In the Beginning Was… The Tube

In the beginning was The Word. Except, of course, it was The Tube that came first, in 1982, a stroppy, silly-trousered teenager of a pop show in a children’s tea-time slot. (As I recall, you flipped over straight after Crackerjack on a Friday, though that might be my memory playing Sky Plus.) The Tube, to a suburban fifteen-year-old like me, was fascinatingly outrageous: saucy, hectic and all-over-the-shop, with real live bands playing real live music and presenters that were DIY rather than DLT. Jools Holland was deadpan and disrespectful; Paula Yates flirted so hard you thought the TV might explode (which it did, in the titles). They both kept messing things up. I thought they, and The Tube, were brilliant. I couldn’t quite believe that any of it was allowed.

Paula Yates flirted so hard you thought the TV might explode

The Tube’s anarchic air was part of the DNA of the new Channel 4. Of course, no primetime telly show is ever commissioned without a grown-up saying yes, but in its early years Channel 4 seemed to be sneaking an entire new generation in the back door whilst the adults tapped their watches at the front. And, for teenage viewers brought up on the sedate thrills of Morecambe and Wise, that was truly exciting. Drunkenness, swearing, innuendo, actual filth; Channel 4 brought them all to a nation’s spotty youth. We were very grateful, even if sometimes we had to sit through a two-hour art movie to find the naughty bits we were promised.

Still, The Tube. The first pop show that felt alive. Because it went out live, and from Newcastle. Away from London’s easy cab-ride home, bands would act as though they were on tour. They got drunk, they got bored, they talked to/rowed with/took the mickey out of each other. Several interviews took place in their dressing rooms, including a notoriously stiff chat between Muriel Gray and Paul Weller around the time The Jam split up. When I watch that clip now, I cringe in sympathy with Gray: it reminds me of umpteen interviews I’ve conducted myself with tricky musicians. When I saw it then, I was agog. Up until The Tube, I’d never realised that pop stars and presenters were real people, with personalities that might clash.

Actually, up until The Tube, I’d never realised, properly, that bands could sound different to the way they did on record. Duran Duran were ropey, to say the least. Terence Trent D’Arby was stunning. Madonna performing Holiday at The Hacienda (just up the road!) was ace, though the reaction of the Mancunian crowd was typically snotty. Still, if I was honest, it was the interviews I looked forward to. Jools Holland and Paula Yates were gifted presenters, in an unselfconscious way you rarely see any more. They weren’t styled (Holland always looked terrible), they weren’t clever-clever, they were themselves. Jittery and caustic in the case of Holland, intelligent and disarming from Yates. With them at the helm The Tube couldn’t fail, no matter how hard some bands tried.

The other big show from the early Channel 4, for me, was Brookside. I’ve never got involved in another soap, before or since, but Brookside was different. For one major reason: it had the Grants. Bobby and Sheila, plus children scally Barry, stroppy Karen and kid Damon. I liked Karen the best: a Scouse version of Trisha from Grange Hill, big hair, big eyes (narrowed), big attitude. But they were all brilliant, the Grants, every one of them a flawed but likeable character, people who weren’t so far from yourself and dealt with similar problems. Though Brookside, these days, is mostly recalled for the high drama of the body under the patio, the lesbian kiss, the siege, it was all about the Grants for me. I even watched Damon and Debbie, the spin-off series where Damon eloped with his posh diabetic girlfriend to wind up stabbed in a hotel room in York. Moral? When working class and middle class meet, it’s not the bourgeois that end up suffering. Common People before Pulp.

Anyway, with The Tube, Brookside, The Comic Strip and Max Headroom’s pop-video show, Channel 4 was my channel, in a way that none of the other three were. I wasn’t particularly aware of the media furore around its output – ‘Channel Swore’ passed me by – but I could sense C4’s underlying ethos of mischief, snippiness and enthusiasm that chimed so well with my own teenage sensibility. In fact, I identified with Channel 4 so strongly that, up until writing this article, I was convinced that it was Channel 4, rather than ITV, that first broadcast throughout the night; and C4, rather than ITV, that gave us 24-hour telly people the joy of Night Network and the madness that was American Gladiators. (Grown men fighting with giant cotton buds! Alright!)

But then, ITV would never have ventured into late-night broadcasting if it wasn’t for Channel 4. Part of the greatness of Channel 4’s early years was that its attitude was catching. It wasn’t long before it warped the broadcasting landscape. Look at Network 7, broadcast in 1987. (Not for too long now: it’ll make you feel sick.) By that point, I was a twenty-year-old student, and thus, Network 7’s target market. It went out for two hours from midday on a Sunday, to catch you just waking up, and like most of my friends, I both loved and hated the show. The camera angles made my hangover worse, but I liked Oliver James’s celebrity interview slot and the way the show used graphics to give you a quick burst of information. Useful if you were over-opinionated, but under-informed (ah, the makings of a journalist even then). I couldn’t get on with Magenta De Vine’s sunglasses, however. Far too poncey London.

Anyway, underneath all the flash, the big thing about Network 7 was its refusal to slot news items into their long-established hierarchy. A hierarchy which went something like: Royals, Politics, Money, Foreign and Just Time For A Heart-warming Kitty-cat On A Skateboard at the end. Instead, pieces about death row prisoners and ATM fraud cuddled up to stories on celebrity premieres. This approach is now so prevalent that Radio 4’s Today Programme can blithely broadcast an inane chat with Naomi Campbell straight after a forensic piece of business analysis. Back in 1987, though, this was revolutionary. Network 7 was the future of British news, though no one knew it then. Its successor, the eye-wateringly terrible Club X, was the future of nothing, however. I rarely watched it, as it went out when I did, but I sometimes caught the Sunday omnibus. It was sod-awful. It took all the worst elements of The Tube and Network 7 and shoved them into the Hippodrome with presenters who didn’t appear to know where, or indeed who, they were.

Club X was a shame because, once again, Channel 4 was affecting the other terrestrial channels for the better. From Network 7, Janet Street-Porter hopped over to BBC 2, to start the DEF II brand, which included The Rough Guide, an excellent show still imitated by most mainstream travel programmes. In years to come, some of Network 7’s team would go on to create The Late Show, and, from there, today’s none-more-BBC stalwarts, Newsnight Review and Later with Jools Holland. Charlie Parsons, responsible for Club X, formed a company, Planet 24, which created The Big Breakfast and The Word.

By the time of those programmes, I was working in the media and so my relationship with Channel 4 had changed. I wrote about its programmes in pop papers, I met the presenters at parties. Somehow, I’d managed to get close to the world that had fascinated me just a few years earlier. But if Channel 4 hadn’t existed, I’d never have thought I could get anywhere. Like Smash Hits, which gave me my first job, Channel 4 somehow articulated my hidden beliefs: that pop was important, that being young was great, that the mainstream was there to be subverted, that questions didn’t have to be perfectly constructed to get to the truth.

And there are many out there who still hate the channel for this, who blame Channel 4 for the tsunami of celebrity drivel that exists today. I think that’s unfair. Sure, it invented Big Brother, but it didn’t invent Simon Cowell, and, anyway, the first two series of BB were genuinely riveting. Yes, there’s an equality of agenda now that sees Britney Spears discussed in the same breath as Somalia. But for me the spirit of early Channel 4 is elsewhere. I see it in Keith Allen’s confrontational documentaries, in Charlie Brooker dissecting TV, Simon Amstell’s scissor-sharp presenting, Dubplate Drama’s you-choose episode endings, Lauren Laverne’s arch questions, Jonathan Ross’s wit, the blanket BBC coverage of every music festival still twitching. You might not like these things, but I do, and that’s why the legacy of Channel 4 is still important, to this suburban teenager at least.