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A while ago, I did a little thought experiment where I chose a random month - Feb 1992 - to see how the range/type of subjects covered on British TV at the time compared to now. I did BBC2 - below - and have finally accessed Channel 4's listings, so ... https://twitter.com/zinovievletter/status/1178784994136875009
What was on Channel 4 in Feb 1992, and how does it compare to the present? There was plenty of popular entertainment: Brookside, Tonight w/Jonathan Ross, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, The Word, Vic Reeves' Big Night Out, The Crystal Maze, Home Improvements, Gamesmaster, Countdown ...
New comedy such as Drop the Dead Donkey and The Jack Dee Show; the regular Dispatches strand; children's comedy-drama Press Gang, carried over from ITV; and lots of US/Aus imports - Cheers, Happy Days, Oprah Winfrey, Little House on the Prairie ...
They broadcast a lot of films, with fewer non-English, queer or experimental ones than I'd remembered. They found room for Jarman's Angelic Conversation (1985) soundtracked by Coil; La Cage aux Folles (1978); and Ealing classics including It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) ...
A French-Canadian film called Sonatine (1984) in their World Cinema series, and a Peter Sellers retrospective that included Richard Lester's experimental comic short The Running Jumping Standing Still Film (1959) https://archive.org/details/therunningjumpingandstandingstillfilm
They sometimes put short films on between programmes, such as Len Lye's Trade Tattoo (1937), a Hungarian animation called Gustav Stays In Bed, a Bulgarian cartoon and a Belgian short called La Femme de Papier
They showed foreign documentaries: Lasse Hallström's 1977 film about Abba; Gillian Armstrong's 'Bingo, Bridesmaids and Braces' about working-class women in Adelaide; and Jeanine Meerapfel's When Memory Speaks (1986), which sounds fascinating http://www.meerapfel.de/n/E-DESEMBARCOS.html
They had an interesting (pre-internet) relationship with old TV: Monty Python precursor At Last The 1948 Show; a Hindu series called The Sword of Tipu Sultan; a repeat and update of their own 1980s 'Women Like Us' documentary about older lesbians
In the TV Heaven strand, they repeated and reassessed things from a single year. 1963 featured episodes of The Avengers and TW3, and Harold Pinter's TV play The Lover. The 1974 one included This Week, on the National Front before that year's election
There were plenty of shows designed to find new talents, too. She Play, showcasing one-off dramas by writers new to TV; Just for Laughs ft. contemporary comedians including Bill Hicks; 291 Club, auditioning and screening new talent at the Hackney Empire in east London ...
The ten-part Russian New Music series, ft. Vyacheslav Ganelin, Archangelsk and others; Scottish Eye, showcasing TV journalism made in Scotland; and The Secret Cabaret, fronted by magician Simon Drake (which was genuinely popular - 2.5m viewers) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Cabaret
In the arts, Burning Books covered Latin American short fiction, Carl Hiassen and Jonathan Miller alongside Jeffrey Archer; Opera on 4 showed Prokofiev's War and Peace; Derek Bailey wrote and produced a four-part series, On the Edge: Improvisation in Music https://blogthehum.com/2016/02/10/derek-baileys-on-the-edge-improvisation-in-music-1234/
For all the whiny fascist pissbabies moaning about pop culture being too PC, C4 catered more for minorities in 1992 than now, with three regular series aimed at the deaf (especially children), one of which was devoted to arts access, and weekly coverage of wheelchair basketball.
They had TV documentaries on female environmentalists in the Amazon; an ecology strand called Fragile Earth; The Germans, a four-part series about post-unification politics; Priests of Passion, on priests' love lives; and an alternative travel show ft. Roger McGough and others
Robert Llewellyn did a comic lecture about male sexuality; Third Wave with Mavis Nicholson went to Mexico for Day of the Dead; Letters from St Petersburg looked at life there just after the end of the USSR; there was a documentary on photographer/communist activist Tina Modotti.
As well as daily schools programming, the documentary series Class Action explored the effects of government cuts to education - class sizes in particular. There were two documentaries on corporate fraud: the Barlow Clowes affair ... https://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/feb/07/barlow-clowes-declared-closed-compensation
David Frost's old interview with Sri Lanka swindler Emil Savundra.
The Without Walls series brought together Stuart Hall, Salman Rushdie and Alain Finkelkraut to discuss the implications of 'the End of History'; another episode had Clive James, playwright Masakazu Yamazaki and philosopher Akira Asada considering Japan's economic rise.
If all this wasn't diverse enough, the Free For All slot encouraged viewers to write in with news, current affairs or human interest stories that C4 might have missed. This kind of participation wasn't typical, and there were plenty of less interesting things being shown ...
What might the last few years of UK politics have been like with a more democratic spirit in our media? Which stories would have captured the public imagination, and would there have been more accountability for dishonesty and corruption?
As @GreavesIan points out, C4 became a corporation in 1993, making it more commercial. Still, it's quite a leap from there to some of the more stupid and spiteful elements of its 21st century programming, covered here by @jasebyjason for @tribunemagazine https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/06/the-blair-show
