Channel 4 without the boring bits

You may not have noticed, but Channel 5 has just celebrated its fifth birthday. Not exactly a coming of age for Britain's fifth and final analogue terrestrial TV channel, perhaps, but significant none the less. Six years ago, not many people would have put money on its survival, let alone its relative prosperity. And yet it has achieved both.

Channel 5 was created when the (Conservative) government realised in the mid-Eighties that there was money to be made from selling off the final slice of the analogue spectrum under a nation-wide terrestrial licence.

To the TV industry, however, this slice looked suspiciously like damaged goods. Firstly, there were technical limitations which meant that whoever got the licence would only be able to reach 85 per cent of the UK population at most; and secondly, millions of video recorders would have to be re-tuned - at the licensee's expense - in order to avoid interference from the new transmissions.

This latter requirement convinced many media observers that the Channel 5 franchise would be a licence to lose money. There were predictions of wholesale burglary and fraud as cowboy technicians gained entrance to the nation's homes under the cover of "re-tuning". It didn't happen, of course, and in fact, what looked like an onerous millstone was turned into a marketing opportunity by the new franchisees - a consortium made up of Lord Hollick's United News and Media Group, the continental media giant RTL and Pearson, owners of the Financial Times and much else besides.

Channel 5 executives saw the retuning requirement as a unique opportunity to establish a distinctive identity and create excitement about the Channel's launch nine months before viewers could even watch it. It was a way of making a virtue of necessity, and it worked.

By September 1996, 94 per cent of the UK knew Channel 5 was coming - a figure that had risen to a remarkable 99 per cent just before the channel went live on 30 March, 1997. Re-tuning the nation's video recorders turned out to be a cinch compared with the challenge of luring 10 per cent of the audience away from the existing terrestrial broadcasters. And here the channel's executives displayed a more erratic touch.

Some things they got right more or less instantly. They decided, for example, that Channel 5 news ought to be brief, hourly, informal and punchy. The newscaster would perch on a desk, not sit behind it. The language would be direct and unpatronising.

And they delivered - with the result that many viewers, frustrated by the long gaps between news on the main channels, often tuned in to Channel 5 just to get updates.

Similarly, the channel's schedulers spotted a gap in the daytime terrestrial market which others had unaccountably missed: the demand for films in the afternoon.

They occasionally commissioned and screened distinctive documentaries, such as illuminating profile of John Prescott, which were unlike anything shown elsewhere. And they experimented creatively with realistic genres, such as Family Affairs, and wacky American soaps.

But these were exceptions which tended to prove the rule that Channel 5 programming in the early years tended to be derivative, inexpensive and, well, tacky.

It was, for example, the first channel to screen a nude game show. And perhaps its biggest innovation was to become the first terrestrial channel to use the screening of soft porn as a marketing strategy.

Viewers whose notions of broadcasting taste and decency had been shaped by decades of regulators and the Nanny State would have been staggered to see what Channel 5 thought suitable for public display in the small hours of the morning, both in terms of fictional material and cod documentaries about the minutiae of the porn business (which, of course, had to show film sequences just to illustrate the points being made).

HL Mencken used to say that nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the public, and Channel 5's first half-decade seems to have confirmed that. The channel has cornered five per cent of the TV audience, and on good nights recently has been doing considerably better. The 3F formula ("football, films and f***ing") appeared to be working. Why, then, are Channel 5 executives now earnestly declaring that they want to put the past behind them and raise the quality of the output, especially when advertisers are telling them that they like the male audiences pulled in by the porn?

The answer is that they cannot get the audience share up to the 10 per cent demanded by their owners without going upmarket.

"We have got away from an image we had a few years back of being tacky and downmarket," says Kevin Lygo, Channel 5's new director of programmes. "That has changed - arts in prime time, documentaries at 8pm - all this means we are not a channel that is to be in any way avoided. It does take a while. But there hasn't been any more adult programming than on any other channel for quite a while."

(Which is a bit rich, given that the channel's website devotes a whole "members only" section to its Xrated shows.)

Mr Lygo has grandly declared his intention of turning his schedules into a version of "Channel 4 without the boring bits". He has been buying classy US series, such as CSI, and even went within a whisker of landing The Simpsons.

All of which indicates that his real aim is not to steal Channel 4's thunder, but to pick the juicy bits from the carcass of a disintegrating ITV1. And given the parlous state of that network, who is to say he might not succeed?

In its first five years, Channel 5 has already proved to be a good investment for its owners. If Mr Lygo gets what he wants, it could turn into a goldmine.