Channel 4 headquarters in Horseferry Road, London. Philip Toscano / PA Wire/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.What was Channel 4 going to be like? I was asked before we went to air. Cartoonists had a ball. Mark Boxer’s Stringalongs in Hampstead were worried it was going to be ‘too much our kind of channel’. Mel Calman’s little man hoped ‘it won’t be too good for me’. The best target I could manage was ‘a channel all would watch some of the time, and no-one for all of the time’. Viewers would pick and choose.
Kelvin MacKenzie’s Sun persisted in tagging C4 as ‘The channel that nobody watches’. I wrote to warn him that he was doing what an editor should never do – telling his readers what they knew from their own experience to be untrue. Many Sun readers, lured by Countdown or Brookside or a raft of Golden Oldies or NFL’s American Football, were watching us appreciatively. He took the point and asked me to lunch.
In an early edition of Voices, Al Alvarez chaired a discussion on ‘The Arts under Dictatorships’, with Mary McCarthy, George Steiner and Joseph Brodksy. Claus Moser, Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, and Chairman of the Royal Opera House, wrote to thank me: ‘Jeremy, that was exactly what television is for!’ Well, up to a point, dear Claus. Everyone has their own idea of what television is for.
