Channel 4 headquarters in Horseferry Road, London. Philip Toscano / PA Wire/Press Association Images. All rights reserved
People rarely have their dreams come true. Especially when they involve a major new enterprise in a well-established landscape, a huge cultural expansion of taste and propriety, and the creation of an innovative political and financial structure to make it work as intended. Yet that is what happened to launch Channel 4. In such a conservative country, with a Conservative government, and two long-established broadcasters occupying almost all of the available space, it was extraordinary. It was even more improbable given the two-decades-long insistence by ITV to claim the fourth channel as ITV2. Television sets built in the seventies had a button listed as ITV2. It was only the protests of Anthony Smith and others that saw it differently. Smith became the architect of the fourth channel in various iterations, expressed at length in a series of articles in The Guardian, and then on the Annan Committee. He made the dream into a proposition that could win support.
