Film On Four

The Film Four Style

Rose’s commissioning decisions were criticised for not being commercial enough, concentrating on esoteric ‘regionalist’ scripts. Isaacs said Four’s films should represent ‘our preoccupations here in Britain’ rather than be targeted towards ‘a bland international market’. Channel Four’s films were developing a particular style of ‘Britishness’ in an environment where an international appeal was essential to a commercial success, a noble prioritising of style rather than saleability.

Social Realism was the prominent theme of Film on Four’s output. Having a television base for production meant the turnaround time between script and finished film could be faster and so able to react to the zeitgeist a lot more effectively. Rose favoured non-London settings for his films and certain distinctive themes that kept recurring. It was typical to focus on the drab day to day existence of a (usually regional) social group offset by a foreign presence, for example the Soviets in Liverpool in Letter to Breznev or Italians in Scotland in Another Time, Another Place.

As a result, Four’s films were accused of being too small in scale, setting their sights too low to warrant being termed cinema. Hacker and Price, Take 10, point out though that ‘no-one could say, for instance that Paris Texas or A Company of Wolves, both partly backed by Channel Four, are not cinematic’.