In its first two decades, television news in Britain had one thing you could count on – the news was read by a man at a desk. By the 1980s, the format had developed just a little. On BBC1 and BBC2, the news was read by a man or a woman at a desk, and on ITV the flagship news programme was read by a man and a woman at a desk. The arrival of Britain’s fourth channel in 1982 brought something new and different. Channel 4 News was to be presented by three men and one woman – with no desks.

It was not a success.

In the opening shot of the opening night the four sat uneasily, trying to control the pile of scripts in their laps. Within a few months, it was back to a man or a woman at a desk and it was many years before any network tried anything like that again. The four presenters all went on to considerable success: Peter Sissons and Trevor McDonald in broadcasting, Sarah (now Baroness) Hogg as head of John Major’s policy unit at Downing Street, and Godfrey Hodgson resuming a distinguished career as a writer and commentator. The episode showed that challenging conventional television news was not going to be easy. But this was what Jeremy Isaacs, the first chief executive of Channel 4, demanded from the programme’s producers, ITN.

Channel 4 News integrated reportage of the event with analysis of the issues

‘We did not want stories of individual crime,’ Isaacs has written, ‘or of minor natural disaster. We did not want coverage of the daily diaries of the Royal Family. Channel 4 News would deal with politics and the economy. It would bring coverage of the City, and of industry. It was to report the developments in science and technology, and in the arts. It was to cover the politics of other countries and to supplement that reporting with the output and insights of foreign television news programmes.’1