The vast spools of the old two-inch format videotape were still the staple of the news film library. And, of course, there was film itself – requiring telecine apparatus to view it. But the birth of Channel 4 also coincided with the brief life span of one-inch video and the video cassette. The entire career of Channel 4 News has coincided with the most complex and rapid, but jerky, technical revolutions known to humankind. We have seen it all: from the death of the CP16 film camera, the black film-changing bag and three-hour film processing to the ongoing, tumultuous and tapeless digital revolution that we are suffering today.

And as the formats were evolving, the methodology for getting material from event to screen was changing equally rapidly: from shipping unprocessed film on aircraft to the present-day FTP e-mail package. In between, there was the period in the mid-Eighties when we would battle with other broadcasters to ‘get onto’ one of the few satellite paths across the Atlantic or Indian Oceans – paying thousands of dollars to do so.

Then came the birth of (the entirely undreamt of) 24-hour news, with mainstream news online and rolling channels. This had a huge impact on every aspect of what we did. But far from putting our conventional one-hour terrestrial news out of business, it made it the very cornerstone of Channel 4’s output. This came exactly when our competitors were pushing national and regional news to the margins – or rushing to fuse their terrestrial output with their 24-hour channels – which, despite talk of trying to reboot their news operations, looked to me like a retreat.

The technology revolution vastly increased the range of what Channel 4 News could do

What some prophets called the beginning of the end for ‘appointment-to-view’ news such as ours couldn’t have been further from the truth. For all the media focus on 24/7 news during the 2003 Iraq War, Channel 4 News secured its best audiences ever, demonstrating the value of a programme that could make sense of the babble of truths, half-truths, propaganda, rumour and speculation that characterised the multi-channel, multi-media world.