Channel 4’s 37-year-old archive would pose a challenge for even the most avid television watcher. Its estimated 14,000 hours of footage would provide a conservative two years of viewing, if watched back to back.
For Dorothy Byrne, Channel 4’s editor-at-large: “Those thousands of hours of material are not only our own history as a broadcaster, they are part of the social history of our country.” It is thus the channel’s recent announcement should come as no surprise – content which is deemed offensive will not be removed from the archive, instead it will be put in context.
Of late, broadcasters have come under fire for the presence of offensive content on their platforms. Netflix recently made the decision to remove Little Britain, The Mighty Boosh and The League of Gentlemen because of the use of blackface. HBO have added an introductory warning to Gone With the Wind, saying that the film “denies the horrors of slavery”.
For Byrne, the issue is far more complex than a simple removal of content will indicate. “If much-loved characters in the past made homophobic comments or dressed up as people from other ethnic groups or pretended to be people who use wheelchairs, should we destroy that evidence of the social attitudes of the times? Cleaning up our past erases evidence of how views that we would now consider reprehensible were once normalised,” she said.
The channel’s policy dictates that programmes with material that has the potential to cause offense, is “generally best handled by adding warnings rather than removing them entirely.”
Byrne concludes that: “We know that it is a matter of judgment, but we will begin from the premise that we should not destroy the past, however embarrassing that past may be, except in exceptional circumstances.”
