It’s hard to imagine the fate of British cinema without the birth of Channel 4. The advent of its film department offered a life-saving transfusion to an ailing industry and led to a renaissance in filmmaking. In 1981, the year before the channel launched, only 24 British films were made and audiences had dropped to an all time low of 86 million. Scarcely two decades earlier, in 1963, 113 films were released and seen by a staggering 350 million cinemagoers. The Sixties boom, kick-started by the Bond franchise, fluffed up by the Carry Ons, sharpened by Stanley Kubrick and romanced by David Lean, resulted in the UK bringing home four best picture Oscars that decade. However, the following decade (some notable exceptions aside), the Seventies, saw a drop in quality and production on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, production fell to levels not seen since 1914.

Jeremy Isaacs, Channel 4’s first Chief Executive, agrees. ‘In those days the industry was in a moribund state and its heart was mortgaged to US money.’ In his letter of application for the job, Isaacs promised to put money into ‘films of feature length for television here, for the cinema abroad’. He’d seen the extraordinary success in Italy and Germany, where public television quotas funded the work of talented directors. If Europe could nurture the likes of Bertolucci, Fellini, Wim Wenders and Fassbinder, Isaacs reasoned that Britain should do the same.

The most passionate argument in favour of film production came from an assorted bunch of filmmakers that visited the newly formed Channel 4 executive at its temporary offices. Stephen Frears, David Hare, Richard Eyre, Ann Scott and Simon Relph pleaded for their films to have a cinema release before being shown on television. Having worked for years to nurture an idea from script to screen, why shouldn’t they enjoy the fruits of their labour with a live audience?

At that time, British filmmakers and television executives were locked in a stalemate. The film industry argued that TV got their movies at a fraction of their real cost. Television, apparently, cherry picked the best products and avoided the high risk of investing up front.

Television countered that the film industry’s refusal to show anything aired previously on the box hampered its own attempts to generate original film. And how could any company afford to delay screening a drama for up to three years after a cinema exhibition? Given that this attitude had been entrenched for years, and was supported by many unions, how did Isaacs and Justin Dukes, the Managing Director, break the stalemate? ‘Simple,’ Isaacs says. ‘We told them that if we paid for it, we’d bloody well show it when we wanted to.’

Channel 4 allocated six million pounds a year to original drama. This was separate from the fifteen hundred straight acquisitions that the station bought before it launched. David Rose was appointed as its first Head of Drama (or Senior Commissioning Editor, Fiction) and decided to spread this money in chunks of £300,000 over twenty films. Rose came straight from BBC Pebble Mill and, in his own words, ‘just transferred the BBC in Birmingham to Channel 4 but gave it better production values’. Rose, the inventor of the docudrama format and part of the original team at Z Cars, had spent years creating partnerships with gifted writers, directors and actors. Talent such as Judi Dench, Alison Steadman and Joss Ackland had had guest roles in Rose’s shows and he’d collaborated with luminaries such as David Hare, Ken Loach, Alan Clarke, Bill Kenwright, Colin Welland and Alan Plater.