Officially, the Channel 4 Corporation is an ALB (arm’s length body), Whitehall jargon for owned by the public but not run by the government, one of a shrinking list of businesses on HMG’s books that vary from the Ordnance Survey and The Royal Mint to the banks rescued during the financial crash, plus the company formally known as the Atomic Weapons Establishment. C4 is the only business on that list that does any kind of journalism; the BBC’s Royal Charter puts it in a different category.

So maybe it is not surprising that from time to time the Conservative government of the day picks out C4 from these strange bedfellows and asks if it should sell off this publicly owned, commercially funded broadcaster with annual revenues of around one billion pounds. The latest occasion was the fourth time (that’s by my count, others argue it is the sixth or seventh). So how come every time the Tories ask themselves the same question, they come up with the same answer – don’t sell?

The first prime minister to ask was, ironically, the one who had launched the channel in 1982 as publicly owned but commercially funded. As the BJR revealed in 2021 (Channel 4: the 30 years’ war, Volume 32, Issue 3), Margaret Thatcher thought she had a better idea by 1988: create an even bigger “third force” against the BBC and ITV by merging a privatised Channel 4 with a soon-to-be-created Channel Five. Her plan was floated in a white paper but lacked support inside the Tory party, let alone outside it.

Eight years later, in 1996, John Major was tempted to sell to offset a shortfall from other privatisations. His cabinet voted to explore the idea but opposition within the Conservative Party was symbolised by a “Dear John” letter from the then C4 chairman and Tory supporter Sir Michael Bishop. “For Channel 4, with new shareholders seeking to maximise profits, money for dividends would have to be taken directly from the screen at viewers’ exp, by diverting programme expenditure.” That argument carried the day.

Under New Labour, C4 was safe, and during the coalition years Liberal Democrat ministers acted as a brake on their Tory colleagues. But when in 2015 the Tories won an overall majority, David Cameron appointed as his secretary for culture, media and sport (DCMS) the man who had been Margaret Thatcher’s political secretary during that 1988 debate about C4’s future. For John Whittingdale, this was his chance to complete his former leader’s unfinished business. A civil servant was spotted going into 10 Downing Street with a document revealing that work should be done on “extracting greater public value from the Channel 4 Corporation, focusing on the privatisation option in particular”. Putting aside any mild embarrassment that the previous month Whittingdale had said “the ownership of Channel 4 is not currently under debate”, he seemed to be on course for success.

However, when Cameron lost the Brexit referendum in 2016, Theresa May took over as PM and sacked Whittingdale. An ambitious junior minister called Matt Hancock picked up the C4 brief and used the threat of privatisation to try to extract some “greater public value”. In a compromise worked out with Channel 4 CEO Alex Mahon, the largest C4 office would remain in Horseferry Road, Westminster, but a new site outside London would became the “national HQ” of the channel. Leeds was chosen, and other departments were moved from London to regional centres. This seemed like a deal that could put the privatisation issue to bed for a decade or so.

But as prime ministers continued to come and go, by 2020 Whittingdale was back in a more junior role at DCMS, summoned from the back benches by Boris Johnson, who was developing a thing about the folks in Horseferry Road. Various people in and around the channel weren’t above winding him up either: replacing Johnson with a block of ice when he wouldn’t take part in a party leaders’ debate on climate change, accusing him of sending his father as a replacement when Johnson Senior was actually a guest of the channel, misquoting the prime minister as saying “people of colour” instead of “people of talent”, and finally calling him a liar. Downing Street was keeping the score as it planned its revenge.

“Here we go again,” said media analysts Enders as Whittingdale was given the go-ahead to restart the C4 debate. Trying to leave nothing to chance this time, he began with “the government’s preferred option”, which was to “facilitate a change of ownership of Channel 4”. But the persistent privatiser fell at the final fence again when Johnson fired him in a DCMS ministerial slaughter after the department failed to deliver the Ofcom chairmanship to Paul Dacre. Whittingdale took it badly and was later compensated with a knighthood.

Nadine Dorries was put in charge at DCMS – what could possibly go wrong? Well, her patron at No 10 got fired by his own MPs for starters. When Johnson left, and with him key advisers pushing for privatisation, the C4 parcel was passed to incoming PM Liz Truss. During the campaign for the party leadership, she had fudged her position and once in office replaced Dorries with Michelle Donelan, who promptly described herself as “somebody that listens” and decides policy “based on evidence”. The well-paid advisers to the likely broadcasting bidders feared the gig was up.

Their hopes rose a little when Rishi Sunak became PM because he had declared himself a seller. However, faced with so many other more pressing problems, Downing Street allowed Donelan at DCMS to conclude that not only was the status quo the option to take but that C4 should also be given something it had never asked for over 40 years: the right to make and sell some of its own programmes.

The campaign to privatise C4 had got closer to legislation than any previous attempt, so what caused this remarkable last-minute change of policy?

1. The political roundabout

The sale of Channel 4 has been considered over the years by no fewer than seven Conservative prime ministers and 17 cabinet ministers who held the media brief. How many were in the job long enough to understand the detail? Margaret Thatcher and John Whittingdale, for certain, that’s clear from the his and hers 1988 papers in the National Archives. But how about Nadine Dorries, who told a Commons committee that Channel 4’s future should be “brought into question, particularly when it is in receipt of taxpayers’ money”. Channel 4 receives no taxpayers’ money.

How many were in the job long enough to care? When the ministerial stars were in alignment for the zealot partnership of Boris Johnson and John Whittingdale and then the Johnson/Dorries coupling, there was strong momentum towards a sale, and a hasty consultation was organised to make the parliamentary timetable as fast as possible. When Whittingdale fell, ironically at the hands of Johnson, and then Johnson himself fell, there were few left who thought the issue was worth a lengthy and potentially difficult parliamentary process. The musical chairs paused for a moment and somebody had to make a decision. Those who supported what C4 had done for the Paralympics and other good deeds (one cabinet minister even stood up and sang Happy Birthday at a C4 party), combined with the “don’t knows” and the “don’t cares”, turned out to be in the majority. Even the lead presenter of Channel Four News being caught calling a minister a “c***” off air was forgiven.

2. The limpness of the ideological argument

The base case for privatisation was once summed up by Whittingdale: “It’s worth asking the question why we need two publicly owned broadcasters.” The simple answer is that the BBC and Channel 4 have different roles. But how could the private sector best perform C4’s duties around innovation, creative risk-taking, and championing unheard voices? A radical alternative would have been a challenge to the free market; maybe language such as “we will deregulate Channel 4 allowing private capital to create innovative new services” and, of course, at the same time maximise the revenue for the Treasury from the sale. Instead, the Government went with the public service broadcasting status quo, sweetened only by a hint of “modernisation of Channel 4’s remit and obligations”. It was a pitch to the consolidators, such as ITV, Viacom (owner of Channel Five) and Warner Brothers Discovery, to increase their scale in the UK, run their own programmes on C4’s channels and, most importantly, take C4 off the Government’s hands. But would it be worth the bother?

3. The failure of the business case

Back in 1996, Whittingdale was arguing that Channel 4’s healthy financial position – annual surplus of £128million – meant it was time for “privatisation at the first opportunity”.

By 2016, he said privatisation was necessary because despite the financial position (£26million surplus and record revenues), C4 might not be sustainable in the long term. After the pandemic, the 2021 surplus was back over £100million, backed up by net cash reserves of £272million. Surviving Covid had been the incentive for cutting costs and Channel 4 was embracing the on-demand revolution with gusto. The “unsustainable” argument was clearly unsustainable.

4.The loyalty of the indie sector

Long gone are the days when Channel 4 was the first, and for some the only, stop for independent producers pitching a project. Now everybody from the BBC and ITV to Sky and the so-called streamers (Netflix, Amazon, etc) commissions from and sometimes buys “indies”. But the sector kept faith with the channel that gave birth to it and any doubters were probably pushed into the C4 loyalist camp when the Government said successful bidders could run more of their own shows on 4.

5. The inscrutable Alex Mahon

For five years, Alexandra Rose Mahon has tried to get on with her day job as chief executive of Channel 4. But DCMS ministers and civil servants kept calling about privatisation, often just to try to work out what she thought. Alex played her cards smartly throughout. She accepted that “the government has every right to look at the ownership of Channel 4 from time to time” and embraced the “levelling up” agenda which the previous C4 regime had rejected when some non-executive directors advocated moving jobs out of London. Her non-confrontational but quietly effective campaign ensured a “sensible decision”.

First published in the British Review of Journalism March 2023

Stewart Purvis was connected with C4 over 40 years as editor of Channel Four News, ITN chief executive, a C4 consultant and a non-executive director for seven-and-a-half years, ending in May 2021. @StewartPurvis

Traditionally there are two types of royal documentary in the UK:

• the ‘authorised’ kind, a TV company puts an idea to Buckingham Palace who like it and agree to co-operate subject to certain conditions
• the ‘unauthorised’ kind, the Palace aren’t interested in the project, don’t try to stop it but don’t co-operate either.

Over the past 40 years I’ve made or appeared in both.

The ‘Harry and Meghan’ series on Netflix uses a different although not entirely new model. The American film-maker, Liz Garbus, working with her husband Dan Cogan, calls it a ‘collaboration’ According to the New York Times: “When pressed as to whether the couple had final approval over the series, she responded: “It was a collaboration. You can keep asking me, but that’s what I’ll say.”

Another documentary-maker Garrett Bradley had dropped out off the project because “Ms. Bradley’s vérité style did not mesh with the couple’s interests”. Instead, according to the New York Times, “Ms. Garbus said that Harry and Meghan were interested in telling their love story within the historical context of the British monarchy. Ms. Garbus wanted to expand on that and explore how their personal pasts affected their present.”

TV folk will read into this that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have effectively had the programmes made in the way they want by professionals they’ve decided to work with about the subjects they want and with, at the very least, some measure of editorial control. 

There are huge advantages to this, they can say and include whatever they want subject only to the law of libel. They are free to give their side of the story, uncomplicated by any other side.

There are two downsides, one is that the royals lose any deniability. There can be no complaints such as ‘my answers were taken out of context’ or ‘I didn’t realise the programme-makers would use that picture’. Meghan and Harry are therefore accountable for every element of the content.

So the sequence about the British Empire in Episode 3, which personally I have no problem with but has enraged others in the UK, was clearly part of the deal with Ms Garbus and Mr Cogan.

The other downside is that omitting anything relevant from the programmes also looks like a conscious decision. For example in the episodes shown so far there is no mention of Meghan having been married and divorced before she met Harry, even in a powerful sequence about divorce.  Which serious ‘documentarian’, as some American film-makers prefer to be called, would omit that fact unless they had to. 

When the next set of episodes are released I suspect there will be more questions to Ms Garbus about whether Harry and Meghan have the last say in what goes in ‘Harry and Meghan’.

Declaration of interest; in the 1980s I made three programmes for ITV with the then Prince and Princess of Wales: an interview called ‘Talking Personally’ and a two-part documentary ‘In Private, In Public’. Extracts were shown in the archive sequences of ‘Harry and Meghan’. The Royal Family held a contactual right to editorial control of the programmes and required the removal of certain sequences shot with the Prince and Princess which I had included in the first cut. Since then I have never been involved in any documentaries where editorial control was shared with a contributor. 

A week after I took over the Editor’s office at Channel Four News in 1983 I found a letter in a desk. It had been left there by Paul McKee who held the fort between the departure of  Derrik Mercer and my arrival, I suspect it was not intended for my eyes. The Chief Executive of Channel Four, Jeremy Isaacs, was informing his ITN counterpart, David Nicholas, that he reluctantly accepted me as Editor but there was a condition: if the ratings did not reach 750,000 within six months the programme would be shut down. 

This was news to me. The C4N audience had gone as low as 250,000 which in TV jargon gave it a ‘TVR’ of zero. So I had moved from Britain’s most popular news programme, News at Ten, to the ‘news with no viewers’. The trade press wondered about my sanity.

What they didn’t know was that I had taken on ‘the worst job in TV’ only to to discover there was a death sentence hanging over it. I decided never to share my secret with my new colleagues for fear it would cause a rush to the exits.

The staff would be the key to saving Channel Four News. Peter Sissons, Trevor McDonald, Elinor Goodman, Lawrence McGinty, Michael Crick, Edward Stourton, Jane Corbin and Ian Ross were among a first rate roll call of on-screen journalists. Overseeing the VTR operation was the redoubtable Sid Stiller and among the graphics team Lesley Everett was a rising star. On the news input desks John Flewin, Garron ‘Garbled Brains’ Baines and Angela Frier were under-appreciated stalwarts. We even had a future Deputy Prime Minister in Damian Green running the business desk.

But feelings about the events of the first year of C4N were still running high. Now the team were suspicious about a new editor who, as Edward Stourton writes in his forthcoming autobiography, had ‘a reputation for populism of a most un-Channel 4-ish kind”.

My own priority was answer the simple question; what was the point of Channel Four News other than it lasted an hour? To Peter Sissons “it was blindingly obvious”. We should choose the news stories of the day which raised issues and deal with them intelligently and if necessary at length. I thought we needed a format which meant the viewer should be able to watch C4N and not need to find any other news that evening. Rather than ignore what I called the ‘video river’ flowing through ITN from its crews and agency suppliers we needed to exploit it.

First Channel Four, who had grudgingly appointed ITN as their news provider in the first place, had to be weaned off an obsession with what they called ‘identifiable analysis’, a code for lengthy studio interviews with experts. My alternative was to thread analysis through the video packages of seven or more minutes using our own in-house expertise plus outside pundits. That would mean a  bigger budget and to their credit C4 agreed.

A week after handing out piechart diagrams of the new format we put it into action on the first anniversary of the channel. Jeremy Isaacs came to the newsroom in Wells Street and climbed onto a desk to speak to staff.  With his head bumping into the ceiling he delivered an upbeat  message rather different from his secret letter to David Nicholas; “Our commitment to ITN is 101 per cent and I am totally committed to both Stewart and to the production of Channel Four News”. Fortunately the team took this as good news rather the dreaded vote of confidence in the manager who is about to be fired. The six month clock began counting down to either ratings success or shutdown. 

There were many difficult moments. Edward Stourton recalls my ‘brutal determination to drag up standards’ in post-mortems after each show. Free drinks in my office afterwards didn’t always smooth over wounded feelings. The night we showed a live shot of empty aircraft steps at Gatwick for far too long brought record ratings but a complaint from Channel Four that this ‘was the wrong kind of journalism’. My explanation was that the British hostages released by Libya had got too drunk on the plane to leave. It cut little ice. 

However overall we were doing more right than wrong, scepticism among the team was giving way to enthusiasm and there was even encouraging external praise from, of all places, the Financial Times and the Los Angeles Times. Then came awards first at the Broadcasting Press Guild, then BAFTA and the Royal Television Society. Our coverage of the Miners Strike was the breakthrough moment when the wider world took notice especially when miners’ leader Arthur Scargill and Coal Board Chairman Ian McGregor made their own films and also debated live on air, the only time they ever spoke to each other in public, and maybe in private too.

One day I got a call from Channel Four to say that such was the progress that the six month deadline was off the table. The programme was safe even if we didn’t reach 750,000. In fact we did make that ratings target anyway.

40 years later the current ratings are not far off 750,000 which is an extraordinary achievement in the context of the enormous decline in linear TV viewing. So Channel Four News now has a greater share of the TV news viewing cake than it did back in those early days. 

The best single decision I made was to build the programme around Peter Sissons. Subsequently Richard Tait’s decision to do the same with Jon Snow ensured extraordinary continuity over nearly four decades. During those years Channel Four teams have upheld and strengthened the reputation for intelligent, challenging and news-making journalism. They continue to win awards around the world.

In Peter’ Sissons own words in his 2011 biography: “Having worked on every major terrestrial TV news broadcast on the BBC,ITV and Channel Four, it is my view that Channel Four News is the one that can make other flagships look pedestrian and predictable”.

This article first appeared in the ITN 55 Club newsletter

This is the text of the address given by Phil Moger at the funeral of former ITN and NBC producer David Phillips on 24th September 2021 at Guildford Crematorium. Phil worked closely with David on the ITN News at 5.45. A Guardian obituary of David is at https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/sep/15/david-phillips-obituary.

David Phillips was simply one the finest broadcast journalists I have ever known.

Outside, working with reporters he was in a league of his own; in the office, masterminding the News at 545 he changed the face of tv journalism. I was proud to work with him and eventually take over as editor of that programme.

David was dynamic. And he was charismatic. And it was never less than exciting to work with him.

But there’s someone who has got better words than me..Gerry Seymour the novelist (who is here today). Gerry was an ITN reporter and worked with David on some of the biggest stories of last century.. He says David was irascible, brilliant, innovative, stubborn and inspirational.

It’s good that I mention Gerry because if you wrote a book about David and some of the ways he worked it would be regarded as unlikely fiction.

And if it was turned into a film, the star would have to be Tom Cruise because he is the only actor who could do the stunts that David pulled off.

David worked for ITN for 20 years.  I’ve picked out some highlights to show his raw talent.

For the first, to get the full impact of the importance go home tonight get on the internet and look up Dawson’s Field explosions.

In 1970, Palestinian terrorists hijacked three airliners and flew them to a dessert airstrip in Jordan. There after offloading the hostage passengers they blew up the planes. One of them was a BOAC VC10

A freelance cameraman working for ITN was the only person to get the picture. There were no satellites or mobile phones.  Everything was on film. This was a massive story that the world was hungry to see.

David grabbed the rolls of film and drove to Amman airport. But there were no flights out.  No planes.  Except for one…a Caravel airliner not due to fly..  David found the pilot and with an American tv man they persuaded him to fly out that night  to Nicosia. for a princely sum…£25,000 in today’s money. Two of them in an eighty seater plane.

David dashed off that plane to find all flights to London were full.  But he persuaded another pilot a BEA captain to let him fly in the jump seat .

In Britain three picture editors worked in relays on the film.  And a half hour programme went out that night – a world exclusive thanks mainly to David. 

It’s yet another flight that brought another exclusive for David…with Gerry Seymour.

In 1972 Palestinian terrorists killed the Israeli athletics team at the Munich Olympics. In a shoot out five of the terrorists were killed but three surrendered.

It was another massive story. Suddenly the Germans released the three who flew to Tripoli. In Munich David hired an executive jet and with Gerry flew after them. A worried Foreign desk  in London asked David “And how much is that gonna cost us this time” “Sorry mate, haven’t a clue” said David.

The ITN pair had no visas . No landing clearance  when they took off.

David and Gerry DID land, arranged to interview the terrorists and hid from the worlds press who were also after the interviews.  But Gerry got them, another world exclusive.  Gerry was to say later David never entertained a fear of failure that day.

David wrote two books about hijackings.  One of them I have here Leila’s Hijack War co written with another ITN journo Peter Snow. I HAVE ONE OF THE FEW REMAINING COPIES IN CIRCULATION. That’s because my wife, News at Ten director Jacqui Bromley typed the manuscript of the book and proof read it.

On lighter topics  David loved anecdotes and I am indebted to Stewart Purvis for this one.  David was at the Montreal Olympics on a radio programme where journalists were discussing their coverage.  A German woman – Dagmar – listed all the problems her team had faced.  David listed all ITN’s successes and said “Hard lines Dagmar .”  She replied “ You are a very rude man ”.  And David replied.  “Me rude, me rude, your’e the German”.

David’s biggest success was being the brains behind a new early evening news programme, The News at 545.  It started in 1977. A different broadcasting world.  No Sky, No 24 hour  BBC news, No Channel four or five.

ITN had its News at Ten but early in the evening it was a ten minute bulletin a hotchpotch of what was to come later in the evening.

The new News at 545 – fifteen minutes long – covered stories that had never been covered on television before.  A nod to the popular press –the Mail, the Mirror etc Ed Stourton once said it was regarded at the time as a bit risqué.

. And it liked sport..a horse race every day.  We were told the Queen mum was a viewer because of this

The whole idea was to make it a good evening paper. David had been a sub on the Manchester Evening News and the London Evening Standard. David’s great talent was spotting a story which people would be talking about at home or in the pub and pushing it up the bulletin to story three or four and, if  it were a quite day, even the main story..

David told me he had a picture of his scenario. A husband comes home to his wife or wife comes home to her husband and as they come through the door they say; HAVE YOU HEARD THIS. 

Example: Recently,  The rolling stones drummer Charlie Watts died.  Known to all generations big time.  A programme I saw headlined it but made it an” And finally.”

Now Afghanistan was big this day so it would not have been the lead but David – and myself – that story would have to be second or third. That was the Phillips difference.  And that’s how he changed the face of tv journalism

Other programmes soon started changing what they covered. It’s what we see today…David’s part in history. And ratings soared

Throughout  David retained his love of the unusual.  Concorde fought for years to be allowed to land in New York.  When it did he negotiated with British Airways to do the landing LIVE IN THE NEWS AT 545. We prayed that day for it to be on time. It was. A great cheer went up in he tv gallery.

And David introduced another innovation — end titles covered in film. I was his main picture man on the Concorde day.  And  on that day we had Concorde’s captain waving his hat in the air from Concorde’s window. As a goodnight.

David left ITN to get back to field producing . That saddened many of us.  He went to  the American company NBC . He was Paris Bureau chief and London deputy chief.

But David never did things by halves.  On the day he left ITN he was taking it easy: his last programme had been put together before lunch.  At three that afternoon Irish terrorists blew up he car of Airey Neave, the shadow Northern Ireland Secretary killing him. Two hours before deadline the whole programme had to be redone.

It was one of his finest.

One final point

 I have gone through dozens of documents to write  David’s obits, many supplied brilliantly by his son Guy head of ITV regional news. 

I came across one phrase written by David; “I get my energy through enthusiasm.”

I never spent a day when David wasn’t enthusiastic.  That phrase should be pined up in every newsroom  because without enthusiasm you put out a dull product.

And David knew that better than anybody .Energy through enthusiasm is the legacy he leaves us.