It’s one of those birthdays destined to shock, like the infant child of a distant cousin suddenly turning 16. Where did the time go?
So brace yourself: Channel 5 is 20 years old. I know – how did that happen? True, it spent much of that time being called Five, but apart from the rebranding – and the subsequent de-rebranding – it’s been with us, all day, every day, since Easter Sunday 1997. You might think that congratulations are in order, but where would you send the telegram? Do you even remember who owns Channel 5 these days?
As with that child of a distant cousin, a lot of us check in with Channel 5 only sporadically, so that any changes to its schedule seem sweeping and radical. Even in the three years since Richard Desmond sold the channel to Viacom (I know, it was on the tip of your tongue), it has been steadily mutating. Gone are the days when it simply provided a one-stop archive for all your NCIS-related needs. It’s so much more than that now. Where else can you find Nightmare Tenants and Slum Landlords in the same programme?
Perhaps you regard C5 as the televisual equivalent of that tree falling in the forest: does it still make noise, even when no one is watching? But, of course, we all watch it. It may not be a destination channel as such, but if you have an urge to spend an afternoon in front of six back-to-back episodes of Can’t Pay? We’ll Take It Away, only C5 can help you. The prevailing attribute of the typical C5 viewer is sloth: a show called Budgies Make You Laugh Out Loud is clearly aimed at an audience too lazy to navigate YouTube. Pets Who Hate Vets must be watched exclusively by people who can’t find their remotes.
In the early days, former C5 chief executive Dawn Airey famously summed up the channel’s remit as “films, football and fucking”. If only it could have lived up to that lofty mission. These days its output is more bollocks, benefits cheats and Big Brother. After the latter was finally euthanised by Channel 4 in 2011, C5 got itself a reputation as a sort of TV purgatory, where spent formats go to die – and then don’t. Neighbours lives on there, although a failure to negotiate a new deal may see the Australian soap axed after 31 years. Recently it’s been announced that the channel is to resurrect the moribund Blind Date.
Twenty years on, one forgets quite how inauspicious the whole launch was. When it first started transmitting only about 70% of the country could receive the new channel. People had to get their video recorders retuned so they wouldn’t interfere with the signal. Imagine being one of those excited viewers who splashed out on a new aerial for the occasion.
On that Easter Sunday at teatime, 2.49 million people tuned in to watch a launch programme called This Is Five! in which the Spice Girls made an appearance. Ratings fell off immediately afterward. There was a disappointing soap called Family Affairs (Idris Elba was in it) that limped on, improbably, until 2005. At one point, they killed the entire original family in a boat explosion. It didn’t help.
The response to Channel 5’s nightly chat flagship, The Jack Docherty Show, was so underwhelming that ratings actually rose when guest hosts filled in for its star. One of them, Graham Norton, won a British comedy award for best newcomer for his summer stand-in work. Norton got a C4 show out of it. Docherty got canned.
There may have been some high points in the channel’s 20-year history, but its reputation is indelibly associated with the low points. No one remembers the nature documentaries; everybody remembers Keith Chegwin naked. In fact, his naturist assault-course game show, The Naked Jungle, was a record ratings winner for C5. Everybody dimly recalls someone called Rebecca Loos masturbating a pig in the deservedly short-lived reality series The Farm. People still remember Touch the Truck, even if nobody actually saw it.
There are certainly people in the UK who have been on Channel 5 more often than they’ve watched it. For a long time its schedule was so heavily weighted with cheap-clips-and-talking-heads countdown shows that there can hardly be a comedian, entertainment journalist or has-been reality star alive who hasn’t perched before a camera in a hotel suite saying the same stupid thing 12 times while trying to figure out how to frame a question about money.
It’s not been all bad. Channel 5 has managed to contribute some staples to our televisual diet. The three hours of Milkshake every weekday may be the best morning show on terrestrial TV, whether you’re a child or not. The Wright Stuff remains as durable a daytime talk fixture as anything out there. It’s got the Gadget Show and the cricket highlights.
After 20 years, C5 is also doing something it never used to do: it is making money. Its lifespan may have uncomfortably straddled the transition from old-school aerials to streaming, but the channel has reported two consecutive years of operating profit for the first time. What it will look like in two decades’ time, nobody knows. But it will almost certainly still be around.
