72 dots

Channel 4 have just opened their eagerly-awaited 4IP fund. It’s an important moment.

Why? Firstly, it’s a big pot of cash (although smaller than we hoped). It’s a new funding model for C4, where, instead of commissioning projects, it supports them with equity investment. It reaches out to everyone, not just an elite of programme makers. And finally, it’s asking for completely new kinds of ideas, the kind that it’s hard even to associate with a television channel.

Matt Locke

My first inkling of the fund was when I spoke to Matt Locke soon after he had joined Channel 4. He had been appointed to the Education Dept, which was frustrated that it had been making good programmes for teenagers which they didn’t watch. Matt explained that they were abandoning TV and putting the whole budget into online.

— The whole lot? I said.
— Yes, he said. We’ve got six million pounds.

This seemed extraordinarily bold. I quickly started to think how we could help him spend it.

— So you’d like ideas?
— Lots of them, he said.
— For the website?

He looked disparaging.

— We want to go where people are, he said. Facebook, IM, text. We want to engage them. We want to touch their lives.
— With a nice Channel 4 logo? I said, helpfully.
— No, he said. Not Channel 4 branded. Under the radar. Cultural interventions.

This blew my mind. Channel 4 is an institution which brands everything it touches. Only The Guardian has been greedier in annexing our culture to its brand. And now it was going anonymous? With “cultural interventions”? Not programmes? Not informational websites? Not even ‘360 programming’?

Here was a channel which had been founded to explore minority interests and experimental television, and had ended up twenty years later sticking a C4 logo on Desperate Housewives. Channel 4’s journey has been a strange one, and in some ways a story of the times. This was a real twist in the tale.

Tornados and Power-ups

Matt gave examples of the kind of projects he admired, like World Without Oil. I started to understand what he meant. WWO was an online game which simulated the beginnings of a global oil crisis. Americans playing the game visited the website to see video reports of the crisis developing, and then reported back on how it was affecting their lives. It was a consensual hallucination.

Over 1900 people signed up as players of World Without Oil, and submitted over 1500 stories from inside the “global oil crisis of 2007.” Their work comprises a rich, complex, and eerily plausible collective imagining of such an event, complete with practical courses of action to help prevent such an event from actually happening.

What a great idea! And it offers its own possible future, one where we use simulation to understand the complexity of the world, where we learn through engagement, where storytelling and action allow us to feel problems as well as understand them.

For these people and over 60,000 active observers, the process of collectively imagining and collaboratively chronicling the oil shock brought strong insight about oil dependency and energy policy. More than mere “raising awareness,” WWO made the issues real, and this in turn led to real engagement and real change in people’s lives.

This was what Matt wanted. I wanted it too — certainly more than I wanted Desperate Housewives. It felt like Channel 4 was returning to its original values, and yet taking a direction which could see its original role entirely disappear.

Public service publishing

And now we have 4IP, which from where I’m standing, is this vision given weight. The Education and New Media Dept have kicked off some very interesting projects in the past twelve months, but 4IP is a national statement.

The question is — will it stick? Or will it be like Dragon’s Den, where a few ideas get a wave of the wad, and even those get mired in due diligence and funding hassles. Our first contact with Matt was through the BBC Innovation Lab, a thoroughly exciting initiative in the same mould as 4IP. But for many of us, the promise outstripped the reality as our projects became stranded in development hell. It’s really hard to nurture ideas, and if the executive and marketing-led interference which has characterised C4’s approach to TV development is placed on Tom Loosemore at 4IP, then I suspect he’ll soon be moving on.

I really hope not, and I really hope the fund flourishes and scatters “power-ups” and “tornados” (Matt’s words) across our cultural landscape. But to be frank, I don’t think Channel 4 has the guts to follow it through. The organisation is under pressure — ad budgets are dramatically shrinking — and when it’s under pressure an organisation resorts to old habits. So expect to see pressure on the fund for big hits, for brand awareness, for reach among its target demographics. And when that happens, Tom and Matt will walk, as they walked from the BBC before.

To be continued

Would that be an unhappy ending? For Channel 4, yes. Because it will have lost a rare opportunity to reinvent itself into a unique 21C cultural institution. Creating a genuinely supportive culture of innovation is hard, and to succeed it needs to run through an organisation like letters through rock. The innovators have been brought in, but I think this vision is their vision, and it’s for Channel 4 to do the hard thing and make it theirs too.