Channel 4 headquarters in Horseferry Road, London. Philip Toscano / PA Wire/Press Association Images. All rights reserved‘Now, I have to warn you – this is not like the BBC at all; this is the Animal House programme review!’
My cautionary guide was Paul Bonner, as we descended the lift to the ground floor boardroom for the weekly lunchtime meeting of commissioning staff to review the past week’s channel output. Paul was the founding director of programmes and one of the few people at the channel’s original base in Soho’s Charlotte Street whom I had known back at the corporation. What sort of process was I about to witness? Could I ever fit in? This really mattered to a husband and father who had crossed London for nothing more secure than a three-year contract. Jeremy Issacs had decreed that no commissioning editor should stay longer for fear of becoming stale in the job, and as a patron, rely only on his cronies.
At the BBC’s programme review, heads of department sat around an enormous, gargantuan table and lobbed sophisticated verbal missiles at their peers and rivals, while defending their own programmes against all-comers in return; the only creative talents that were likely to survive this gruelling process were those whose reputations were judged un-trashable.
