The Channel "Four" Innovation

I'm still feeling bloody poorly and am rather worried that I'll be unable to meet up with Joe in Central later this evening. Not even the arrival of Barrack Obama, or the fact that Kelly Brook's been sacked from the judging panel off the new series of "Britain's Got Talent" can make me feel better physically.

I've just spent the last few hours reading parts of Maggie Brown's book about the history of Channel 4 called "A License To Be Different". Whilst it's a personal account and written by an outsider, there are some things I'm not sure about such a section looking a the decline of The Big Breakfast which more or less started when Denise left and was replaced by the said sacked judge.

It mentions that Kelly couldn't read "long words" such as "satirical" and "intrepid" from the autocue and even though she was poor in my opinion, Johnny Vaughan did the right thing to defend her by mentioning that the Big Breakfast didn't and has never used autocues, with all the scripts carried by the hosts on clipboards, adding to the adlibbed nature of the show.

I was probably the only boy at secondary school who wasn't gutted when Kelly didn't return from her two week holiday in July 1999 and was replaced by Liza Tarbuck who despite being 15 years older was a lot better as a host.
Liza however was a fan of her predcessor and mentioned in a tabloid newspaper that she wasn't happy about her treatment on the show.

I never understood why Johnny only went on holiday for one week at a time, whilst all his female co-hosts took two weeks off. Then again he was a key point of the show at the time and for me was his best television ever.

The book also mentioned that the broadcaster hasn't commisioned a new original cutting edge show for at least five years in the same way as The Big Breakfast, The Tube,
The Crystal Maze and so on, instead relying on brought in shows and
formats such as Big Brother and Deal Or No Deal.

Another interesting statement came from a quote by Gordon Ramsay about why he enjoyed working for the channel;
"Channel 4 don't do 'here's one I made earlier', or cook along with Gordon - it's cutting edge".

Ironically, two months after the book was published, Gordon hosted the Cookalong Live special and it became a series later in the year.

One I'll probably be referring to again during the dissertation but it's given me one or two ideas on what to look at.