Channel 14 « Andrew Sparkes

Channel 14

As a last term project in my first year of university, students from my course (scriptwriting) were put into groups with students from sister courses (interactive media and televison production) to produce a cohesive multimedia project – essentially a website with video content.

Our brief was the simple yet infuriatingly open-ended three words; “End of Empire”. This resulted in hours of debate over whether the project should be about a band breaking up or the end of the world (both eventually proven unimaginative when we realised other groups had already settled on these ideas themselves). However, since the project was being sponsored by Channel 4, we decided upon creating a website for a fictional television channel that was hurtling down the pan.

Channel 14 was an obvious parody of Channel 4, with shows such as Dick and Julie (a couple trying to run a chatshow while heading for divorce), Win or Don’t Win (a simple gameshow in which you get what you ask for) and Darren Beige (a street performer that was actually a wizard, except the now-immune-to-tricks public didn’t believe him).

The video content was trailers for, and clips of, these intentionally dreadful shows, which I co-wrote the scripts for. While these videos weren’t the best acted or most professionally produced student videos in the world, it ended up fitting the idea of a channel’s dismal final output much more than if the production and acting side was perfect.

During the presentation day, head of 4talent, Jo Taylor, praised our daring attitude (a hallmark of Channel 4) for lampooning the very channel that was sponsoring us, and picked it as one of the year’s three best projects.