Happy 20th Birthday Channel Five

Happy Birthday to Channel Five. Twenty years ago today the channel launched and it's first programme, "This is 5" featured the Spice Girls and attracted 2.5 million viewers despite only being available to around 65% of UK households at launch.

During the intervening years the channel has changed hands regularly, being owned by Germany's RTL, by Richard "dirty" Desmond's Northern and Shell, and since 2014 by media giant Viacom.

Famously lowbrow, it is perhaps best remembered for a naked Keith Chegwin - which may have already conjured a disturbing image in the minds of readers of this post.

So it is that The UK's fifth terrestrial channel turns 20. Happy Birthday Channel 5. Having watched a programme last week about Shannon Matthews on Five, I estimate that I must be getting close now to the major milestone of one programme viewed for every year the channel has been on air. Awesome!

Are they still going? I may be alone on this, but I can't say I watch any Channel 5 programming.

What a strange post.

I remember the launch like it was yesterday, picking up a grainy signal on a 14" portable tv in my bedroom using an indoor aerial.

As a kid back then I remember loving the original line up especially the quizzes, family affairs and exclusive of an early evening.

I adored the different style given to the news and the hourly updates. The movies were great every night also, it was definitely different to the other channels at that time.

Your memory takes me back to the arrival of Channel 4 — hanging out my bedroom window, holding a homemade Meccano 'aerial', trying to get a picture!

I also have happy memories of the launch, we actually found the test card a few weeks earlier when we were trying to tune the telly into BBC Wales to watch Wrexham vs Chesterfield in the FA Cup. We got a grainy, mostly monochrome picture but we could at least see it, and at the time I found it very exciting as we didn't have Sky, and also when it started I liked how it was all quite cheap and homely.

I watched The Jack Docherty Show every night for a couple of months, because I liked the idea of it, until I realised I was only really watching it for the sake of it and it wasn't very good. Of course, for the first three months they stripped comedy every night at 11.40 and I watched some of that - including the panel show Bring Me The Head Of Light Entertainment with Graham Norton, which was "devised" by Lee Hurst but was clearly just I'm Sorry I Haven't Got A Clue on the telly. There was also We Know Where You Live which was a pretty ropey sketch show but with a cast of Simon Pegg, Amanda Holden, Sanjeev Bhaskar and Fiona Allen which you now wouldn't be able to put together for several million pounds. Anyway, all those shows ended after three months, and that was it.

Six months later I went to university and the picture was amazing, but by that point I'd got bored of it, to be honest. What I always found bizarre about the early days was how stuff would never be axed but just dwindle to nothing, so Jack Docherty moved from 11pm to 1am and from five days a week to four, to three, to two, to one, and Exclusive would be tried out in a million slots, and Mariella Frostrup's series would be relaunched every five minutes with a different name.

The best show C5 ever showed was Festival of Fun, the Lee and Herring-fronted compilations from the Montreal Comedy Festival, first shown on Paramount, which were brilliant because the pair used to do brilliant routines about the clips which were often very bad. I remember they showed a clip of awful loudmouth sexist American comedian Bobby Slayton who did a routine about how women should shut up and "make me a sandwich", which Richard Herring then used as his catchphrase for the entire series. They showed the second series at midnight on Sunday and because the Channel 5 picture via VHS was so bad I had to stay up to watch it. And the second series wasn't half as good because they filmed the links before they added the clips.

Yes, for most of us without Sky and not around in the early 80s it was the first channel launch we'd witnessed and a pretty big deal. C5 of course were trying to market themselves as competition for BBC1 and ITV rather than the smaller terrestrials and tried to aim young and in hindsight it's launch strategy wasn't too bad at all. Back then they only really had to find an hour of primetime programming a night, plus stripped staples like Family Affairs and Exclusive along with the nightly movie.

Of course what we didn't know then is we'd be seeing channels launch practically once a month in the years ahead and it would soon stop being an event. I'd guess the last channel launch I took notice of was probably More4.

The problem with the stripped and stranded stuff though is that they soon ran out of stuff, though. One of the big problems that did for Jack Docherty - apart from it not being very good - is that it was all very well saying at 9pm it was a film and at 11pm it was Jack Docherty, but in reality very few films were exactly two hours duration, so most nights you ended up getting things like Exclusive Extra (ie, half of that night's Exclusive again) and sundry other fillers around 10.45 and by the time Jack came on everyone had switched off. So a few months later they announced that Jack would be on whenever the film finished, but that just meant nobody knew when it was on. Didn't work either way.

I was a student in Plymouth when C4 launched. The relay station at Plympton that served the part of city I was in, didn't carry C4 until three years later. I had to make do with Caradon Hill, which I could only receive properly when the local gasometer was down !

C5 in 97, I lived near Winchester. C5 used a flea powered transmitter on Fawley Power Station's chimney. The only advantage was it was in exactly the same direction as the main BBC/ITV/C4 transmitter at Rowridge. However, C5 was 'next door' to BBC 1 on the UHF band, and BBC 1's signal was huge, and 'leaked all over' C5's picture. I faffed about making a filter, to reduce BBC 1's sideband (over simplification). Had it working quite well after a few weeks, but then C5 launched on Astra analogue. Cracking picture, and I never went back to the terrestrial signal.

It was historic in many ways. The first terrestrial channel to feature a permanent DOG (which was dimmed once or twice if I recall correctly, after complaints), the first channel to really go big on the 'stripped and stranded' programming format, the last British analogue network.

The opening nights line up was (according to Wikipedia)
This is 5!
Family Affairs
Two Little Boys
Hospital!
Beyond Fear
The Jack Docherty Show
The Comedy Store Special
Turnstyle
Live and Dangerous

I have dim memories of any of it, except I do recall Hospital! being atrocious (despite Celia Imrie being in it) and the much heralded Jack Docherty Show not being much better. Reception where I lived at the time (northern edge of London) wasn't strong at all and the picture seemed very prone to atmospheric interference.

At the time I seem to think I had a non scart telly, a video and a free to air satellite box, both of which were daisy chained via RF into the telly (those were the days!) and they were both tuned in the rough frequency area that Channel 5 went on air with. It was such a faff to get everything with a half decent picture.

Despite living near the Croydon transmitter, the first night's entertainment included horizontal lines going across the screen which nobody in 2017 would tolerate, but was acceptable in 1997. (When C5 launched on Astra in 1998, I used that until C5 got a power increase).

As mentioned, the news bulletins were innovative and I watched Family Affairs. Another highlight was Bill Buckley's sardonic CA delivery to Prisoner Cell Block H and other cheap and cheerful foreign soap imports over the credits.

However, I now consider C5 to be nothing more than a multichannel these days with programming that barely registers, although I'm glad 5 News has come out of the wilderness after a period at Sky, but even the news bulletin still seems to have taken some of the worst of Sky's era with the human interest nonsense.

With Viacom managing the channel, it's probably at it's most stable in it's history though.

The stripped scheduling was revolutary at the time, as was the main news being at 8:30pm., not to mention the hourly snappy news headlines. I don't think anyone sat on a desk in news before Kirsty Young did, or indeed presented it standing up, but before long everyone was doing it.

I remember watching Whittle and 100% at teatime. The attempt at the nightly chat show was brave as well.

Everything was so different and bright and breezy compared to the other terrestrials. Sadly it all faded away, the various unique studio content was axed (very much like BBC Choice in a way) and now they run a normal schedule of mostly documentaries and imports.

Maybe it was the constant changes in ownership, the constant new looks or the fact that they launched just a bit too close to the multichannel era and the days of ad revenue being spread too thinly, but they've never managed to make much of an impact in recent years and often look like the number one digital channel than the fifth terrestrial channel. The taudry image of Keith Chegwin with no clothes on and then picking up Big Brother in its dying days didn't help its image.