Channel 4’s Kevin Lygo

October 2007

By Anna Carugati

Back in 1982, long before
British viewers even knew what a remote control was, Channel 4 hit the British
TV scene with a fresh, sometimes irreverent, often innovative alternative to
the more traditional program offerings of the BBC and ITV. As Channel 4
celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, its director of television, Kevin
Lygo, looks back at the channel’s major accomplishments and the challenges it
faces in the future.

TV EUROPE: What impact has Channel 4 left on the television
landscape in the U.K.?

LYGO: We
initiated an independent production sector. Before Channel 4 started, there
really weren’t any independent producers in the U.K., and 25 years on you look
at the U.K. and its independent production sector is incredibly strong. Today
across the world you see British formats. So I think Channel 4 has done a
tremendous service.

There’s little doubt that
because a public-service ethos is at its heart, for 25 years, Channel 4 has
kept the BBC on its toes. Channel 4 has led the way in forming opinions, in
trying new formats, in inventing new types of television, and the BBC has
copied it on many occasions, as has ITV.

If you look at
public-service broadcasting in this country, Channel 4 plays a completely
vital, integral part alongside the BBC. And it does so because from the
beginning, with Jeremy Isaacs at its helm, it had these attitudes that were not
necessarily found in the BBC. Channel 4 was independent—independent of
government, independent of shareholders, independent of any particular group.
This gave it a buccaneering, entrepreneurial spirit that has been communicated
through its programs. And it’s not a coincidence that those attitudes were the
founding principles of most of the people setting up independent production
companies 25 years ago.

Our audience is younger
than other broadcasters and it is more up-market, and this is because we appeal
to…restless minds, the people who want to challenge the orthodox. And in many
ways its biggest single contribution has been in distilling an
attitude—primarily in factual programming, but also in drama and
comedy—of a challenger. Then, because it decided to champion the new and
the different, new on-screen and off-screen talent has always been at the
forefront. Jonathan Ross, Graham Norton, Ricky Gervais—all these people
started their careers at Channel 4. They knew Channel 4 would take the risk to
work with them when they were nobodies. Many, many more people—writers,
producers and directors—all got their break working at Channel 4 when no
one else would give them the job.

I would mention Film4 in
the same breath. Film4’s reputation is very strong as a maker of independent
films, largely British-based, but not parochial, such as Four Weddings and a
Funeral or Trainspotting and, this year, The Last King of Scotland. Kevin Macdonald, who directed The Last King of
Scotland, had made documentaries
for us. This was his first feature. We backed him and the script, and that’s
how it got made. Channel 4’s contribution to British film has been lasting, and
we continue to [back such projects].

TV EUROPE: Has
it been difficult for Channel 4 to remain true to its mission as competition in
the British TV market became more intense?

LYGO: Yes.
There’s no doubt it is harder now running Channel 4 than it ever has been. But
it was always its own biggest critic, and this restlessness, this search and
desire for the new all the time has always led to a constant soul-searching.
It’s extraordinary that in the past 10 to 12 years ITV and BBC’s audiences have
halved. BBC One and ITV used to have 40 percent of the viewing share and now
they are both at 20 percent. Fifteen years ago we were 10 percent, and today we
are 9.8 percent. We’ll always be on or about 10 percent. And that’s curious
because if we were only 10 percent [at the start] and we’re 10 percent now, we
must therefore be appealing to more people.

It’s never been conceived,
nor have I ever run it, as a channel that you would sit down at 6 o’clock and
stay with until you go to bed. You come in, you go out, you like this, you
don’t like that, and so on. It’s an eclectic mix of programs, but all united by
that sense of excellence. They share these attitudes: modern, contemporary,
iconoclastic. So where the BBC makes many, many programs about stately homes
and the histories of England, we’re about modern, contemporary society. Perhaps
nowhere is that reflected in entertainment terms more than Big Brother, which is the great polarizing program of our age.
In this country, you love it or you hate it, but whatever you think about it,
nothing has so dominated the headlines in terms of television programming in
the last seven years as has Big Brother. And this, for Channel 4, has been a good thing, because it’s made us
bigger, it’s made us more accessible to a wider group. It’s an extraordinary runaway hit. And
though it infuriates people as much as it delights them, it has ultimately been
a great asset to the channel.

TV EUROPE: This has been a tumultuous year for British tele­vision,
from the phone-in scandals to misleading editing in shows. Were there lessons
to be learned in the whole issue of viewer trust?

LYGO: Viewer
trust is vital. We’re slightly in the eye of the storm, and proportionality
seems to me an important thing to cling to here. Most of television—99
percent of it—is completely fine, enjoyed and trusted by audiences in
every way. When there are mistakes made, when things are wrong, when deception
takes place, or when in the keenest sense, like the phone-in shows, you enter a
competition that you couldn’t win because there already was a winner [chosen],
that’s completely wrong. It must be dealt with, and has been dealt with by all
broadcasters.

We’ve taken the lead.
We’re not doing any premium-rate phone-in competitions anymore, because the
whole thing is so difficult to police properly. But I also think that stealing
a slice of bread is a crime, and murder is a crime, but they are different. And
they require different responses. What is of little doubt is that audiences
want to be able to trust you. They know that there’s artifice involved in
television production, and they just need to be confident that when you have to
re-create things and try things again—which is all the normal grammar of
program-making—that you haven’t distorted the truth on the way, that
you’re still telling the same story and you haven’t fundamentally deceived
them. And that’s the thing to cling to.

So I think everybody has
been a tiny bit too cavalier at times—not very often, but in some
instances, us included. It’s a good moment to reassess program-makers, usually
those at a junior level. We had an instance with Gordon Ramsay, where he went
sea-bass fishing in a short segment of his show. He goes hunting with a harpoon
and gets sea bass and yells, “Yeah, I got a sea bass!” and it transpires later
that he didn’t get any sea bass. Nobody died, except for the sea bass, so it’s
not the end of the world. However, what is important, and this is what we’ve
done, is that the people [who filmed that sequence] know that they shouldn’t do
that.

It’s not [a horrible] offense, but don’t do it, because it’s not needed. Think more inventively, more
creatively: Gordon doesn’t catch the sea bass, he comes out of the water and
swears, “Fucking hell, why can’t I see a bloody thing down there?” But luckily
Joe Blow does it for a living and has caught three [and gives them to Ramsay].
Nobody thinks less of old Ramsay, nobody thinks less of the program. It’s kind
of a mind-set thing. That’s what’s got to get back at the top of people’s minds
when they’re out filming.

It’s probably a by-product
of the amount of formatted reality [on television] that requires setups the
whole time. That’s fine in certain genres, but not in certain ways. You know
you can’t invent the news, you can’t invent investigative documentary, you
can’t invent anything like that. On the other end of the scale, on a panel show
with comedians, yes, you’ve shown them the questions beforehand. Bloody hell,
do you know how boring it would be if they didn’t have answers prepared
beforehand? You’ve just got to be careful about what is and isn’t deception.
It’s a very difficult thing to define—perhaps the industry itself hasn’t
quite nailed it, but there’s a sort of gray area.

TV EUROPE: Do
U.S. series continue to be an important part of Channel 4’s schedule?

LYGO: American
programming has become more expensive and it’s something that we will be
spending less on in the future. Channel 4 used to be the only place where you
could see new, interesting shows from America. So when we started it was Thirtysomething, Hill Street Blues and Cheers, and more latterly Friends, Six Feet Under, The
Sopranos, Desperate Housewives and so on. The problem for us is twofold. First,
all these new channels that have launched in the last ten years are buying
American shows and a consequence of this is that the price goes up. Lucky for
the U.S. studios! And secondly, that exclusive, special feeling that we’re
bringing something exotic and exciting with American programming has less
impact than it used to. It appears less special to the viewer, because every
U.S. series is available somewhere on digital television. And that takes off
some of the luster. But when we go out to L.A., we’ll still want to buy things
we think are the best, or the most interesting, or the quirkiest. But overall
we’ll be spending less.

TV EUROPE: Is
it necessary in today’s landscape for a broadcaster like Channel 4 to have a
bouquet of digital channels to help amortize costs of programming, draw more
people to specific shows and even attract new audiences?

LYGO: Yes,
all of the above! Digital channels help extend the amount of people that see
our programming. What we want more than anything is for everybody to watch our
programs. And if you can get more people to watch programs by repeating them on
other channels, then that’s a completely valid public service. There’s no doubt
that just by having more shelf space you get that. But it’s quite interesting.
We’re the only broadcaster in the U.K. who has given its channels
names—More4, E4, Film4. Whereas at ITV it’s ITV1, ITV2, ITV3, ITV4. Our
channels have their own interesting personalities. People know pretty clearly
what More4 stands for and what E4 stands for. That’s partly why they’ve been so
successful—they’ve got a brand. In a years’ time we’ll have E4 the
channel, E4.com, E4 Radio, and it will be a cross-platform experience. It will
be something that is definitely targeted at young people. It will be a very
valuable, powerful tool for us.

TV EUROPE: Is one of the challenges in the next few years the
switch to digital? Could paying for that take away considerable resources from
programming? Has that been sorted out?

LYGO: No. We’re
sailing right into the middle of it. Digital service will be completed by 2012,
so in 2012 the entire nation will have multichannel TV. It’s an enormous
challenge for us because what it can take away is scale. We don’t know where
the limit is, but there comes a moment where you cease to have the impact that
you’ve been used to simply by the scale of people that are watching. So if in
the olden days there were only three or four channels, more or less everybody
watched what was on. Nowadays you’ve got 400 channels in your home—you’re
quite likely to miss things, not see things. And therefore [event television] and talking about programs that are on the next day are harder to create. We’re
seeing broadcasters do more stunts. It’s fewer, bigger things.

Channel 4 really wants to
try and keep a range of voices, a plethora of new, exciting one-off different
interesting programs. We’re still fundamentally a factual channel. So luckily
the cost of documentaries isn’t prohibitive yet, and the economics of our model
means that, if we can keep our factual programming relevant, and interesting to
an audience, then we should be all right. But I think if your ambitions are, as
ours are, to continue with comedy and drama, then the funding model is in
question.

TV EUROPE: What
are some of the highlights for the upcoming season?

LYGO: For
us the [the main concentration] for next year is new shows, and we’re going to
be more brutal than ever in cutting series that have [so far] not performed
well. If we were making purely commercial decisions we’d just keep them going,
but we need to cut away some of the returning series. It’s strange, we’re the
victim of our own success that we have a hit and we think, “Great, we can bring
that back.” But after a while we’ve got too many of them and we haven’t got
space for anything new. So it’s a strange paradox, but we’re going to have to
really force ourselves and the producers and directors to start new shows.

As for our highlights,
we’ve got quite interesting, slightly social-purpose-driven formatted
documentaries. We’ve got Dumped,
that features a bunch of people living on a refuse heap for a few weeks. It’s
entertaining television—but underpinning it is a look at what we throw
away as a society. You can actually live off of other people’s garbage
perfectly adequately.