Apparently, Channel 4 made a bid for coverage of Formula One. It is difficult to define Channel 4, the fourth British terrestrial station. It is a channel I rarely watch live, but it has an amazing archive on 4OD, its version of iPlayer, and is especially good on historical documentaries and quirky comedy.

It launched in 1982 and introduced breakfast television to the UK. I warmed to the station because the very first show featured Stirling Moss, plain Mr God back then.

For a time, Channel 4 wrested cricket from the BBC and I got interested during a fight for the Ashes a few years back. Channel 4's coverage was exemplary, it even had cameras in the stumps. CGI was used to illustrate the deliveries of bowlers. For me, it was a revelation.

I had PE teachers at school, sadists to a man, and their idea of achievement was walking without tripping over their wrists, not one of them ever explained the finer points of the game.

Channel 4 employed an agency to come up with a bid to secure coverage of Formula One. Some bright spark came up with a winning tag, The Power + The Glory.

This person seems unaware that the title has been used before, for a 13-part series on the history of motor racing broadcast by BBC2 twenty years ago. I was the historical consultant on the series.

The Channel 4 bid was stylish in a flip-chart sort of way. It had a Ten Po1nt plan. When you see point spelled as po1nt, you know you are in a special place. There was also 'Cover4ge'. Someone must that thought that clever. Then there was 'High 1mp4ct Factual'.

Notice also that the plan had ten po1nts. Eleven po1nts would not have worked. It has to be three, five or ten. Did Stalin ever come up with a Six Year Plan?

One of the po1nts was 'Major educational outreach with F1 academy projects'. When I see the word, 'outreach', I want to throw up. It must be all those years I spent as a teacher and having this sort of crap thrown at me.

Another po1nt was 'More historical coverage of F1 with extended use of archive' and that really grabbed my attention. In the series on which I worked we had no archive material later than 1978, the year Bernie secured all the rights. The reason was simple, the budget would not stretch to that.

Bernie's demand for archive material was four times greater than the most expensive archive material anywhere in the world, on any subject. It was many, many, more times the cost charged by most film archives.

If you saw the series, this may surprise you. Ford made a promotional film which shows Jackie Stewart driving a Tyrrell round the 'Ring and his DFV engine had 'Ford' on the cam covers. The trouble was that everyone referred to the DFV as a Cosworth engine. We used the film made for Ford, always very good people to deal with.

Channel 4 wasted money employing an agency to do cute things with spelling and not doing basic research like finding out the cost of post-1978 archive footage. Nowhere in the bid were the two words that mattered: How Much?

Mike Lawrence
mike.lawrence@pitpass.com

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