How Channel "Swore" changed TV I was encouraged to do this by what I took to be a backsliding on the part of BBC Two. The days of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man were long gone. Foreign films, and British independent cinema, were no more to be seen. To greet us, though, BBC Two showed Wagner's Ring. Here was an opportunity to make a mark. On our first weekend we showed Mozart's Idomeneo, recorded live overnight from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, putting Luciano Pavarotti on our screen on Sunday afternoon, followed that same evening by the Royal Shakespeare Company's Nicholas Nickleby. We owed much to David Rose for the wealth of film-making he found for us in Film on Four, and to Liz Forgan, who shaped an agenda for Channel 4 News and provided a range of views: Comment, Opinion (half-hour addresses to camera), and The Video Box for viewers to have their say. Mike Bolland gave us The Tube, The Comic Strip Presents and Saturday Live. Michael Kustow, commissioning the arts, delivered The Mystery Plays written by Tony Harrison, directed by Bill Bryden; Peter Hall's masked Oresteia, again written by Harrison; Mahabharata, Peter Brook's wondrous telling of the Hindu myth; and Harrison's poem V, set in a Leeds graveyard, directed for the screen by Richard Eyre. For the arts lover anywhere in these isles, but particularly outside London, these offerings were manna from heaven. Kustow started Dance on Four, and we showed Bluebeard's Castle by Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal. A gentleman telephoned the C4 duty officer at 22.25pm to say: "I can't understand why such an inane programme is being shown and why I have been watching it for the past two hours." As chief executive I saw to it that on Sunday afternoons we showed 12 operas a year. They included Philip Glass's Satyagraha, sung in Sanskrit, and Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, filmed by Jean-Marie Straub. The Welsh composer William Mathias told me that in a Cardiff hotel the next morning, a farmer said to him, "Did you see that wonderful opera on television yesterday? Beautiful music, and theology too! Who watched? Suppose an opera got 250,000 viewers, that was as many, I calculated, as a flourishing broadsheet might attract. In an opera house, it would have taken a hundred performances to reach that figure. Rosi's film of Carmen, with Placido Domingo, got 2.5 million. More than anything else, the channel aimed at diversity, finding a Brazilian soap opera, Escrava Isaura (Isaura the slave girl); A Sense of Place, three films on Ulster poets by a poet of film, David Hammond; and the much mocked title Quilts in Women's Lives. Critics fumed at the prospect, but liked what they actually saw. In sport, denied football, rugby, cricket and tennis, we showed the NFL, the Tour de France and sumo. The Tour de France won me the F T Bidlake Memorial Award, for services to cycling - a handsome plaque which I still cherish as I have never been able to ride a bike. After I left C4, I tended to be overcritical of its output in other hands. Sour grapes, perhaps. But I do feel strongly about two things. First, the notion that the channel had always aimed at outrage, and therefore programmes ought to shock. Not true. We aimed at surprise. Second, the practice of incentivising commissioning editors to maximise ratings. The consequence is to shun all risk, find a product that works and repeat subject matter and format over and over again. That way lies homogeneity and tedium: one property programme, or bullying protagonist, after another. Big Brother, perhaps the channel's biggest ever rating attraction and revenue earner, was innovative at first, but long outstayed its welcome, dominating seven evenings a week, three months at a time. The "reality" show, far from capturing the spottiness of life, simply puts on an act, and keeps repeating it. Year after year, however, C4 has produced its fair share of excellent programmes, winning awards regularly. Today, I share C4"s pride in what they do. Slumdog Millionaire cleaned up at the Oscars. Drama is making a comeback. This summer came their bold coverage of the Paralympics, superbly executed. C4"s finest hour? On C4"s first night, we showed Walter, in which Ian McKellen played a retarded lad. "A big mistake, Jeremy," blinkered old trouts told me. Not the film for an opening night at all. It was, though. In their different ways, both this year's Games and Frears's film had much to tell us of the human condition.