Was it really ten years ago today when at 6pm I watched a decidedly fuzzy picture of the (then massively popular) Spice Girls launching Channel 5? Indeed I was lucky that Channel 5 was available at all where I lived in the South of England, since transmitter coverage was initially very patchy and was especially the case in the South due to foreign stations restricting the coverage area.
The technical problems that prevented widespread terrestrial coverage were based on the fact that the UK transmitter network was originally designed for only four channels, therefore finding space for a fifth channel required a lot of ingenuity and clever technical planning to avoid interfering with other existing transmissions both in the UK and mainland Europe.
As with almost all channel launch nights, Channel 5's launch night bore no resemblance whatsoever to the regular schedules, and to begin with it adopted a classical "stripped and stranded" approach (like BBC2 before the arrival of David Attenborough) to the schedule, meaning that if you tuned in at a set time you were almost guaranteed to see the same programme or a film.
But unlike BBC2, Channel 5 initially concentrated on the bright, cheap and cheerful for its programming, whether it was the Night Fever karaoke orgy on Saturday nights, the 100% quiz shown on weekdays, imports such as Xena: Warrior Princess or even soft porn. The mandatory soap opera was Family Affairs which ran until 2005, but it was the news that really caused waves.
Kirsty Young became famous for her less formal approach to newsreading, and unsurprisingly the basic concept of sitting on the edge of the desk (as opposed to behind it) was promptly copied by virtually everybody else.
However despite all of the publicity, viewing figures remained small until Channel 5 became available on the Astra satellite, and terrestrial coverage slowly increased as well despite the technical difficulties. Channel 5's terrestrial coverage was further improved from 1998 onwards by the introduction of digital terrestrial television (now popularly known as Freeview).
Football matches helped to raise Channel 5's profile and finally gave it some respectable viewing figures, but for various reasons it never really took advantage of the decline of its major commercial rival ITV, effectively leaving Channel 4 to take up the slack whilst the ITV companies were preoccupied with buying each other and throwing out half its staff.
Channel 5 started life as a consortium that included what was United News and Media; UNM also owned the Anglia, HTV and Meridian ITV franchises for a while during this period, so unsurprisingly some programming that started life as regional ITV offerings inevitably ended up on Channel 5. (Or vice versa.)
Fast forward to the present day and it's the large media empire RTL that now owns Channel Five outright, though the channel is still predominantly noted for its imports (such as House, Prison Break and new arrival Shark) despite attempts to establish its own programmes, although the bright colours, karaoke and most of the soft porn was thrown out years ago as it moved upmarket.
The Milkshake! brand has done reasonably well in a crowded market for kids' TV, and very recently Channel Five somewhat belatedly launched the Five Life and Five US channels, therefore being the last of the terrestrial channels to adopt a multichannel strategy.
And although Channel Five itself is still stuck in fifth place in the terrestrial pecking order, it can still frequently outperform Sky One in the ratings even though its growth has recently stagnated courtesy of the growing multichannel competition from other sources. BSkyB could have bought the channel recently but for reasons only known to itself decided not to.
So Channel Five celebrates its tenth anniversary in reasonable health, but the Channel Five story is arguably just as much about lost opportunity as it is about creating the last UK national analogue terrestrial broadcaster.
