Jade Goody - the face of the new Channel 4? Photograph: Timothy Anderson/PA
Next month, the new series of Channel 4's Celebrity Wife Swap will show what happened when Vanessa Feltz visited Paul Daniels' extremely cream Thames-side mansion. Never since Oscar Madison moved into Felix Unger's apartment has there been an odder couple. She asks questions; he doesn't. She likes clubbing; he prefers an early night. He loves magic tricks; she couldn't give a rat's ass about them. Just one problem: on Channel 4's preview DVD there is a terrible screeching noise. It sounds just like someone - the director, possibly - scraping a barrel. I've got used to that noise recently. I heard it when Channel 4 scheduled a so-called "wank week", a season of masturbation-themed programmes, and last month - if this isn't the wrong verb - pulled it. I heard it last month when the presenter of Channel 4's You Are What You Eat, Gillian McKeith, a self-styled straight-talking nutritionist better known as the Awful Poo Lady, dropped her "doctor" title from an ad campaign after a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority. I heard it when Richard and Judy were sucked into the interactive TV scandal, facing allegations that viewers were encouraged to keep calling at £1 a time, even though contestants for the You Say We Pay competition had already been chosen. And only last week I heard it on Ten Years Younger, when Nicky Hambleton-Jones yanked yet another putatively plug-ugly shopper off the streets of Britain for face-time with a surgeon's knife.
There was, one might think, more scraping earlier this month with The Great Global Warming Swindle, by director Martin Durkin. Among those queueing up to attack the show was one of the scientists whose views the show purported to represent. Carl Wunsch, professor of physical oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claimed his remarks had been distorted and that the results were "as close to pure propaganda as anything since world war two". "This seems like a deliberate attempt to exploit someone who is on the other side of the issue," he said. Wunsch is reportedly considering a complaint to the broadcasting regulator Ofcom.
Durkin, whose 1997 Channel 4 series Against Nature, which compared environmentalists to Nazis, was damned by the Independent Television Commission for selective editing, has defended his use of Wunsch's interview. The journalist Maggie Brown, whose history of Channel 4 will be published in September, believes the programme was "legitimate ... You can read the consensus view everywhere. Why not have your brain cells challenged?" But such views seem to be in the minority. "The channel has lost its soul," says Anthony Smith, one of Channel 4's founders. "So when it does something like this, it looks like opportunism."
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