Channel 4's chief creative officer on why she believes Benefits Street was public service broadcasting at its best
Channel 4 will blast into space on Sunday when it orbits the world live from the International Space Station. It will make a welcome change for the broadcaster which spent much of last year under a cloud, not above them.
Channel 4's chief creative officer, Jay Hunt, admits 2013 was "tough in lots of ways", not least the 11.4% drop in its audience share and the employment tribunal which branded her "disingenuous".
But Hunt is looking forward, not back, and says this week's Channel 4 schedule, which includes the Winter Paralympics, the new series of Gogglebox, the Cheltenham Gold Cup and yesterday's climax to Crufts, makes it "probably the most exhilarating week since I have been at Channel 4".
In the controversial documentary series Benefits Street, she had the most talked-about show of the year. Hunt describes the series, which generated more than 1,800 complaints to Channel 4 and Ofcom and is now being investigated by the media regulator, as "absolutely the sweet spot of public service broadcasting at its best".
"It's a perfect Channel 4 show," she says. "It engaged a huge audience and got millions of people thinking about the welfare state and people at the bottom of society. I don't think Channel 4 has ever mattered more. It is exactly what we should be doing."
Ofcom will investigate whether the programme was unfair to contributors and did not do enough to protect children. One resident, White Dee, told Newsnight last week that residents went "absolutely mad" when they found out, two weeks before broadcast, it would be called Benefits Street.
Hunt is unapologetic about the title. "It's a fair reflection of the street," she says. "Most people on that street were living on some kind of benefit and in that sense it's factually accurate. I don't make any apology that it's a noticeable and noisy title. That's one of the reasons it got the audience it did."
Much of the debate was not about welfare as such, but whether Channel 4 was guilty of so-called "poverty porn". People in Grimsby launched a protest after it was chosen by Channel 4 as the location for the return of its series about unemployed people, Skint. "Inevitably in the aftermath of Benefits Street these pieces are going to be more complex to deliver," says Hunt with admirable understatement. "We've got to make sure we are treating the community with respect and it is a fair reflection of the way they live."
A second series of Benefits Street is also in the pipeline, with Hunt hopeful of generating national debates about immigration and the NHS. Critics said Channel 4 should turn its attention away from the unemployed and towards City bonus culture or corporate tax avoidance. Hunt counters by saying it does that all the time, on Channel 4 News and Dispatches.
Whatever its merits, Benefits Street put Channel 4 at the heart of the national conversation, a place it has not occupied for some time. Gogglebox, which consists entirely of people watching TV, was another breakout hit. And while two shows do not constitute a revival, Hunt points to last week's Royal Television Society nominations as further evidence, with Channel 4's 19 nods (from Dogging Tales and Educating Yorkshire to Olivia Colman drama Run and French import The Returned) more than any other broadcaster.
And yet the Big Brother-shaped hole in its schedule (all 200 hours of it) remains, with returnable entertainment hits thin on the ground. Its celebrity winter sports show The Jump (like ITV's Splash!, but with more broken bones) was "the first time we have had a big pre-watershed hit for quite a long time," says Hunt, who is keen to bring it back. "It's hard to think what is our pre-watershed tone of voice," she adds. "There is a gravitational pull at 4 towards the edgy, the difficult and the rude. To have found a show that could serve a family audience and get the figures it did was really important."
Despite the boost to its peaktime audience from Benefits Street, which had a consolidated average of 5.9 million viewers, Channel 4's all-day share of the audience is down 4% year on year, partly as a result of BBC2's boost from the Winter Olympics. "I knew when I arrived it was going to be difficult. You are not going to wake up one day and think we fixed it," says Hunt, who has endured no shortage of criticism in the three years since she took charge of Channel 4.
The day after she arrived, in January 2011, Miriam O'Reilly won her age discrimination case against the BBC after she was dropped from Countryfile when Hunt was still controller of BBC1. The case came back to bite Hunt in last year's age discrimination claim by John McCririck after he was axed from Channel 4's racing coverage. McCririck lost the case but the tribunal panel criticised Hunt as "disingenuous in the extreme" for saying she had "personally" apologised to O'Reilly. In fact, she had made an "expression of regret" in a Guardian interview.
"I completely stand by what I said," says Hunt. "It ultimately became a semantic debate about when you say 'regret', does it or does it not mean 'sorry'. It's pretty small fry, this stuff." But it can't have been easy going through two tribunals and being accused of being a "serial age discriminator", which Hunt denied. "Yeah, but we won."
Hunt has been accused by producers of "micromanaging", tinkering with programmes and their scheduling, and there was the infamous leaving party held by Channel 4's former comedy chief Shane Allen, before he joined the BBC in 2012, when he handed out balloons and T-shirts emblazoned with "end the Hunt".
"I have run channels for eight years, you just take the rough with the smooth," says Hunt. "You are an obvious and conspicuous leader of a channel and people will take potshots at you and you have to become quite sanguine about that. It's very difficult for me to have as many fingers in as many pies as people imply. Of course I have a view on the big pieces but I simply haven't got time to be all over the detail of everything. My job is focusing on the strategic direction of where we are going to be in 2015, 2016, not what we are putting on the telly tomorrow."
Although Hostages only had a shadow of the impact of its fellow US drama Homeland, Hunt can expect to make a bigger splash with her latest acquisition Fargo, the FX adaptation of the Coen brothers' film starring Martin Freeman and Billy Bob Thornton which will air on Channel 4 in the spring. Hunt describes it as a "perfect Channel 4 show".
Also coming up this year are new dramas from Russell T Davies (in a season about being gay in Britain today) and Paul Abbott, and the return of Danny Boyle's Babylon, plus a second series of Dennis Kelly's Utopia and Matt Berry's comedy, Toast of London.
But there are challenges ahead, not least for independent producers who are being asked to shave 2-3% off their budgets of returning C4 shows. "We are looking to drive efficiencies for the simple reason we are trying to get more original programming on air," Hunt confirms. She expects her budget (a record £434m on homegrown content in 2012) to be "broadly stable".
But for now Hunt's attention is turning to the heavens and Live From Space, the 17,500mph trip around the world which will be presented by (an earth-bound) Dermot O'Leary. It is apt to ask about the bigger picture in the broadcaster's 32nd year. "Channel 4 can still play a really important role in showing what it is like to live on the edge of society, whether it is because of your sexuality or ethnicity or class," says Hunt. "That sense of being a home for different voices matters more than ever." Reported by guardian.co.uk 1 day ago.
Channel 4 will blast into space on Sunday when it orbits the world live from the International Space Station. It will make a welcome change for the broadcaster which spent much of last year under a cloud, not above them.
Channel 4's chief creative officer, Jay Hunt, admits 2013 was "tough in lots of ways", not least the 11.4% drop in its audience share and the employment tribunal which branded her "disingenuous".
But Hunt is looking forward, not back, and says this week's Channel 4 schedule, which includes the Winter Paralympics, the new series of Gogglebox, the Cheltenham Gold Cup and yesterday's climax to Crufts, makes it "probably the most exhilarating week since I have been at Channel 4".
In the controversial documentary series Benefits Street, she had the most talked-about show of the year. Hunt describes the series, which generated more than 1,800 complaints to Channel 4 and Ofcom and is now being investigated by the media regulator, as "absolutely the sweet spot of public service broadcasting at its best".
"It's a perfect Channel 4 show," she says. "It engaged a huge audience and got millions of people thinking about the welfare state and people at the bottom of society. I don't think Channel 4 has ever mattered more. It is exactly what we should be doing."
Ofcom will investigate whether the programme was unfair to contributors and did not do enough to protect children. One resident, White Dee, told Newsnight last week that residents went "absolutely mad" when they found out, two weeks before broadcast, it would be called Benefits Street.
Hunt is unapologetic about the title. "It's a fair reflection of the street," she says. "Most people on that street were living on some kind of benefit and in that sense it's factually accurate. I don't make any apology that it's a noticeable and noisy title. That's one of the reasons it got the audience it did."
Much of the debate was not about welfare as such, but whether Channel 4 was guilty of so-called "poverty porn". People in Grimsby launched a protest after it was chosen by Channel 4 as the location for the return of its series about unemployed people, Skint. "Inevitably in the aftermath of Benefits Street these pieces are going to be more complex to deliver," says Hunt with admirable understatement. "We've got to make sure we are treating the community with respect and it is a fair reflection of the way they live."
A second series of Benefits Street is also in the pipeline, with Hunt hopeful of generating national debates about immigration and the NHS. Critics said Channel 4 should turn its attention away from the unemployed and towards City bonus culture or corporate tax avoidance. Hunt counters by saying it does that all the time, on Channel 4 News and Dispatches.
Whatever its merits, Benefits Street put Channel 4 at the heart of the national conversation, a place it has not occupied for some time. Gogglebox, which consists entirely of people watching TV, was another breakout hit. And while two shows do not constitute a revival, Hunt points to last week's Royal Television Society nominations as further evidence, with Channel 4's 19 nods (from Dogging Tales and Educating Yorkshire to Olivia Colman drama Run and French import The Returned) more than any other broadcaster.
And yet the Big Brother-shaped hole in its schedule (all 200 hours of it) remains, with returnable entertainment hits thin on the ground. Its celebrity winter sports show The Jump (like ITV's Splash!, but with more broken bones) was "the first time we have had a big pre-watershed hit for quite a long time," says Hunt, who is keen to bring it back. "It's hard to think what is our pre-watershed tone of voice," she adds. "There is a gravitational pull at 4 towards the edgy, the difficult and the rude. To have found a show that could serve a family audience and get the figures it did was really important."
Despite the boost to its peaktime audience from Benefits Street, which had a consolidated average of 5.9 million viewers, Channel 4's all-day share of the audience is down 4% year on year, partly as a result of BBC2's boost from the Winter Olympics. "I knew when I arrived it was going to be difficult. You are not going to wake up one day and think we fixed it," says Hunt, who has endured no shortage of criticism in the three years since she took charge of Channel 4.
The day after she arrived, in January 2011, Miriam O'Reilly won her age discrimination case against the BBC after she was dropped from Countryfile when Hunt was still controller of BBC1. The case came back to bite Hunt in last year's age discrimination claim by John McCririck after he was axed from Channel 4's racing coverage. McCririck lost the case but the tribunal panel criticised Hunt as "disingenuous in the extreme" for saying she had "personally" apologised to O'Reilly. In fact, she had made an "expression of regret" in a Guardian interview.
"I completely stand by what I said," says Hunt. "It ultimately became a semantic debate about when you say 'regret', does it or does it not mean 'sorry'. It's pretty small fry, this stuff." But it can't have been easy going through two tribunals and being accused of being a "serial age discriminator", which Hunt denied. "Yeah, but we won."
Hunt has been accused by producers of "micromanaging", tinkering with programmes and their scheduling, and there was the infamous leaving party held by Channel 4's former comedy chief Shane Allen, before he joined the BBC in 2012, when he handed out balloons and T-shirts emblazoned with "end the Hunt".
"I have run channels for eight years, you just take the rough with the smooth," says Hunt. "You are an obvious and conspicuous leader of a channel and people will take potshots at you and you have to become quite sanguine about that. It's very difficult for me to have as many fingers in as many pies as people imply. Of course I have a view on the big pieces but I simply haven't got time to be all over the detail of everything. My job is focusing on the strategic direction of where we are going to be in 2015, 2016, not what we are putting on the telly tomorrow."
Although Hostages only had a shadow of the impact of its fellow US drama Homeland, Hunt can expect to make a bigger splash with her latest acquisition Fargo, the FX adaptation of the Coen brothers' film starring Martin Freeman and Billy Bob Thornton which will air on Channel 4 in the spring. Hunt describes it as a "perfect Channel 4 show".
Also coming up this year are new dramas from Russell T Davies (in a season about being gay in Britain today) and Paul Abbott, and the return of Danny Boyle's Babylon, plus a second series of Dennis Kelly's Utopia and Matt Berry's comedy, Toast of London.
But there are challenges ahead, not least for independent producers who are being asked to shave 2-3% off their budgets of returning C4 shows. "We are looking to drive efficiencies for the simple reason we are trying to get more original programming on air," Hunt confirms. She expects her budget (a record £434m on homegrown content in 2012) to be "broadly stable".
But for now Hunt's attention is turning to the heavens and Live From Space, the 17,500mph trip around the world which will be presented by (an earth-bound) Dermot O'Leary. It is apt to ask about the bigger picture in the broadcaster's 32nd year. "Channel 4 can still play a really important role in showing what it is like to live on the edge of society, whether it is because of your sexuality or ethnicity or class," says Hunt. "That sense of being a home for different voices matters more than ever." Reported by guardian.co.uk 1 day ago.