Channel 4's Birthday

They did make a big fuss over their 15th, can't quite remember what they did, but I remember the '4 is 15' idents which ran throughout.

It's a shame they're not doing anything this year, S4C did something last year, you would think that Channel 4 would repeat a couple of old shows, or do what ITV are doing and making a documentary about the channel's history, or even a celebratory ident, every other broadcaster does this, such as Sky, Granada, GMTV and the list goes on.

No doubt they'll mention it on Countdown, though.

Yep, there was repeats of the Comic Strip presents and Don't Forget Your Toothbrush among others and a documentary looking back over the 15 years in a 30 minute programme selecting two programmes per year including a look at the launch.

From what I remember, the 15 year look back season was shown throughout Christmas of 1997.

I seem to remember now but I knew they made a one off new Comic Strip around this time featuring everyone who was neccessary, I seem to recall it was about these Business men and that their travel goes wrong. But was this done at this time? As I knew it was transmitted late 1997 or early 1998.

Not true at all, what they are doing is using the popularity of Countdown and Richard and Judy to improve the ratings of other programmes by hammocking the not that popular programmes inbetween the 2 popular ones.

Why would Channel 4 want to purposefully kill off one of it's most popular, famous and successful programmes?

Private Eye recently suggested C4 wanted to sweep out anything that seemed 'old'. Brookie and C'down have been on C4 since day one and C4 lately is taking a 'new broom' attitude - i.e. even decent shows (Right to Reply, Big Breakfast for example) are being canned just because they've got more than a couple of years of back. I'm not a Brookie fan (hated the show) but when a show with a large loyal fanbase is shunted, you have to question the motives...