demonstrate its relevance to Channel 4 and to show any potential for
improvement. Why it took so long to swing the axe is a mystery. Brookside
was always on a rolling 12-month contract and needn't have hung like an
albatross around the channel's neck for such a desperately long period,
getting kicked around the schedules like a deflated football from weekday
evenings to Saturday afternoons to, ultimately, the dumping ground of
late Tuesday nights. Perhaps nobody at C4 knew with what to replace it.
Perhaps the money that would be saved by giving it the chop wasn't in
such demand until now. The final episode went out on Tuesday 4 November.
A wretched piece of undignified cat-calling and self-indulgent score-settling,
it was a cardboard tombstone.
MISC ...
The third series of The
West Wing lasted three weeks at 8pm on Saturday nights, before
being dumped at 11pm on Mondays ... from Monday 17 March Channel 4
News introduced a new 12pm bulletin in anticipation of war in Iraq;
the programme then became a permanent fixture ... when conflict did break
out, another Channel 4 News bulletin was temporarily added to the
schedules between 7am and 8.10am ... elsewhere J'Accuse was revived
to complement the channel's war coverage, and Dispatches uncovered
links between Osama Bin Laden and various British organisations ... major
new productions of Twelfth Night and the modern opera The Death
of Klinghoffer were screened ... 4 Dance returned ... The
Salon threatened to become the channel's first never-ending reality
show ... Straw Dogs was shown on television for the first time
on Sunday 10 August ... the T4 strand expanded to run on both Saturday
as well as Sunday mornings from 13 September ... Hollyoaks ran
five nights a week from Monday 3 November ... and RI:SE
ended, virtually unnoticed, in December.
ON SCREEN
DERREN BROWN
By presuming to play Russian Roulette Live
on screen in October, Derren Brown vaulted himself up from the status
of talking point on broadsheet inside pages to a front cover tabloid obsession.
Despite the man's continual protestations he was not some kind of irresponsible
mystic, nor intent on glamorising gun culture, his "real time"
attempt to avoid not getting a bullet in his own skull stirred up a classic
Channel 4 controversy. Allegations the programme was rigged and the finale
botched mingled with genuine complaints the stunt was "distasteful,
trivialised suicide, promoted guns and would encourage copycat incidents".
Ofcom later cleared C4 of all charges. Brown, meanwhile, went on to enjoy
an "enfant terrible" reputation far out of proportion to his
previously arch and subtle Mind Control series of comic misdirection.
GRAND DESIGNS
It would have seemed preposterous to Jeremy
Isaacs, and downright laughable to Michael Grade, that come the millennium
the main thing propping up Channel 4's peaktime weeknight schedule would
be joinery. Grand Designs had begun quietly in 1999 but, thanks
to charismatic host Kevin McCloud's sulphurous assessments of the show's
amateur housebuilders, coupled with strong narratives of success and failure,
had gone on to amass a huge following. By 2003 it was regularly one of
the most-watched programmes on the channel, had gained a spin-off magazine
and travelling roadshow, and helped create audiences for similarly-themed
efforts such as Property Ladder and Location, Location, Location.
Somehow the vagaries of real estate had become mainstream entertainment,
while - at a push - ticking public service boxes in Channel 4's charter
(well, educating the nation about dry rot). The bubble would soon burst
courtesy of too many crossover shows and "event" TV such as
Britain's Best Home, but for a while property programmes were the
very foundation for C4's existence.
OFF SCREEN
• When Countdown
was moved from 4.15pm to 3.15pm starting on Monday 15 September, questions
were asked in Parliament and petitions launched.
• The channel's annual share of viewers fell below 10% for the first
time in 12 years.
• Vanni Treves, only the channel's fourth chairman in its entire
history, stepped down at the end of the year.
• A major shake-up of staff saw Tim Gardam leave as Director of Programmes;
John McHugh and Danielle Lux quit the entertainment department; Kevin
Lygo and Andrew Newman defect from five to be C4 Director of Programmes
and Head of Entertainment respectively; and Ben Frow, responsible for
commissioning Jamie's Kitchen, How Clean is Your House?
and Location, Location, Location, went in the opposite direction
to five.
FOUR-WORDS
"It was a big brave choice that didn't
work. I don't know how you experiment without making mistakes."
- Mark Thompson on Boys and Girls
"When I arrived here, half our ratings
came from US shows and Brookside. It's now 20%."
- Tim Gardam on handing over to Kevin
Lygo
"I couldn't pass up the chance to return
to Channel 4. The combination of a bigger programme budget and the channel's
remit to cause trouble and to innovate represents a unique opportunity
for a controller."
- Kevin Lygo on taking over from Tim
Gardam
"What other television channel would
try a completely untested live programme, strip it all the way through
an autumn week at nine at night, plus 6pm and 11pm slots? It's a genuinely
pretty potty piece of television."
- Mark Thompson on The Games
MY FAVOURITE CHANNEL 4 MOMENT ...
ALT. TV: THIS IS A TRUE
STORY (2003)
Channel 4 for me has always worked best at
the margins: at the edges of the property shows, dating games, imports,
landmark dramas, chat shows and sitcoms, those quiet moments of magic
which throw light on some unheralded part of life or the world.
This was one of the most beautiful documentaries
it has ever funded. The filmmakers, led by Paul Berczeller, wanted to
investigate an urban myth surrounding the death of a young Japanese woman
in North Dakota. So the story went, after watching the Coen Brother's
Oscar winning film Fargo, Takako Konishi had travelled to the state
capital, Bismarck, searching for the unclaimed money which had been buried
by Steve Buscemi's character in the film - despite protestations of the
town's people the movie was a fiction, and despite what the Coens had
mischievously written in the opening caption card of the film (giving
this documentary its title). Sadly, she was later found dead in some woods
across the state line in Minnesota.
In reconstructing the final days of this mysterious
girl, Berczeller was inspired by La Jetée, Chris Marker's
1964 film about time travel (later remade by Terry Gilliam as Twelve
Monkeys) which told its story entirely in still frames. He also took
a music promoter, Mimi, who had more than a passing resemblance to the
student who he had stand in the same wintry landscape as the dead girl,
and in photographs with the very townspeople who had originally interacted
with Takoko.
The result was a documentary filled with a
range of atmospheric and importantly memorable images, besides being as
solid a piece of journalism as anything you might find in primetime or
with three times the duration on the big screen. It uncovered the truth
behind what turned out to be a tragic urban myth, but in a way that gave
Takoko back her dignity, revealing beneath it all there was a once happy
girl who was handed one of life's knocks, and couldn't cope. I can't imagine
there are many of us who haven't felt the same way.
- Stuart Ian Burns
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