Established by Margaret Thatcher to shake up telly, over almost 40 years Channel 4 has been doing just that. As the prospect of privatisation looms, here are some of its most talked-about moments, from Brass Eye to Big Brother
When Channel 4 launched at 4.45pm on Tuesday 2 November 1982, Nancy Banks-Smith in the Guardian worried that some of the programmes were “trendy enough to make the teeth peel”. Yet Channel 4 wasn’t designed to be trendy. It was established by Margaret Thatcher to shake up telly and, in particular, nobble the BBC. She even contemplated TV sets that could only broadcast ITV and Channel 4. “If she hadn’t hated the BBC so much,” said the TV producer Stewart Mackinnon, “she would not have created Channel 4. But she did.”
Like many a Thatcher’s child, Channel 4 went rogue. After a sedate debut in the form of the gameshow Countdown – still going strong 7,500 episodes later, with a new host, Anne Robinson – it was soon effing and jeffing, going cold turkey and staying up late watching mucky foreign films. In the light of all this, the only surprising thing about the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, dangling the possibility of Channel 4 being privatised is that it has taken the Tories so long to get round to taking it down.
