There's a simple and long-established process for publicising television shows. The best stories within a documentary are offered to newspapers as the basis for features, while the most famous or articulate contributors are toured round television and radio studios. We wait for the final line of italic type or announcer's thank you to find out the time and day on which we can satisfy the appetite established. In the last two weeks or so, though, there's been an unexpected twist in this ritual. Hearing or reading Anita Roddick previewing a high-concept documentary in which she lives in various disguises (overweight, homeless), you wonder if it will turn out to be on BBC2 or Channel 4. But the pay-off surprises: it's the Discovery Channel.
Newspaper spreads based on a documentary called Hitler's Britain - imagining this country's architecture if the second world war's outcome had been reversed - were sourced not to ITV, as we might have guessed, but to Channel 5. A widely publicised "interactive soap opera" called Thunder Road, by the playwright John Godber, also turns out to come from further across the broadcast spectrum than we might have expected: BBC4.
If we add The Situation Room - another BBC4 project, in which experts hypothetically manage a world crisis - then it can be argued that the four most original and attractive programmes of the last week came from the least-worn buttons on the remote-control.
While the effect may have been intensified because the established terrestrial quartet of channels starve their schedules in early December in the hope of a fat Christmas, this dominance by minority broadcasters has a much greater significance. If impact is judged by the buzz around programmes, then this was the week when Britain really began to feel like a multi-channel television culture.
At the moment, this new breadth of attention is more media-driven than audience-led, but the announcement that sales of Freeview boxes - the 30-channel digital cooperation between the BBC and Sky - are selling faster than expected suggests that a similar shift is also taking place on the other side of the screen. In addition, BBC4, though still a ratings ripple rather than a tidal-wave, last week achieved its best audience figures since launch.
The publicity side of this transformation results from a formal decision by the press. Commentators on television have tended towards the prejudice - I include myself in this - that the best material was almost bound to be on the four oldest terrestrial channels.
In the last year, experience has questioned this prejudice and there's a clear sense now that TV section editors are dropping the objection that there's no point in publicising series which people can't see. In broadsheet papers, relatively large coverage is given to minority literature and cinema, and this policy of spotlighting content rather than box office now seems to have been extended to television.
In turn, that decision inevitably increases the available audience. In Britain, supply of multi-channel television has always run far in advance of demand. Even well into the second decade of availability, satellite or cable audiences of around a million (generally for big football matches) are exceptional.
Revealingly, The Simpsons, one of the great global viewer-seducers of all time, can bring only around 700,000 viewers on non-traditional channels. Like astrologers and conspiracy theorists, television executives discovered that there are far fewer extra-terrestrials around than they might have hoped. But the respectable beginning of Freeview suggests that British resistance to 100-button television was more financial than cultural.
Admittedly, in other areas of culture, an expansion of outlets has not always been a benefit. Lottery-funding in movies, for example, clearly led to the unwise green-lighting of some projects which had been rejected previously on grounds of quality.
But on television's additional channels, there's commendably little sense of overlooked sell-by dates. BBC4, for example, estimates that only around a 10th of the projects it is now offered have been rejected by other desks. And some pick-up commissions - such as the making of Ian Curteis's The Falklands Play, 20 years after its rejection by the BBC - are clearly justified as historical restitution.
As UK multi-channel viewing developed, there was a fear that the new services would blackmail viewers into using them by moving over shows which were previously available free. When satellite came to Britain, Rupert Murdoch's Sky used football and cricket in just such a way.
But, with the exception of Channel 4's digital spin-off E4 - which has used early screenings of The West Wing and Six Feet Under as a lure - the younger channels more often seem to be screening shows which would not otherwise be seen. And, where transfers have occurred, Channel 5, with its documentaries on art and architectural history - and BBC4's screening of Nicholas Maw's four-hour opera Sophie's Choice - are adopting genres which had been orphaned by the increasing commerciality of the mainstream channels.
When Channel 4 was created 20 years ago, the term "publisher broadcaster" was coined to describe a network which would buy in rather than create its material. Two decades later, British broadcasting is, in a more subtle sense, equivalent to publishing. BBC1 and ITV1 remain the best-selling blockbusters and BBC2 and Channel 4 the upmarket literary stuff, but, with the huge numbers of digital stations available in TV and radio, there are now parallels as well with the brilliant unknown poet who sells 300 copies, the cult book known only to a few and the academic handbook aimed only at a few.
There are still serious questions about how this diversification will be funded and sustained, but the listings pages and the sales of Freeview suggest that multi-channel viewing has found a new power.
