Launched in 1982, the UK's fourth terrestrial television channel is widely credited with keeping the flame of British filmmaking alive in the 1980s at a time when successive Conservative Governments refused any kind of state support for the industry. The public Channel Four Television Corporation established a separate films arm - Film On Four. Its remit was to cross-subsidise British film production with television money to create not only a stream of high quality film drama for the Channel to screen but also throw out a much-needed life-line to the struggling British film
industry. Under the leadership of David Rose, Film on Four funded films first for cinema release, prior to subsequent television transmission and some of its early successes were spectacular, including Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), Neil Jordan's Angel (1982) and Stephen Frears'/Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). The '90s saw a more commercially orientated policy but one which often paid box-office dividends in terms of international hits like Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and Trainspotting (1996). In the late '90s, FilmFour, as it was now called, gained its own dedicated subscription TV channel, screening both its own fare and a range of independent, 'challenging' cinema from around the world. However, by July 2002, retrenchment had set in as Channel Four regained control of its independent film subsidiary, slashing its annual budget for film production largely as the result of a general downturn in TV advertising. Channel Four's contribution to contemporary British cinema had been immense but
the demise of FilmFour raised uncomfortable questions about the involvement of television money in film production: for example, to what extent the priorities of commercial television would always in the end take precedence over film and to what extent the scale and ambition of British filmmaking would always inevitably be reduced to that of low-budget 'television movies' to the detriment of the overall health of both British cinema and arguably, indigenous British television drama.
Bibliography
Ansorge, Peter, From Liverpool to Los Angeles:
On Writing for Theatre, Film and Television (1997);
Pym, John, Film
on Four: Ten Years of Film on Four (1992).
John Cook, Encyclopedia of British Film
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