How much longer for Andy Duncan, Chief Executive of Channel 4?

On 18/1/2007 Andy Duncan, boss of public service TV company Channel 4, issued a defence of "Celebrity Big Brother" against allegations of racism. Here is the URL for a BBC TV recording of Duncan's statement. For a more extended view of a man with his heels dug in, see this searching 29/1/2007 20 minute Channel 4 News interview by Krishnan Guru-Murthy, in which (in relation to the remark "I think she should fuck off home....  She can’t even speak English properly anyway") Duncan asserts  that Channel 4 "could not be certain the intent was racist". 20 weeks later Ofcom published its heavily critical report of its Content Sanctions Committee's investigation in Big Brother  [250 kB PDF] investigation.   Paragraphs 8.1 to 8.39 are the ones to read to get a palpable sense of the absurdity of Duncan's defence.  It is hard to see how Duncan, whose basic salary, according to the BBC, was £622k, including a performance-related bonus, and who will also be in line for a £450k long service bonus later this year,  will last much longer at the head of Channel 4.

Comments

[Donald Clark]

Why all this C4 bashing?

The BBC are unusually diligent and active on this one. Could it be their resentment over Big Brother's success and their failure to innovate in this genre (see Castaway)? On salaries, the BBC is full of massively-well paid executives, in an organisation that is famously inefficient.

Remember also that the legal threat of racism was completely neutralised when Jane Goody was called "white-trash" by a black contestant.

There was also a full feature on this evening's BBC news on Endemol's reality TV kidney organ transplant programme - sure to bring middle-England out in a fit of moral indignation! It has a terminally ill patient choosing one of three dialysis patients. I think they're right to show the programme and so does the renal medical community in Holland who support this programme, as there's a chronic lack of kidney donation. It is hoped that the publicity will save lives in the long run. Surely a nobler cause than Strictly Come Dancing, a 1950s BBC throwback.

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Donald. I had a feeling you'd be commenting, and I've no idea why you judge this to be 'Channel 4 bashing', or, by implication BBC-endorsing.

Back in January I complained to Andy Duncan about his assertion in relation to material broadcast (see above) that Channel 4 "could not be certain the intent was racist".

I got the standard reply that Channel 4 was sending anyone who complained about the programme (which I'd not done, having learnt about it mainly from your own post in support of it at the time and the extensive discussion that provoked), and it took a bit of time and trouble to get a (defensive) response from Channel 4, citing an impending internal investigation as a reason for not commenting further.

If Andy Duncan had argued that the intent of the remark was racist but that it deserved to be broadcast, that would have been a different matter. But he didn't, and I think that though he and Channel 4 state that it was not his intention, the effect of his remarks was to condone or excuse racism. That is why I do not think he should be at the head of a broadcasting company. Seb