MediaGuardian Comment: In praise of ... digital television
BBC Four may now be rivalling Men & Motors (in numbers at least if not target audience), but have things really changed since Janice Hadlow took over as BBC Four controller? More4 has been reasonably successful for Channel 4 even if the slightly ambiguous "adult entertainment" slogan turned out to be porn of a different kind - property porn.
By contrast, BBC Four got off to a slow start for exactly the same reasons that plagued BBC2's launch in 1964, even though its potential audience was much greater than its 1964 counterpart. It seems that anything with an upmarket remit is less likely to hit the ground running with a large audience, though its launch night was admittedly pretty heavy going in places.
Although BBC Four has continued to prosper under Janice Hadlow, we shouldn't underestimate the groundwork that Roly Keating established for the channel. Indeed during the Keating era there were several instances of 'event'-based television and a similar use of archive footage (under the Time Shift banner) that is also credited for the channel's popularity today.
One subtle but interesting difference worth noting between BBC Four in 2002 and the same channel today relates to the idents. The channel launched with computer-generated patterns of spikes or lines that pulsated in time to the accompanying soundtrack; some critics thought of this as being just "a fancy screensaver" but the idea was very distinctive and different.
Today's BBC Four idents by comparison are very mainstream despite their intellectual pretensions ("Wow! Books!"); they're not too dissimilar to ITV4's current optical illusion idents which isn't too surprising given the fact that Red Bee Media conceived and created both sets of idents.
But these 'average' idents have perhaps helped BBC Four to gain the image of being a more 'average' channel as a consequence; something that is less elitist yet still with higher ideals, but the exact significance of this in terms of perceived image is perhaps more difficult to quantify, though it appears to have influenced the opinions of media journalists.
