1993
Compiled by Steve Williams, Ian Jones and Jack Kibble-White
First published November 2002
Debuts
January …
Jonathan Ross opened up the Saturday Zoo with regulars including Steve Coogan and Denis Leary … Fragile Earth: Tears of the Dragon studied China’s wildlife, with a foreign crew allowed in the country for the first time … future Big Brother producer Philip Edgar-Jones, Tania Guha and someone called Johnny Vaughan launched Moviewatch … animal and human sexuality was compared in The Sexual Imperative … and Paula Yates presented 10 minutes of teatime romance in The Wednesday Weepie.
February …
Emma Freud discussed health issues in The Pulse … Tim Hincks examined The Secret Life Of office furniture such as the fax and photocopier … Roger Graef recorded life in Wandsworth Prison in Turning the Screw … Darcus Howe played Devil’s Advocate … while Dennis Potter’s Lipstick On Your Collar began.
March …
Harry Enfield’s Guide to Opera tried to bring the art to the masses, though oddly each episode was screened six days earlier on Yorkshire TV … Mary Goldring gave the UK’s privatised utilities The Goldring Audit … and the teatime slot paid a visit to Eerie, Indiana.
April …
Sophie Grigson was in the garden for Grow Your Greens on Friday nights, then on Wednesday moved into the kitchen to Eat Your Greens … David Jessel and his Rough Justice team switched to C4 to produce Trial and Error … Naked Sport examined the sports business in the USA … Viva Cabaret mixed comedy and music in a nightclub setting and saw early appearances for Harry Hill and Lee Evans among others … while The Golden Girls relocated to The Golden Palace.
May …
Alan Bennett examined the inter-war years in The Long Summer.
June …
Lynda La Plante’s Comics was based on the career of a stand-up comedian, with routines written by Mark Thomas and Jenny Eclair … Glaswegian Bruce Morton got his own stand-up series, Sin … 1950s deep South was the setting for I’ll Fly Away … and MTV’s The Real World made its first appearance.
July …
Frank Finlay starred in the drama An Exchange of Fire, partly filmed in Prague … from the makers of The South Bank Show, Opening Shot took a youthful look at the arts … the dance scene was covered in Hypnosis … while Caitlin Moran and Johnny Vaughan presented Naked City.
August …
Anglia Television’s Go Fishing got a network outing … Jack Docherty and Moray Hunter were Mr Don and Mr George … and after the success of Orchestra!, Dudley Moore fronted Concerto!
September …
Screaming Reels was the second angling series in as many months … The World Chess Championships were covered by both C4 and BBC2, with Carol Vorderman presenting on C4 … American football got a new look with the magazine Trash Talk … Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City were serialised … while Jean-Paul Gaultier and Antione de Caunes presented Eurotrash.
October …
Archive footage was revoiced to chronicle The Almost Complete History of the 20th Century … Jim Henson Productions were behind Sunday morning’s Dog City … and after a Christmas special, the first series of Rory Bremner … Who Else? began.
November …
New directors got a break in the Short Stories strand … Sandi Toksvig looked at communication in The Talking Show … while the acclaimed Homicide: Life on the Street debuted in the UK.
December …
Jo Brand Through the Cakehole began with a festive special; a series followed in April.
Finales
Cheers
After 10 years as a staple of Friday nights, C4′s longest-running comedy series came to an end. Anxious to make the most of it, the channel screened the final three episodes on consecutive nights, concluding with the 90-minute finale on Sunday 13 June. But even that wasn’t the end of it as a repeat run started the following Friday and ran for the rest of the year. Throughout its life, Cheers had never been less than entertaining, and left a bit of a hole in C4′s American sitcom collection – The Golden Palace was a flop both here and in the USA, Nurses and Home Improvement never made the grade, and The Cosby Show was also about to end (on 2 January 1994). Indeed it wasn’t for another year that a US sitcom of similar stature was found to join Roseanne, and it came from the same producers. With Frasier, C4 managed to find a sitcom that was perhaps even more popular and influential than the programme it span off from.
Misc …
A staple of weekends for many years, Saved By The Bell moved from TV-am in January … 12 – 14 February was designated Love Weekend with Nina Myskow and Richard Jobson introducing such delights as The Naked Chat Show from the Windmill Theatre, as well as the part-animated sitcom Nights and special editions of The Word and Saturday Zoo … March’s Gimme Shelter season featured Cathy Come Home and the spoof quiz for the homeless, Come On Down and Out … Derek Jarman’s Blue was premiered in September, without commercial breaks … a Saturday night in December devoted eight hours to The Velvet Underground, linked by Debbie Harry … Christmas in New York included Camp Christmas, a party where all the guests were gay, RuPaul’s Christmas Ball and Beeban Kidron’s Hookers, Hustlers, Pimps and Their Johns … while Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Chekov’s Swan Song on Christmas Day and Tim Allen Rewires America four days later both got viewing figures so low they were rounded down to zero.
On Screen
Chris Evans
Evans was a man who literally found fame overnight. He was well-known in the London area for his quirky radio shows on GLR, but his only significant TV appearances had been on BSB’s Power Station channel, which nobody watched, and TV-am’s Saturday morning show TV MAYhem in 1991, intended as a 40-part series but axed after six. However The Big Breakfast turned out to be the ideal format for him, and he played a huge part in the show’s success. In 1993 it was certainly the nation’s favourite way to wake up – helped in part by the teething troubles of GMTV – and Evans was one of the most sought-after talents around. Few people seemed as relaxed and none as consistently imaginative while fronting 10 hours of live television a week. Regular features such as Invention Corner, Anorak of the Week and Master Blaster got everyone talking in school playgrounds and offices during the day, and his appearances with Zig and Zag produced sublime moments of comedy. C4 quickly signed him up on a long-term deal to front a gameshow idea he’d been developing, as well as continuing on The Big Breakfast, but he was never as popular and as creative as he was during that first year or so at Lock Keepers’ Cottages.
Eurotrash
There was a point in the mid-’90s when Rapido TV appeared to make almost every programme on Channel 4, but this early success remains, perhaps, its most famous creation, overshadowing even the programme that gave the company its name. When Eurotrash launched in September, it seemed a fairly unappealing format – Jean-Paul Gaultier and Antoine De Caunes introducing leftover “freak show” features from The Word, while speaking in Franglais in daft outfits in front of cheap backdrops. But it was all done with so much charm that it was hard to take offence to it, and indeed even managed to endear itself to an audience who would never normally be watching Channel 4 late on a Friday night. The departure of Gaultier in 1996 didn’t harm its viewing figures, and indeed, the show managed to go from strength to strength, becoming a schedule staple for many years to come. While other shows in the Friday night spot (The Girlie Show, Something For the Weekend) just seemed to make sex seemed a bit boring, Eurotrash managed to make even the most bizarre individual seem inoffensive and amusing.
Off Screen
• C4 began to sell its own advertising from 1 January. Previously this had been the job of the ITV companies, but now the broadcaster was self-financing – something which allowed it to cut most of its ties with its commercial neighbour, although athletics meetings were shown on both channels for one more year.
• Smashie and Nicey fronted the first Late Licence on 19 November, a mix of repeats (including The Word and Saturday Zoo), films and new programmes (like Herman’s Head) that saw the channel run until around 5am on Friday and Saturday nights.
Four-Words
“The Big Breakfast worries me – in fact it is the most worrying thing I have ever seen on television and if this is an indication of what to expect in the future, then the future looks pretty gloomy.”
- Sandi Toksvig
“The arrival of The Big Breakfast sums up the decline of Channel 4. When it started I was in my twenties and thought, here at last is something I could watch that didn’t remind me of my parents, but now it has the worst bits of all the other channels.”
- Julie Burchill
“Good programming will come when people deliberately take risks in both topic and treatment. In other words to fly in the faith of accepted wisdom. You have to work at it because it doesn’t just happen. On the other hand, it has to survive and sell its own airtime. The challenge is balancing both of those things.”
- Jeremy Isaacs
My Favourite Channel 4 Moment …
The Word (1991)
For me, this was a truly amazing piece of television. The Word – post pub television often at its very worst, was the provider of the moment in question. We had witnessed the irritation that is Terry Christian, the dimness of Dani Behr and – thank the Lord – the saving grace of Katie Puckrick, but when Nirvana appeared towards the end of the show in 1991, great TV took place.
Those of us who had already caught a glimpse of the collective genius of Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl knew we were in for a treat, having seen the video for Smells Like Teen Spirit on MTV. Booked by then researcher Jo Whiley to appear on the show, Nirvana took to the stage with Cobain already every inch the superstar he was about to become. Before they launched into the now familiarly spiky riff to Teen Spirit, Kurt opened his mouth and said: “I’d just like to say that my girlfriend, Courtney Love, of the sensational band Hole, is the greatest fuck in the world!” They then performed the song, only to have the end credits roll over them about halfway through. The crowd moshed, Channel 4 blustered and apparently viewers complained (at The Word?!). This was all before Cobain’s descent into heroin addiction and crippling depression. All I knew was that Cobain was a star and this band was going to be huge.
I also knew that despite The Word‘s shortcomings, this probably wouldn’t have happened on any other show.
- Paula Wilkins
| <1992 |
