When David Abraham was turned down by Middlesex Polytechnic for a documentary-making course, after he completed his degree in History at Magdalen, he thought he would never make it in the world of television. Now the CEO of Channel 4, he keeps a copy of the rejection letter framed in his bathroom.
Channel 4 is famously irreverent in its output, and has courted controversy from broadcasting the first lesbian kiss on primetime British TV in 1993, to the debate surrounding the documentary Big Fat Gypsy Weddings, which was dropped in April this year. Publically owned but financially self-sufficient, the 2003 Communications Act states that Channel 4 should “demonstrate innovation, experiment and creativity in the form and content of programs”, “appeal to the tastes and interests of a culturally diverse society” and “include programs of an educational nature”. The most popular shows since the channel’s inception are Big Brother, Friends, Big Fat Gypsy Weddings and The Grand National. I asked Abraham whether this “tabloid television” was sticking to the Channel’s remit. Abraham strongly challenged this view: “I would refute the suggestion that there is any ‘tabloid television’ on Channel 4. Big Brother ended on the show four years ago, and we’ve rebuilt our channel with brilliant shows like Educating Yorkshire, Educating Essex and fantastic drama like Babylon and Indian Summers. Some people like to come up with that comment but it’s absolutely not the case about our schedule currently”. But, he concedes “we must do shows that are appealing to a broad audience, so that they can generate significant advertising revenue to then pay for things like Dispatches, investigative pieces, or arts shows”.
He cites Channel 4‘s considerable educative output – like Grayson Perry’s BAFTA Award Winning Who are You?(“Two words sum this up – original and outstanding.”- RTS website), or Life From Space (“Probably one of the most ambitious live programs ever made.”- RTS website) that won a Royal Television Society Award for Excellence. Channel 4, Abraham argues, is unfairly criticised, “There’s a balance in the schedule, but often critics want to have it both ways”. They “demand that we should be running wall to wall Open University programmes, but they also want us to be commercially self-sufficient”.
Anyone paying attention to the debacles and controversies of the management of the BBC in the last five years will understand the mire that can surround Public Service Broadcasters and their funding. When it was suggested that BBC should share license fee proceeds with other broadcasters, Abraham was reported as saying he would rather act “with utter impunity” than receive the money. I asked him why Channel 4 turned down this possibility of public funding, and whether he thought the BBC was constrained with what it could produce/report on: “I’m not suggesting that the BBC allows itself to be directly influenced by the government, but it must constantly justify itself to parliament (…) we (a) are smaller and (b) we have a remit that encourages risk taking and are expected to be iconoclastic, that is part of our tradition. By the time I got here that idea (receiving “top slice” funding from the BBC) had run its course: we decided that we had to cut our cloth according to our means”.
Abraham eschews public funding, but believes that private pay platforms (Sky, Virgin etc) should pay Channel 4 for including 4’s channels as part of their service. He first made this argument last year in the James McTaggert Memorial Lecture, a speech delivered annually at the Edinburgh International Television Festival. The speech provoked much furore. Sky spokesman Graham McWilliam, claimed that Channel 4 was calling for a subsidy to compensate for the channel’s “declining performance” and “this would amount to a discriminatory tax on millions of licence fee paying viewers to watch public service content that should be free”.
I put McWilliam’s criticisms to Abraham. He replied that McWilliam was Sky’s “corporate spin-meister” and that Channel 4 was only asking for a fair deal. “It’s a pretty outrageous thing to say….our revenues are approaching record levels last year and this year. We’re spending more on UK originating content than we’ve ever done before, winning more awards and more Oscars…. So I won’t take that too seriously.” “The more substantive point” Abraham continues, is that “more than half the viewing on pay platforms is to public service channels, so if one imagined a world where the public channels were not available on pay platforms, the subscribers would be hugely inconvenienced …. Indeed it’s easy to demonstrate that a number of them would not be willing to pay £40/50 per month without the public channels.” He believes that the value that Channel 4, BBC and other PSBs provide to private pay platforms should be recognised, as it is in other countries: “it’s an argument about fair value exchange between public broadcasters and private companies that are profiting from the availability of these channels for free.”
Channel 4’s content is diverse, ranging from Indian Summers (a show in the finest traditions of BBC Sunday Night Drama) to its Alternative Christmas Message. Given the number of its shows aimed at a younger demographic, and its recent ethnic minorities election debate in the wake of UKIP’s rising popularity, I asked Abraham if Channel 4 saw itself as catering to a more diverse audience than other PSBs. “With regards to young people, E4 has by far the biggest share of 16-24 year olds of digital channels, and a serious documentary on Channel 4 will typically get more views among young people than on BBC and ITV.” In terms of ethnicity Abraham argues that “Channel 4 News has a higher proportion of BAME views than other channels.” Channel 4 traditionally sees itself as the channel of diversity, broadcasting the first black sitcom, the first lesbian kiss, the first disabled and transgender mainstream entertainment shows, and in 2012 it broadcast the Paralympics. The comedian and activist Lenny Henry has argued that a separate fund should be set aside to boost the presence of BAME participants in broadcasting (in a 2014 BAFTA lecture).
I asked Abraham about representation of minorities in Channel 4. “We keep a very close eye on representation across the board, both on screen as well as behind the camera for the production”, he replied. Abraham tells me about the “joined up thinking” that goes on within broadcasters “If you want to change the whole industry, you have to look at it on a genre by genre basis. What matters in investigative journalism will differ from what matters in drama, so we have given ourselves fresh targets on what we can do with each of those genres every three to five years.” Abraham believes that it is equally important for Channel 4 to be diverse in terms of region- “in shows like Gogglebox you can see that we are around the country no particular bias to the south or the north- we represent all voices”.
I’m sure that many of you dear students are familiar with the channel’s online offering All Four, having spent too much of your time watching Raised by Wolves instead of doing that vital essay. You are not alone. According to Abraham, half of all 16-24 year olds in the UK are registered on All Four. All Four can be said to be part of Channel 4’s data strategy: monitoring user profiles and looking at their preferences. In his McTaggert lecture Abraham claimed that “A TV channel without a data strategy is like a submarine without sonar”. Abraham oversaw the introduction of “All Four”, which keeps track of the viewing experience. He explains “what was initially the catch up experience is now a whole range of experiences: live TV, catch up, ‘what’s next?’” What’s become clear in our interview is that for Abraham, innovation and creativity must always be supported by Channel 4’s independence and commercial viability.
There has been much concern in some quarters as to what a publically owned but commercially funded BBC might look like if the licence fee is abolished. The experience of Channel 4 might suggest we do not have too much to fear.
