The British media event of 1987 was the move of Michael Grade from the second-ranking job at BBC Television to the No.1 spot at Channel 4. Grade--former president of Embassy Television, former program director at ITV's London Weekend, in line for promotion at the BBC to managing director from director of programs--was trading the BBC's over fifteen thousand broadcasting hours and an annual budget close to 600 million pounds for Four's five thousand hours and 180 million pounds. At forty-four, the golden boy of British television, heir to the world-famous Grade dynasty (he is the nephew of show-biz Lords Lew Grade and Bernie Delfont), looked as if he might be backtracking.
It was not just the manner of Grade's appointment, leap-frogging half a dozen short-listed candidates, that made headlines. Bemused members of the British broadcasting establishment wondered why a man on his way to becoming the BBC's director-general should want the much smaller Channel 4 post or, for that matter, why Four should want him. Channel 4, set up by act of Parliament to be "distinctive" and "innovative," is by definition a minority service in a system that has always prided itself on catering to minorities.
Margin of Political Dissent
Channel 4 is famous for its range of ethnic programs, programs appealing to feminists and gays, and programs allowing a wider margin of political dissent than any other British TV channel. It is known as well for a popular twice-weekly soap opera, Brookside, and for pumping new life into the flagging British cinema industry by means of its handsome investment in the weekly Films on Four. It started in 1982 with an audience share of 4 percent and has built steadily to between 8 and 9 percent. Many of its programs are seen on the Public Broadcasting System in the States.
Grade's skills are those of an ace scheduler and program wheeler-dealer. His mission at the BBC, where he worked closely with recently retired managing director Bill Cotton, who had lured him back from the States, was to raise the Beeb's viewing share to 50 percent or better through more popular programming. Nurturing such audience pullers as the thrice-weekly Wogan chat show and British TV's highest-rated soap, EastEnders, (currently being shown on U.S. television) he succeeded brilliantly. By adroit retiming, he even doubled the audience for the BBC's heaviest current affairs slot, Panorama. Critics complained that he had pushed BBC television down-market; his producers basked in the upturn of BBC fortunes in the unremitting battle with the rival ITV. How, they both wondered, would Grade fare in an environment where ratings success was not only considered unimportant, but was positively discouraged?
Grade's Defection
With hindsight, it is possible to see Grade's defection as part of the profound change that is slowly coming over the face of British broadcasting. For four decades, British TV has been dominated by large, seemingly immovable institutions--the BBC, the Independent Broadcasting Authority and the five or six largest companies in its ITV chain--which, unlike their American network counterparts and Channel 4, have traditionally made all but a handful of their programs in their own studios with their own staffs.
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