Channel 4’s Kevin Lygo

April 2006

By Anna Carugati

When viewers in Britain
want to watch programming that is different, cutting edge, and often pushes the
envelope, chances are they tune in to Channel 4. It was established in 1981 as
an advertising-funded, not-for-profit broadcaster with a mandate to innovate,
experiment, and serve the needs of all segments of the British audience.
Through the years it has done exactly that with dramas such as Sex Traffic and
Teachers, comedies like Ali G and Smack the Pony, and a very rich menu of
documentaries and current-affairs programming. Channel 4 has also launched
digital services: the younger-skewing E4 and the upmarket More4. And there are
plans under way for a film channel. As director of television, Kevin Lygo
oversees the programming on the entire portfolio of channels. An unabashed
lover of good television, he shares with TV Europe his vision for Channel 4.

TV EUROPE: What is Channel 4’s role in the British TV
landscape?

LYGO: In the
U.K. we are the public-service complement to the BBC. So although we have no
state funding of any sort, because we are funded by advertising, we have a
remit to innovate and take risks and represent the diversity of the country.
That’s our purpose in life, which translates into genuinely trying to initiate
new programs, new talent on-screen, and bring people programs from around the
world that maybe they wouldn’t get otherwise.

TV EUROPE: What
kind of programs have allowed Channel 4 to remain relevant to its viewers up to
now, and how will its offering have to expand or change in order for it to
continue to remain relevant?

LYGO: The great
thing that Channel 4 has done over many, many years is appear to be unshackled
by authority and tradition.

To pick a drama that airs
now—Shameless—it
could really only appear on Channel 4. It’s a bit too rude for the BBC. It’s a
hard, affectionate portrait of working-class life, which I don’t suppose ITV
would do. So it’s never going to get large audiences, but it’s a brilliant
piece of work, and it’s unfiltered by the channel, and as a result it’s an
enormous hit for us—it’s our highest-rated drama ever. In comedy we’ve
always been leading the way, alongside the BBC, with programs like Green Wing.
We recently started a new sitcom on Friday called The IT Crowd. In the past we’ve had Ali G. It’s that sort of anarchic, edgy, younger fun
that the channel has always had on a Friday night.

The heartland of the
channel is still its factual output. At 9:00 every night there is a
documentary. Every night for an hour at 7:00 is our news. It’s actually doing
better and better. We’ve increased the amount of pure investigative programs to
some 34 a year and I want to do more.

One couldn’t leave out Big
Brother, which is an extraordinary
success. This summer we will do our seventh series, and we’ve done about four
celebrity ones as well. We love the program. We don’t do too much of it. We
treat it really carefully. Endemol is endlessly creative about how to tweak it—and
we do add twists and turns, more interesting casts. We spend an enormous amount
of time trying to get the casting right. Audiences love it. The channel loves
it. We don’t have cricket anymore. We don’t have a sporting event, and in some
ways Big Brother is like our
Super Bowl. It has that role.

If you take all these
programs, we are more than the sum of our parts because on the one hand there
is an investigative documentary about a hospital and on the other side you’ve
got Supernanny, and then on
another night you’ve got a great drama. The range is as broad as any TV station
anywhere, but the attitude of most programs is constant. When the programs are
at their best, they are iconoclastic. They are younger skewing. The news even
comes with a liberal, open, contemporary take on the world. Even in our history
programming we’ve shifted into being more often than not about what we call “nearly
history.” In other words, programs about the 1970s or the 1980s, and we’ve done
less about King George in England or the Nazis. Although we still do some
traditional stuff, we’ve moved more into contemporizing everything.

So you get a feel of the
channel being very of the moment. Whether it’s Big Brother, which is all about how young people live their
life, or it’s Supernanny, or it’s
an investigative documentary knocking down some wrongdoing somewhere, there is
a common thread of trying to reflect the world in the way we—we being
slightly younger-thinking people—think it should be seen.

TV EUROPE: There is a commitment on your part to continue with
investigative documentaries. That can be quite expensive. Many
advertiser-supported broadcasters have had to abandon or cut back so many of
the shows that make the backbone of your schedule.

LYGO: I
would say that the glory of Channel 4 is that the funding formula for this
place is in our hands. We calibrate what we presume—and we are never 100
percent right—will be commercially desirable, against what we feel is
less commercially desirable but important to the channel’s reputation, remit
and purpose. So when we make the money we keep it all and just plow it back
into programs next year.

Channel 4’s brand is so
strongly imprinted on viewers’ minds because they know that [we try] a lot of
things, and some don’t work, but they don’t always mind that they don’t work.
We get more criticism if we do copycat programming than if we try something new
and it doesn’t work. If you’re at the BBC and you try a new program and it
doesn’t work, people will say, “Why on earth am I paying my license fee for
this rubbish?” Poor souls, they can’t win! There’s a glorious mandate to
experiment here.

TV EUROPE: Are
advertisers supportive and receptive of what Channel 4 offers?

LYGO: Completely.
We have a very good sales team here and it is understood by advertisers they
are buying the channel for a unique access to the most difficult people to get
at: lighter viewers, younger viewers and upmarket viewers. For our advertisers,
it’s a very clean and pure way to get their product in programming that younger
people love. There is a kind of glow just by being on Channel 4.

TV EUROPE:
Channel 4 commissions all of its programming—what is the state of the
independent production community in the U.K.?

LYGO: It’s very
strong creatively. There is a slight consolidation frenzy going on—companies
are buying each other, bigger companies are inflating themselves on the stock
market. We’ll see more of this for a year or two. ITV only takes 25 percent of
its programming from the independent sector, and the BBC only takes 25 percent,
but we are utterly dependent upon them and therefore have a closer relationship
with them. Interestingly, many of the most exciting programs on any of the
channels are made by independents.

TV EUROPE:
Channel 4 is more than just the terrestrial channel. It is a portfolio of
channels.

LYGO: We have
E4 and More4. More4 just launched last October. It was very successful and is
already establishing itself as [an outlet for] premier documentaries [targeted
at an upmarket audience]. E4 used to be on pay television; we’ve taken it to
free-to-air and it’s available in about 70 percent of homes for free and
subsequently its ratings have leapt. It’s the biggest channel for the 16 to 34
age group. Its schedule consists largely of acquired programming. The O.C. is the quintessential E4 program. It’s a channel
that is designed to appeal to the 19-year-old girl. It has a very effective
relationship with the main channel, and so does More4. We schedule all the
channels together. When we are running Lost, we play an episode on Channel 4 and at the end we
say, “Turn to E4 now if you want to see the next episode.” It’s an incredibly
effective way of driving people to our digital channels and getting them used
to going there, and seeing all their favorite programs. We use that as a way of
spreading viewers across the portfolio of channels. Channel 4 is very much the
mother ship, but it’s got these offspring in E4 and More4, which give viewers
more choice.

TV EUROPE: Are
there plans for launching more channels?

LYGO: There
are plans for more channels. The other thing that we are looking at is new
media and video on demand and mobile content, so we are investing more and more
in that as well.

TV EUROPE: That’s
necessary today, isn’t it?

LYGO: I think
it is, apart from the fact that no one knows what the hell is going to happen.
But you take your eye off the main player at your peril. Ninety percent of our
money still comes from what is on Channel 4. You need to serve the audiences and give them what they
want, how they want it, when they want it, and that is the reason for getting
into all these things, but all of it is utterly predicated upon having programs
that people desperately want to watch. Channel 4 doesn’t need enormous
audiences. We want every program we make to be somebody’s favorite program
ever. We want dedicated, obsessive fans for every program. It’s nice if it’s 4
million but it can be fine if it’s one million.

TV EUROPE: What
is an acceptable audience share for Channel 4?

LYGO: The
truth is we have a psychological goal of staying around 10 percent. We’ve
always been around 10 percent. In the last few years, ITV lost nearly one third
of its audience and the BBC has lost audiences. This erosion has happened
because there used to be four channels and now there are 400 in most people’s
homes. What is extraordinary about Channel 4 is that we have just stayed at 10
percent, which, in effect, is growth. We added E4 and More4. And now our
portfolio’s share is greater than what the channel’s has ever been. So more
people are watching than have ever watched it.

We are in a sort of golden
period of overall growth, more people watching in peak time than have ever
watched the channel, and it can’t last, it’s all going to go terribly wrong
soon! You never know what’s around the corner!

TV EUROPE:
Channel 4 has always been extremely open to imported programming, and it’s had
some big successes with U.S. series.

LYGO: Yes,
American shows have always been the backbone of the schedule, from the early
days when it was Hill Street Blues
and Roseanne, and then we went
through Cheers, L.A. Law, NYPD Blue and Ally McBeal. Friends was an extraordinary hit here. Last year it was
the fantastic HBO shows The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and Sex
and the City. ER
and Invasion have done very
well and now Lost and Desperate
Housewives do incredibly well. We’ve
recently started running My Name Is Earl and it’s done well—that is a great sign, because American
sitcoms have been hard to find.

TV EUROPE: The
U.S. has had a hard time with comedies lately, but the Brits seem to hit
comedies right on the mark every time. Why is that?

LYGO: Comedy
is in a wonderful place at the moment in Britain. It is a period of
small-audience, beautifully crafted, brilliantly performed comedies, which do
not have wide appeal. So whether it is The Office or Little Britain or, in our case, Green Wing and hopefully The IT Crowd, the difficulty has been getting more than 2 or 3
million viewers. These great big hits that all the media fall in love with and
talk about all the time, they have quite small audiences. The challenge is to
get one that is both adored by cognoscenti and watched by a wider range of
people. But we are lucky in that small audiences are not catastrophic for us.
We can continue to invest heavily in comedies and just keep going.

TV EUROPE: Will
Channel 4 face some financial difficulties when it switches from analog to
digital transmissions, and what is being done to get around that?

LYGO: It
would be remarkable if when the switchover happens we weren’t affected. In
order to deliver on our remit [and continue to spend money on quality
programs], it may be that there is a funding gap [between the cost of
programming and the cost of upgrading to digital transmissions], so we are
warning the government to this effect. We don’t want a handout; we don’t really
want cash, because whenever someone gives you money they always want something
for it! And the purity of the Channel 4 model is we’re so flexible and allowed
to act swiftly with responsibility. But there are ways they can help us. They
can grant us spectrum. They can help pay for the digital switchover itself,
which is an engineering [expense] to the tune of tens of millions of pounds.
There are all sorts of indirect ways they can help us.

TV EUROPE: What
do you enjoy most about your job?

LYGO: Going
home, I like doing that! [Laughs] I do like watching telly. I thoroughly enjoy the week in Los Angeles at the
Screenings where I am treated like some Russian billionaire arriving in a limo.
They take you to the theater and about eight people greet you, “Are you ready
to see our programming now?” and you answer, “Naw, I think I’ll have another
latte.” You sit there not
believing you are being paid for watching the wonderful new dramas and comedies
coming up on American telly. And
then you go to some gorgeous hotel poolside—that’s a tough job.

TV EUROPE: Not
to mention the parties!

LYGO: No,
I never go. I’m always too tired to go to the parties—completely
jet-lagged. I’m in my hotel room watching TV and ordering a burger from room
service. It’s just heaven!