Quality | 2009.02.11
Zoe Williams: Public service bickering
Channel 4 is in trouble - of course financially, we knew that. But also specifically, in that way that always happens, every time the word "big" is used in meaningless but apparently emotive conjunction with the word "brother". Boys and Girls Alone was first shown last night: it shows 20 kids, in equal gender distribution, aged eight to 12, moving into a remote house in Cornwall. The aim is to see whether "today\'s kids" are mollycoddled in real life or whether they are actually pretty resourceful and could survive perfectly well without parents, provided they were allowed to kick each other to death.
"This is a peep show using children as the victims," complained a spokesperson for charity Bullying UK in the Daily Mail. "If parents left their children alone in houses for two weeks, social services would be round. I\'m quite surprised they haven\'t intervened in this." On the one hand, she has a point - all one\'s instincts would stretch to avoid televised, and it\'s a weird sort of adult-led broadcasting institution that takes a standard "drama is conflict" formula and lets it loose on immature minds. But on the other, these conflicts are the whittling tool of personality. The issue is vexed by parental partiality, I\'d venture. I am all in favour of other peoples\' children being bullied to a burnished maturity; I should like mine to exist perpetually in a warm bath of approbation. Never mind all that now, it\'s complicated - the issue of Channel 4 is smaller than child-rearing, yet large enough that you can stick the knife in without feeling bad, and it has a measurable cost structure.
Channel 4 is always at the centre of something like this. In the 80s, occasionally, it raised an issue of genuine import with an act of authentic creativity. Now it\'s all feverish issue-waving, cooked up around inconsequential acts of spite. Jade Goody, acting the giddy racist on Celebrity Big Brother: this had no place in any discussion about race relations - in any country. It was just an unremarkable bully\'s flailing about to find something offensive to say. Later that year, Emily Parr was kicked out of regular BB for saying "nigger". In 2003, two contestants had sex and had to be given a morning-after pill. I can\'t remember whether the controversy was over them having sex on telly, the collusion of the producers in procuring the pill, the use of the pill instead of having "safe sex", or the use of the pill on a non-prescription basis.
The point is, it is central to Channel 4\'s business model - even before the credit crunch but much magnified since - that it is taken seriously as a broadcaster with a public service remit, and can therefore go to the government for money. And yet if you look individually at any of these squabbles, they don\'t just make the public service claim look laughable, they undermine the quality of the entire station. This is a channel at the centre of harassing a load of nine-year-olds to within an inch of their sanity - for ratings. Don\'t you find this makes it harder to take their news output seriously?
And yet when you try to imagine broadcasting without Channel 4, there is a hole, and it\'s left not by Jon Snow (he would get a job somewhere else), but by precisely these highly contrived, mercenary, manipulated flashpoints that make people talk about things. Because in the end, racism still does exist, everywhere; but without a controversy, it\'s not news. Most people don\'t know what they think about bullying: they don\'t know where they stand on the spectrum of "stamp it out" or "leave them to it". There is something unintimidating about these "reality" moments; they make big things seem worth discussing, broadly, in a way that religious leaders and thinktank reports tend not to. That is Channel 4\'s gift to public broadcasting. I\'m not sure how much it\'s worth in cash terms, but it\'s more than nothing.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/04/reality-channel-4
