Channel 4 doesn’t need a visionary but it could do with a new vision

Is there a future for UK broadcaster Channel 4?

The one-time enfant terrible of the UK broadcasting scene has been struggling of late and now it’s looking for a new CEO as Alex Mahon (below) is on her way to live events outfit Superstruct Entertainment. Mahon has done a pretty good job of keeping C4’s end up against a Tory government that would have loved to flog it to the highest bidder and overseen one of those digital transformations (that we love so much) to an inconclusive mid-point.

Its programmes, though. no longer seem to move the dial: at times it’s like the Jamie Oliver channel (without the budget to shift him from his kitchen, out of which he might be a bit more interesting) with other supposed highlights Gogglebox (OK) and the endless Great British Bake-off which it nicked from the BBC. The best thing on it is Walter Presents’ Astrid: Murder in Paris but that’s consigned to More4 with a feeble English remake (no subtitles of course) on the main channel.

Audiences and ad revenue are down (although not disastrously in a streaming world) while digital revenue is inching up. A Labour government is certain to be a more sympathetic ultimate owner than the Tories (which, as above, it did well to survive) but Mahon’s successor needs to show some of flair of previous bosses like Michael Grade. Grade was dubbed the “UK’s pornographer-in-chief” by the Daily Mail and compliments don’t come much higher than that.

COO Jonathan Allan will be in charge while the search goes on (programme boss Ian Katz, a former Guardian journalist, is not reckoned a contender.) Katz has had an up-and-down reign although it was the right decision to look outside the ranks of BBC and ITV commissioning execs who, mostly, commission the same old things (gloomy cop shows with troubled cops.) Allan may emerge as a full-time contender.

C4 doesn’t need a visionary but it could do with a new vision.