Britain’s Channel Four bold experiment

Press, 6 September 1982, Page 18

Britain’s Channel Four bold experiment

By

ALISON MAITLAND

of NZPA-Reuter

London Fifty years after Britain first experimented with television. viewers are in for another bold venture — a new channel devoted to the unconventional. The channel. Britain's fourth, will invite pressure groups to give their version of the news, show video films made by amateurs, commission original British movies and put a strong emphasis on minority interests.

Channel Four will go on the air on November 2, ending 18 years of domination by the British Broadcasting Corporation’s two channels and a third independent commercial channel. Parliament has decided that Channel Four must provide “a distinctive service" that is at once educational, entertaining and innovative. The man faced with this somewhat daunting task is the producer, Jeremy Isaacs, the channel’s chief executive. Mr Isaacs, 49, is well qualified for the job — he has produced the 8.8.C.’s best-known current affairs programme, “Panorama," made documentaries for New Zealand television and acted as independent television's Hollywood consultant.

He sees his new post as a challenge, believing Channel Four can succeed only if it keeps track of Britain's changing needs. “For example, there are more than three million unemployed and maybe that’s a number that will never come down again to levels we used to tolerate,” he says. “At some time society has to make up its mind to turn some of that unemployment into planned leisure. I think that in the long run that role, if we can begin to equip ourselves to fulfil it, will turn out to have been our real justification."

Channel Four’s educational programmes will be mainly

for adults and will include series on new technology, self-sufficiency and making the most of leisure. Mr Isaacs says he wants the new service to be both more serious and more populist than existing television.

It will cover news in greater depth, examining less-understood subjects like engineering, finance and science.

“It won't be about crime — except big cases — or about tiffs in the Royal Family,” he says. Once a week, pressure groups right across the political spectrum will be given a chance to comment on the channel’s news coverage and contribute their own account of events. In the search for new perspectives, a weekly cur-rent-affairs programme will be produced and presented entirely by women.

For the first time. too. black journalists will write and present a news, magazine for Britain’s two million citizens of West Indian, Indian or Pakistani origin. Young people, whose needs the Channel Four team considers to be inadequately met by existing television, will make a weekly programme on the latest in rock music, fashion, politics and sport. Channel Four will also be conscientiously cosmopolitan, doubling the number of foreign language films on British TV, increasing coverage of Asian, African and South American news and introducing sports like American football.

As an island people whose language, thanks to a once vast empire, is spoken by millions, the British are not good at listening to other people’s points of view, says Mr Isaacs.

“We know very little still about Europe, very little about the Third World and very little indeed about Latin America ... the Falklands drew attention again to a lack of knowledge of the

history of Latin America." he savs.

But if all this makes the channel sound like a panacea for the nation’s ills at a cost of $271 million — its budget next year — Mr Isaacs quicklv denies it.

"I take a very, very pessimistic view of television's ability to solve social problems." he says, adding that the most it can do is contribute to social well-being by satisfying certain human needs, such as the need for planned leisure and new skills.

Besides, he says, Channel Four has to make money. It is a subsidiary of the Gov-ernment-appointed Independent Broadcasting Authority (1.8. A. which chooses the commercial TV companies that operate in Britain's 14 regions.

Like these TV companies, the new channel will be answerable to the 1.8. A. and not to the advertisers. It will be financed by subscriptions from these companies, which in turn will be able to sell advertising on Channel Four programmes in their region. The new channel hopes to win a 10 per cent share of Britain’s estimated 45 million viewers as soon as possible. One big attraction before Christmas will be a film version of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s smash hit, “Nicholas Nickleby." which New Yorkers had to pay $lOO to see. But it is too early to know if the risks Channel Four is taking with its focus on the new and experimental will pay off. “There are banana skins on every square of pavement ahead." savs Mr Isaacs.