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Its shows may not be cool or challenging, but Channel 5 has cornered the market in mildly pacy thrillers and dependable human interest
March 18, 2024 2:27 pm(Updated 2:45 pm)
Rewind just a few years and Channel 5 really was dreck on a stick. Whether reviving Big Brother or assailing the nations’s eyeballs with Dogs Behaving Badly or Can’t Pay? We’ll Take It Away! (chronicling the daily grind of High Court enforcement agents), the network wasn’t so much low-brow as no-brow. Spend an evening bingeing C5 back then, and you could feel your brain cells losing the will to continue.
Today, an average night with C5 is likely to have those brain cells fizzing with delight. With an impressive lack of fuss, the station has become a powerhouse of small-screen drama, invariably featuring vaguely familiar faces and a pacy storyline. The latest example arrives tonight, as Jason Watkins stars in Coma, a thriller about a quiet family man pushed too far by unruly teenagers led by lippy Jordan (Joe Barber).
The premise of a suburban dad facing off against socially disruptive adolescents is one which many viewers will recognise from everyday life. The series runs across four evenings – a C5 innovation that sets it apart from both the Netflix binge model and the plodding “you’ll have to wait a week to discover what happens” format still favoured by traditional broadcasters. Above all, it is unpretentious and very watchable.
This blueprint has brought Channel 5 great success, all the way back to 2021 and The Drowning. In that series Jill Halfpenny played a mother who has a haunting encounter with a young man who’s a dead ringer for the son she lost a decade before.
The Drowning wasn’t C5’s first tilt at drama. But it fired the starter pistol for a new era of fuss-free and solidly riveting fare. It has gone on to replicate that formula with The Inheritance, Ross Kemp’s Blindspot and, earlier this month, Love Rat, starring Coronation Street’s Sally Lindsay as a lonely middle-aged woman caught up in a romance scam on a sun holiday. Factor in a successful reboot of cuddly Yorkshire period caper All Creatures Great and Small, and you have a network which has delivered a streak of thoroughly dependable scripted escapism.
The charm of these shows is that, while competently made, they aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel. Very often, they aren’t “about” anything: their only goal is to pass the time pleasantly.
Behind this agreeable fare is Channel 5’s guiding philosophy – that its mission is to entertain and only to entertain. “We are not a channel that is supposed to innovate and… break new ground,” C5 controller Ben Frow told the Royal Television Society in 2022. “That is not my remit.”
Channel 5 picks its project with care. When it decided to pivot seriously to drama, senior executives looked at what was doing well on other channels. They then explored how C5 could make similar series on a more modest budget.
“When we first started doing it, we looked at our competitors and thought, okay, what are the shows that we think our viewers are going to watch?” drama commissioner Sebastian Cardwell told the Commissioning Conversations podcast. “We’re pretty sure they’re going to watch [ITV thriller] Liar; they probably watch Call the Midwife. Then you go: How do we do that?”
He was proud to describe Channel 5 and its drama as “broad” and “populist.” We’re not niche. I’m probably not going to commission a science fiction project anytime soon.”
Ironically, not being niche has become its own niche. Channel 5 has cornered the market in mildly pacy thrillers and dependable human interest drama. These shows will not blow your mind or make you think again about big social issues. That’s not their job – because that isn’t what audiences necessarily want all of the time.
“Ben [Frow] always talks about the audience as being a mother and daughter sitting on a couch in Middlesbrough who watch TV together,” Cardwell told the Royal Television Society. “I kind of agree with that. We know that we’re not metropolitan, we’re not cool, we’re not London.”
The crucial phrase here is “not cool”. Television is full of shows that want to push the envelope and shake the viewer out of their comfort zone. The message conveyed by Channel 5’s cosy thrillers is that if it’s a Monday night, the kids are tucked up in bed, and you have a long week ahead, then, actually, it’s fine to stay in your comfort zone.
In taking the innovative idea that audiences just want to be entertained and running with it, Channel 5 has reinvented British drama – and made itself an essential part of the broadcasting landscape. Coming from the darkest days of Dogs Behaving Badly, it’s a woofs-to-riches story we can all applaud.
