After the party
The caterer's revenge
Charles Allen's MacTaggart Lecture at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival was either judged a 'success' or 'failure' depending on the person you spoke to afterwards, but two facts have emerged from this get-together that seem abundantly clear.
Firstly, broadcasters other than the BBC tend to dislike each other if they have an element of public funding, therefore it's easy to get a proportion of the audience on your side if you throw anti-BBC "monopoly" and/or anti-Channel 4 "too successful" sentiments into a speech, and it's even better if nobody can ask you questions immediately afterwards.
Channel 4 hates the BBC for having a secure source of effectively private funding, and BSkyB hates the BBC for the same reasons plus (at least) Dawn Airey hates Channel 4 for being too successful therefore it ought to be privatised.
Broadcasters that lack programmes and/or audience (especially ITV and BSkyB) tend to blame anything with a public service remit for 'distorting the(ir) market' or alternatively for somehow crippling the private sector despite the fact that nobody could name a single small company that has gone bust as a result of the BBC's internet presence.
Secondly, the British seem to love losers and hate winners. Sometimes this attitude is justified, but Charles Allen's speech fully exploited this loophole to deflect the debate away from the issue of ITV's relatively poor performance; it also helped that 'media types' tend to think collectively even if their broadcasters have different remits.
It's frustrating that there wasn't the opportunity to pull the factual content of Allen's speech apart at the time, since it was full of contradictions and factually unsound in places. Just like ITV's current programming, the speech was slickly packaged but contained as much accuracy and insight as one of Ant and Dec's jokes. (That is if you can call them jokes.)
However one thing is true: Channel 4 is now far more 'commercial' than it was 20 years ago, even though on paper (at least) it seems to be still delivering a reasonably tight public service remit; the irony being that C4 is now stronger commercially than it ever was despite the recent availability of more channels, in contrast to ITV's ever-declining audience share for ITV1.
That's not to say that a less commercial Channel 4 wouldn't be welcome, though thankfully there has been a recent trend away from the blatant commercialism of the mid-1990s that resulted (amongst other things) in a subscription FilmFour channel eventually moving all the arthouse movies away from Channel 4 (despite claims otherwise).
If you doubt that there has been recent change in this area at Channel 4, consider the fact that the channel is actually going to cut back on the length of Big Brother next year; something that no other broadcaster (apart from perhaps the BBC) would even dare contemplate doing at present if in a similar position.
Now if ITV were ever to gain the rights to Big Brother...
