What the hell has happened to Channel 4?
A broadcaster once acclaimed for creativity, originality and risk-taking has sunk ever deeper in recent years into a purveyor of cheap reality television and manufactured sensationalism. This month’s revelations that two female participants on its flagship show Married at First Sight UK were allegedly raped by their on-screen partners, with a third alleging a non-consensual sex act, and one woman claiming Channel 4 continued to broadcast her episodes after she had reported the assault, represent the grim and logical nadir of a long decline that has lasted more than two decades.
The contrast with Channel 4’s origins is stark. Launched in November 1982 with a statutory mandate to experiment, serve minority tastes and give voice to those previously unheard on British television; its founding chief executive, Glasgow-born documentary-maker Jeremy Isaacs, led what amounted to a cultural revolution in British broadcasting.
Operating a publisher-broadcaster model, in which everything was commissioned from outside rather than produced in-house, it provided a financial lifeline to the ailing British film industry and a kick-start to the non-existent Irish one. Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway flourished under its patronage. Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette gave Britain its first gay Asian love story and launched Daniel Day-Lewis.
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Neil Jordan’s directorial debut was a Channel 4 co-production, as was his breakthrough Oscar-winner The Crying Game. The channel’s Workshop Declaration of 1982 funded a network of regional and ethnic minority community film-making collectives, including the Derry Film and Video Workshop, whose Hush-A-Bye Baby (1990) was the first Irish film to address teenage pregnancy in a Catholic nationalist community, a subject RTÉ would not have touched. The channel also financed more than 50 African feature films, at a time when no other Western broadcaster was doing anything of the kind.
While much of this was what we would now call left-coded, the publisher-broadcaster model aligned neatly with Margaret Thatcher’s instinct to break up monolithic public institutions and inject market competition into broadcasting. Channel 4 birthed a new generation of independent production talent that would dominate British broadcasting for the following decades. That tension between radical content and market dynamics was brilliantly productive while the financial conditions were good.
In the 1990s, Channel 4 went from strength to strength commercially. Under Isaacs’s successor, Michael Grade, a more populist mix of programming tapped into the Cool Britannia zeitgeist with the best imported American shows (ER, Friends), generation-defining drama and entertainment (Queer as Folk, TFI Friday) and enduring comedy classics (Father Ted, Brass Eye). The channel was making serious money, and management increasingly chafed under the statutory arrangement with ITV that required it to share surplus revenues.
That arrangement ended in 1998, when the ITV relationship established under the 1990 Broadcasting Act was phased out. From that point, Channel 4 lived or died entirely on advertising revenue. The new incentive structure decisively shifted the content strategy.
Big Brother arrived in 2000. The format of strangers under surveillance, public vote and weekly elimination, was bought from Dutch company Endemol. Channel 4 merely acquired it. Revenue was enormous. The channel told itself it was doing sociology but it was really exploitation with a thin cultural studies veneer. When Celebrity Big Brother broadcast racist abuse directed at Shilpa Shetty in 2007, generating a record number of Ofcom complaints, the viewing figures went up as the abuse became more flagrant.
Channel 4 was profiting from harm, and the same publisher-broadcaster model that had once provided the framework for provocative film-making was now providing an alibi for cruelty as entertainment: we just commission it, the producer makes it.
With Benefits Street in 2014, the channel founded to give voice to the marginalised was now presenting deprived communities as poverty porn for the comfortable. And, while some fine programmes were still being made, Channel 4 was increasingly associated in the public mind with soft-core dross like Naked Attraction, in which contestants choose a romantic partner based solely on the progressive revelation of naked bodies, presented as body-positive television and received as a gameshow in which people are judged on their genitalia.
Financial pressures gradually become more acute. The Covid advertising collapse stripped £150 million (€173 million) from Channel 4’s content budget. The streaming revolution hollowed out its younger audience. A record deficit of £50 million in 2023 was followed by 250 redundancies, department mergers and a deteriorating relationship with the independent production sector whose very existence Channel 4 had originally called into being. Three of its most senior executives departed within a year. Its new chief executive comes from a background in advertising sales.
Into this diminished institution arrived this month’s Panorama investigation. Married at First Sight UK had topped Channel 4’s streaming charts and run to 10 seasons. As usual, it was made by an independent producer. And, according to one of the women who appeared on it, Channel 4 continued to broadcast it after she had reported being raped.
[ Married at First Sight relationship coach Mel Schilling dies aged 54Opens in new window ]
Jeremy Isaacs died in June 2024, at 94. His obituaries were full of the names he had launched and the films he had made possible and the legacy he left behind. None of them mentioned Married at First Sight.
It’s a measure of the distance between what Channel 4 was built to be and what it has become that it still uses the language of its founding to describe its mission – challenging, innovative, diverse – while the conditions that allowed those words to actually mean something have been stripped away entirely.
