gets better. the country has been rocked by demonstrations of our soaring prices, power cuts and a lack of medicine. he was appointed in an attempt to diffuse the protests. now on bbc news, the media show. hello. welcome to the media show. welcome too to the headquarters of channel 4 in central london. and we re here because the government has confirmed it s pushing on with its plans to privatise channel 4, despite the reservations of the broadcaster. so we re going to look through all of the issues that this raises with our guest today, the ceo of channel 4, alex mahon. alex, thank you very much indeed forjoining us. this wasn t the outcome you wanted. so where did it go wrong? well, i m not sure that it went wrong. i mean, obviously, this is the government s decision to make. what i would say is it s never quiet times at channel 4. this is not a job you would take if you wanted an easy life and a restful retirement. how often do you speak to the dcms or to nadine dorries? w
So the onus on us is how do we switch to distributing it in the ways they want, because the content is in demand. so that s why we ve switched so much to allli and where we re getting that streaming growth. i have no doubt that people want the content. it s are you making it available in the places where they want to see it? and this is an area i m very interested to hear your views on, because all content creators, all content creators are wrestling with when do we put our content on our own platforms versus when do we put versions of our content out on third party platforms, youtube, tiktok, wherever it may be. how do you view that on and off platform conundrum? that s an easy one for me because we re like small and grubby enough to partner with anyone. and channel 4 always has been, right? it s never the bbc or itv, so we don t have to think we ll only be on our, as it used to be called, walled garden or will only be on our owned and operated service. you know, we ve been mak
Can some of the programming you re describing for example, paralympics coverage if not be picked up by a privatised channel 4, then it more likely than not will be supported by one of the public service broadcasters. ithink, look, there s a couple of points that, you re absolutely right to point that out. let s take the paralympics, because that was in the market. right? and channel 4 picked up. since we took it, we ve invested multiple times more than others did. you know, the last paralympics in beijing, the winters, we put an entirely disabled presenting crew on it. you would never do that if you were trying to cover it, but also make money, because those things lose lots of money. you would never think every time, how do we make it bigger? how do we go further? how do we set the global standard? we know that one factually because it was in the market before and no one did it and it is in the market in every other territory and no one covers it in the way we do. i suppose wh
Night, you know, when you see someone like mo gilligan winning an award or you see a show like help, one of ours, winning awards, we see people who ve been on our channel who are on other channels now winning awards. that s a joy. but most of that research, if you like, loses money. most are starting with new people, new directors, new producers, new writers, new actors, new presenters. they have their first shows with us, you know, and that s a great thing. and then they start off and then they get bigger and then they turn up somewhere else. for the uk creative industries, that s a positive thing. if you are trying to make money forever and hold onto them, that s not necessarily. at the moment, that s how we run the business. now, you mentioned the baftas on sunday night. congratulations on the awards that channel 4 won. nadine dorries, the culture secretary, has said that government ownership is preventing you from competing against streaming giants. i ve heard you make the case man
You ve gone from being the enfant terrible to a troublesome uncle, acknowledging the fact that you re an older organisation. he put out a commissioning document in april titled here comes trouble. he says he wants to give a voice to the unheard, say the unsayable and show the unseen. but then i m looking through today s channel 4 schedule and there s frasier, undercover boss usa, couples come dine with me, countdown, a place in the sun, great house giveaway, sun, sea and selling houses. that doesn t feel like it s a network which is saying the unsayable. that s mostly the daytime schedule, as you well know. but there s also a load of things that have been on in the past couple of weeks, like the davina show that i mentioned, derry girls, hellraisers, documentaries that we ve had on, we ve got coming up, something big on elon musk. we ve got troy deeney on how important it is that black history is taught in schools in the uk. we ve got ghislaine maxwell documentary coming up. there s a