Early Channel 4's video art

In early November 1982 a new television channel was launched in the UK that transformed British video art. Channel 4 was unlike the other three channels then available to UK audiences: two of these (BBC1, BBC2) were cast in a socially conservative and patriarchal mould of educating the public (an impulse little changed since the days of John Reith, the BBC's first Director-General in the 1920s), while the third (ITV) was a purely commercial enterprise. Channel 4 was established following a parliamentary bill that aimed to open up broadcasting to minority groups and, separately, to encourage independent experimental film and video production. Among the programmes created in this early experimental period was Stuart Marshall's Bright Eyes (1984), one of the first full-length documentaries to confront AIDS and the media hysteria surrounding it. (Early British video art)