The infamous Five

Published on Wednesday 20 October 2004 02:06

JUST WHEN we thought it was safe to switch over to the fifth terrestrial television channel, it seems Five is up to its old tricks again.

There we were, looking forward to insights about country life down on the farm, with the added bonus of celebrities up to their elbows in muck, and what did Five give us? Rebecca Loos getting to grips with the kind of pig husbandry that could put you off pork chops for life.

Her exploits on The Farm - as well as her unprintable accompanying comment - took reality television to a new low. One tabloid splashed its apoplexy across its front page and the wider debate on the depths to which television executives will stoop for ratings raged anew. But for those who have kept a weather eye on Five in the past year or so, there was more than disgust at play - there was also a huge helping of surprise.

Britain’s youngest terrestrial channel may have started out seven years ago as Channel 5 with programme content famously summed up by founding chief executive Dawn Airey as "football, films and f*******", but in the two years since it renamed itself more elegantly as Five, it has been working hard in polishing up its act with schedules just as likely to attract highbrows as raise eyebrows.

Earlier this year, the channel screened The Big Question, a science series featuring heavyweights such as evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and scientist Baroness Susan Greenfield. Its Fivearts Cities initiative, which commissioned a new poem from Liverpool poet Roger McGough, proved so popular that it is about to commission another from Andrew Motion for the 60th anniversary of VE Day. Meanwhile, Five’s autumn schedule lists documentaries on Alexander the Great, the Vikings and an eight-parter on paintings presented by art critic Waldemar Januszczak.

Add to this the now crosschannel mix of crime series, property programmes and reality television and it seems the baby of Britain’s TV world has finally matured. So where does the somewhat gratuitous farmyard chore of Loos - whose alleged affair with England captain and Real Madrid star David Beckham appears to fulfil at least two of Airey’s f-words - fit into its sleaze-free profile?

DAN CHAMBERS, head of programming at Five for the past year, insists the Loos incident is not the first step on a slippery slope back to the channel’s old ways. In fact, he professes to have no idea what all the fuss is about. "It was a massively exaggerated story," he says. "I think we had five calls to the channel. As a show, The Farm is really responsible. They don’t do anything without a farmer standing over them and it was the farmer who asked Rebecca to do it. I don’t really think the country is up in arms about it." Maybe not, but the country is certainly watching, and Chambers knows it. In the last year, Five has increased its overall audience share by 3 per cent - no mean feat at a time when other terrestrial channels were losing viewers.

Comparing budgets gives an even better perspective on its success. Channel 4 has 450 million to play with, while Five has just 153 million.

Chambers, a former science commissioning editor and documentary maker at Channel 4, seems well on the way to fulfilling his stated aim that Five’s "USP [unique selling point] is to be somewhere in between Channel 4 and ITV". This is where viewing such as The Farm comes in - not as a flagship element of Five’s schedules, but as part of a cleverly concocted mix that is helping the channel to punch above its weight in the ratings wars.

Chambers’s strategy is multi-stranded, and displays the sort of pragmatism necessitated by his budget. Instead of trying to be all things to everyone - something the young Channel 4 didn’t attempt either - Five is targeting niche markets to win viewers. Key to his gameplan is what Chambers calls complementary programming. "When Coronation Street is on, soap-watchers will be watching, so we can put on technology programmes for young men," he says. "I suppose it’s saying that we won’t try to compete against Emmerdale or Coronation Street as the people who watch these programmes are very loyal. In a commercial sense, we pick off those who are not served by these types of shows and give them something different."

Chambers feels Five is taking up where channels traditionally associated with high-brow programmes are slipping. "When faced with Location, Location, Location, there are people who want variety," he says. "They want proper content - history or understanding wildlife. We get good audiences for these type of shows.

"It’s partly identifying a gap in the market. I used to run Equinox science programmes, such as Secrets of the Dead, at Channel 4. But when you look at Channel 4 now, along with BBC 2, it is making less of these quality programmes."

Chambers indicates that he is prepared to forget ratings in some areas in his masterplan to redefine Five as a quality channel rather than a salacious one. History and factual programmes fall into this category: "We are looking at an upmarket audience. It’s not about viewing figures. Increasingly what’s happening with advertisers is that they like to be able to target specific groups. It makes commercial sense to have more focused programmes and it makes good editorial sense too. Instead of people saying. ‘Well, I quite like it,’ they will say ‘I love it.’"

It is this sort of strategic thinking that has advertisers watching Five closely. Last Tuesday, for instance, the channel pitted Nigel Marven’s Piranha Adventure, featuring the zoologist swimming with flesh-eating fish in the Amazon, against Channel 4’s long-running property show Location, Location, Location, providing a perfect, if rather hairy escape from our endless obsession with buying a home. On Wednesday, Jennie Bond’s Royals, a documentary on the Windsors by the former BBC royal correspondent, was shown at the same time as Channel 4’s Property Ladder.

The strategy has impressed Chris Hayward, television analyst at advertising buyer Zenith Optimedia, who believes it lures viewers who wouldn’t normally watch Five. "There is a very clever use of the eight o’clock strand, with documentaries on Michael Jackson and What the Romans Did, that sort of thing," he says. "They look good, but don’t cost a lot of money. It shows a really good use of archive material, with good voice-overs, clever links and snappy titles."

BUT CHAMBERS KNOWS he must appeal to larger markets sometimes if he is to secure the advertising revenues which will help Five grow. His portfolio is far from exclusively high brow, and Five’s skill has been in his shrewd choice of more mainstream programmes. Buy-ins from America, such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and Law and Order, have brought good viewing figures. Cosmetic Surgery Live found a new strand for reality television. Chambers has bought the UK rights to the Joey, a spin-off of the hugely successful Friends. Perhaps inevitably, Five also has its own property show, featuring Colin McAllister and Justin Ryan.

It is here that Chambers expects to secure ratings - and Loos has led the way. On 7 October, the day the Sun devoted its front page to Loos and her porker pal, The Farm attracted its largest audience to date, with 1.6 million viewers. Even better, a high proportion of those who tuned in were younger viewers, those rich in disposable income and highly sought-after by advertisers.

Previous episodes of The Farm had averaged 1.3 million viewers, a 7.2 per cent share of the available television audience. That is only a fraction higher than Five’s previous reality TV venture, Back to Reality, which averaged around one million viewers. But more than 30 per cent of those who watch The Farm are within the 16-34 age slot, compared to the more usual average of around 20 per cent. "What we are interested in is a younger audience," says Chambers. "The channel is getting more of these viewers than we’ve had before, so I’m delighted."

THE ADVERTISING people think he has every right to be. Hayward points to the purchase of Joey as "the biggest statement yet that Five is moving on to the next level". He adds: "The audience performance has been good in the last three or four years. It has taken great strides in redefining itself away from a sub-porn and movie channel to a real station. But it has to keep that up. It should be looking to a profile of audience more akin to Channel 4, younger and more upmarket."

Whether Chambers will dump the likes of Loos remains to be seen. Perhaps Five is not the new Four in the advertisers eyes just yet - but there is no doubt it is well on the way.