IT’S impossible to pin down "British values’. How can anyone truly nail what defines the collective soul of four distinct nations with a long, painful history of war, rivalry, distrust and animosity currently existing in an uneasy, creaking union? You may as well go hunting for Lewis Carroll’s Snark, a Leprechaun’s rainbow, or Boris Johnson’s morality.

It’s easier to define "what’s not British values". With near Sophoclean irony, the UK government’s push to get schoolchildren to celebrate Britishness is probably the best example of what’s not British values. The One Britain, One Nation Day (OBON) – complete with creepy Soviet song (sample lyrics: "We are Britain and we have one dream, to unite all people in one great team") – is everything the people of England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland are not. We aren’t obedient, good little citizens, marching in lockstep towards a shining future, at one with the British hive-mind. It’s almost perfectly comic that OBON (which sounds like a terrible noodle dish) will be celebrated in schools on June 25, when Scottish pupils have finished for the summer.

If there’s anything which gets close to symbolising the mythic, phantasm of British values, it’s the individualistic, creative, off-the-wall, seat-of-your-pants, let’s-tell-it-as-it-is, stick-it-to-the-man soul of Channel 4. There’s a mantra that the BBC somehow represents the essence of these islands. It doesn’t. The BBC represents a certain kind of establishment world-view: a vision of life which genuflects to Royals, celebrates rather than challenges the status quo, and happily amplifies the voice of power.

The end is nigh for the BBC – and it’s the broadcaster’s own fault

The BBC talks down, C4 speaks up. C4 comes closer to the rebellious spirit of the people of these weird islands – I stress the people, not the governments. Whether we’re Scottish, English, Northern Irish or Welsh, the folk of this manic archipelago have been kicking against the traces for centuries. We rebel, revolt, defenestrate leaders, and are generally utterly awkward and bloody difficult. We prick pomposity. We’re funny, anarchic, silly, witty (that’s maybe one trait we all share: a union of comedy). We’re pretty tolerant – mostly – unless you’re intolerant. We’re changeable, flighty. We’re relatively smart too – we like big ideas, but aren’t so keen on big egos.

The ordinary people of Britain aren’t the same as the governments of Britain – more’s the damn pity. When I think of the people of Britain I think of Peterloo rebels, Suffragettes, heretics, Enlightenment revolutionaries, ordinary folk in Glasgow, Belfast, Cardiff and London who’ve given the finger to the ruling classes and demanded their rights time and again down the generations. None of this is to say, in some awful populist way, that the "ordinary people" of Britain are sanctified. Many of us are thoroughly rotten – we can be a vile, nasty bunch when we put our minds to it. But if you had to distil down the people of these islands – again I stress the people not the government – the resulting liquor would have overwhelming taste-notes of easy-going liberalism. That’s why I like the people of these four nations, and implacably distrust the four governments.

It should come as no surprise then that Boris Johnson’s Secretary of State for Culture Wars, Oliver Dowden, is coming for C4, planning to privatise it, and ruin one of the last great creative institutions in Britain.

I’m no apologist for Margaret Thatcher – far from it. But when Thatcher set up C4 she allowed creativity to flourish in British TV. The current moves against the channel are yet more proof that Johnson isn’t what we once called Conservative. C4 was set up as a public service broadcaster tasked with outsourcing all programming. It democratised television. It has no in-house production team. That means independent production companies thrive across Britain selling programming to C4 – creating jobs, making a buck. When a successful show sells overseas, it’s the production company which coins it in, not Channel 4. Under its remit, the channel also ploughs all profits back into programming. It’s a perfect Goldilocks-esque recipe for how to run a TV station.

Now, as Johnson’s government cheerleads for the execrable mess that’s GB News, it turns on our most unique channel – after, of course, whipping an already acquiescent BBC into broken submission with licence fee threats. Partly it’s pure spite. Johnson never forgave C4 for replacing him with a melting ice block when he chickened out of a climate change debate. But it’s also part of the on-going Culture War – C4 is seen as a liberal bastion and the Tories need to keep feeding the Culture War beast as Brexit rots before them.

I fell in love with C4 on its November 1982 launch day. At 12, I’d been force-fed a pabulum diet of Jim Davidson and The Good Old Days (dear God, I pity those of us of an age to remember that utter embarrassing horror-show). Now I was getting The Tube and After Dark. Oh, After Dark how I miss your drunken late-night madness.

C4 felt 21st century in the 20th century. It still feels culturally ahead of the game. It forced the BBC and ITV to give up their substandard variety-style programming and grow up. Even when C4 embraced the gutter it did so with panache, creating an entire genre with Big Brother. At its best, I’d argue, reality TV holds a brutal mirror up to society – at its worst, evidently, it’s a modern day Bedlam where we pay to see the crazies.

Boris Johnson and his media cheerleaders created this anger...God help Britain

When it went mass market, C4 did it differently too. Brookside wasn’t the twee confection of Coronation Street. It tried to portray real folk, living real lives. It felt honest and, again, broke boundaries. A lesbian kiss may seem trite today, it was a liberating watershed in 1994.

Maybe it's because I’m a Generation X cliche but the awkward cool, lazy, louche, vaguely cynical, studied outsideryness of C4 feels like it speaks to me and for me. I share its values – its "British liberalism’. That the Tories are coming for it doesn’t surprise me because there’s nothing truly British – in the good sense of that word – about this modern iteration of Conservatism.

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