Channel 4 gives us 30 reasons to be cheerful

MEDIA & MARKETING:CHANNEL 4 TURNS 30 tomorrow, which it will no doubt celebrate with a special 4-shaped cake, some alcopops and fond reminiscences about that time both contestants on Countdown declared the word "w**kers", for seven.

When you’re in happy convulsions watching Will from The Inbetweeners accidentally defecate during an exam, it’s easy to forget that Channel 4 is a not-for-profit public service broadcaster. Publicly owned, but not publicly funded, it has a statutory remit to be “innovative, experimental and distinctive”. Any profits it does make – and it’s spent almost all of the last three decades in the black – are reinvested in programming.

For its birthday year, Channel 4 is actually planning, rather than stumbling into, a temporary deficit, so it can invest in its future identity as an only moderately clapped out thirtysomething, “a little bit older, not much wiser”. Quite amazingly, this deficit will be funded by what it calls “transitional reserves” – two words that must be the envy of revenue-starved broadcasters everywhere.

They would be forgiven for looking at Channel 4’s “unique business model” and wondering how they, too, might gain access to the seemingly unlimited resources of the one lender still willing to pony up. I speak, of course, of the Banker on Deal or No Deal.

As I happen to think Channel 4 is largely a benign source of joy, let us pass over those silences on Countdown whenever Nick Hewer says something a bit spiky and everyone just wishes Richard Whiteley hadn’t been taken so early. Let’s forgive 10 O’Clock Live for being less than the sum of its parts. And let’s gloss over that time Celebrity Big Brother managed to spark an international race row, requiring a hasty and somewhat surreal diplomatic intervention by Gordon Brown.

Instead, let’s focus on the positives – 30 reasons from the past 30 years why Channel 4 is a brilliant public service broadcaster.

For the sake of expediency, Jon Snow accounts for numbers one to 10 on this list.

Father Ted, Spaced, Black Books, Green Wing, The Book Group, Peep Show, The Adam and Joe Show and the only filmed portrayal of journalism that is even halfway realistic, Drop the Dead Donkey, represent numbers 11 to 18, all courtesy of its comedy commissioners.

On the subject of realism, a special mention for Noughties drama Teachers (19), for populating its scenes with long lines of bored pupils carrying chairs through corridors – something I remember doing quite a lot of in school. Plaudits, too, for pioneering a lifestyle advice show (Property Ladder, 20) in which the schtick is that participants arrogantly disregard everything the expert tells them.

“Achingly alternative” is an image that Channel 4 periodically returns to, but this is more often a force for good than for cringe. It is never more in keeping with its public service remit than during its Alternative Christmas Message (21), when it ignores royal platitudes in favour of Doreen and Neville Lawrence, or Katie Piper. I admit I wasn’t quite so approving when it got Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in for some festive cheer, but it was certainly distinctive.

Even Big Brother could have been classed as innovative and experimental in its first series (22), long before it descended into a televised cage fight loved only by cyberbullies. Indeed, much of what Channel 4 has been good at has involved the milking of fresh talent, or farming of Fresh Meat (23), before that talent can inflate its asking price and channel-hop – see So Graham Norton (24).

Perhaps crucially for its next licence renewal, Channel 4 has adopted an innovative approach not just to content, but to the medium of television itself. From the time-shifting of E4+1 to on-demand service 4oD, it has got there before the competition.

Thanks partly to 4oD’s free library of riches – including Misfits, Skins, Queer as Folk and Any Human Heart (25-28) – but driven mostly by shiny interactive properties such as The Million Pound Drop (29), more than five million people have registered their details with Channel 4. As more than 60 per cent of 4oD views now come from these logged-in users, the broadcaster can tell advertisers precisely who is watching what online – and if they’re going to die in the next 90 minutes.

Because Channel 4 has, thrillingly, been taking its “experimental” ethos literally of late, which leads me to last month’s The Plane Crash (30), a stunt documentary in which it invited viewers to virtually “check in” to a Boeing 727, and then got a team of scientist types to crash it in the Mexican desert.

Frankly, anyone old enough to recall the daring output of Channel 4’s 1980s youth can lament away. If television has taught me anything, it’s to never sit near the front of the plane, and what could be more educational than that?