Don’t write off Channel 4 – pushing boundaries is still in its DNA

When Channel 4 launched in 1982, I was only a young boy but already TV-obsessed and excited by the arrival of this naughty new network. It was going to break taboos, push boundaries and offer alternative opinions and lifestyles – and it didn’t disappoint.

Through the 1980s, I fell in love with C4 and it’s not too much of an exaggeration to say it helped define my attitude to the world and made me want to become a writer. From the topical wit of Saturday Night Live to the outrageous chaos of The Tube, it felt like a channel that was speaking my language, but it was the bold, realist soap opera Brookside that truly inspired me.

Being from a northern working-class background, this drama, set on a newbuild inner city close, felt like a world I recognised: believable characters, hard-hitting storylines and authentic dialogue. It was written with passion and purpose by writers who would go on to become household names: Jimmy McGovern, Kay Mellor and Frank Cottrell-Boyce, among others. I never missed an episode.

Brookside proved that ordinary lives could make extraordinary television, because their concerns were our concerns. Whether it was unemployment, class divide or sexual assault, the programme never shied away from tackling big issues. And it always did so with truth and humour.

C4 quickly defined itself with drama, comedy and entertainment that was bold, innovative and diverse. What other channel would have made the multi-cultural Thatcherite snapshot My Beautiful Laundrette, or the explicit celebration of gay life that was Queer As Folk? Who else would have made Alan Bleasdale’s GBH, Tony Marchant’s Never Never, The Comic Strip, Big Brother, Phoenix Nights or Traffik?

“My overriding memory is of a creative environment that had a singular mission: to be like nowhere else. We were encouraged to be ballsy”

In the early 2000s, I finally found myself working with C4, on the launch of what would become, arguably, its most channel-defining show to date. Paul Abbott’s Shameless (pictured above) was filthy, funny, political and putrid. It presented council estate life not as Ken Loach would show it, but as a farcical fusion of joy and desperation.

My overriding memory of C4 at that time is of a creative environment that had a singular mission: to be like nowhere else. We were encouraged, at every turn, to be as brave, ballsy and envelope-pushing as we could possibly be.

This has been C4’s winning formula over the years. Whether it’s the ill-fated Wank Week, the controversial public autopsy, the dubious Great Global Warming Swindle doc or the legendary Brass Eye, it has always been prepared to go where others won’t.

So with privatisation hovering, is the C4 of today still the brave C4 of yesteryear? Well, not quite. Too much property, too many celebrities, too much baking. Commercial necessities have led to a watering down of its former risk-taking self. That, and other channels – particular the streamers – have stolen some of its outrageous clothing.

But let me ask you this: if a new free-to-air channel were to launch that offered up dramas like It’s A Sin, National Treasure and The Virtues, comedies like Catastrophe and Derry Girls, entertainment like Gogglebox and Hunted, and docs like For Sama, 60 Days On The Street and Educating Essex, would you be watching it? I know I would. And so would the TV makers of the future.

• Danny Brocklehurst is the writer of The Stranger and Brassic