Tawdry, banal and tediously Left-wing. Will someone tell me why we don’t just sell off Channel 4?

A Sk a hundred people if Channel 4 is privately or publicly owned, and I bet nearly all of them would assume the former. But they’d be wrong. Since it began broadcasting in 1982, it has been in the hands of the State.

It’s true that, unlike the BBC, Channel 4 receives no financial support from taxpayers. Most of its income comes from advertising. Nonetheless, it belongs to you and me as much as the National Gallery or the Royal Mint.

But in contrast to the National Gallery or the Royal Mint, it’s not clear why this increasingly trashy channel should be in public ownership. It could easily thrive in the commercial sector.

Yet the Culture Secretary, karen Bradley, confirmed in a speech in Manchester yesterday that the Government has decided not to sell Channel 4. She offered no good reason.

Superfluous

Why not cash in? Anyone pursued by a bank for unpaid debts is likely to cast an eye around for some unneeded item of value that might be sold to stave off the bailiffs.

That is what the Government should be doing. It is spending about £50billion a year more than it gets in tax receipts, and its mounting debt has reached a staggering £1.8 trillion.

You would have thought that in these dire straits it would jettison superfluous assets. Flogging Channel 4 would raise between £1 billion and £1.5 billion. Not enough to make more than a dent in our spiralling debts, perhaps, but a tidy sum all the same.

Alas, Mrs Bradley has seemingly been persuaded by Channel 4 executives that its sale would jeopardise the small independent companies that make programmes for it.

I’ve no idea whether this is true. I would have thought any prospective commercial owner of Channel 4 would make use of independent producers, and might be induced to make an undertaking to do so.

But in any event it should not be the Government’s first consideration to safeguard programme makers. No, its foremost responsibility is to reduce the national debt by selling off what it does not need to own.

And there could be no more obvious candidate than Channel 4. When launched, it faced commercial uncertainties and, despite a zeal for privatisation, the Thatcher government felt it needed the protection that public ownership would confer.

Moreover, it was then a serious TV channel committed to making programmes of a quality not often to be found on the BBC or ITV. Its first chief executive, Jeremy Isaacs, had produced the 26-episode The World At War, an unsurpassed documentary about World War II.

As long as Channel 4 remained different to its rivals, and continued to cater for relatively upmarket tastes, there was a strong argument for it remaining a national service broadcaster.

Alas, that case collapsed when Michael Grade took over from Jeremy Isaacs, who is said to have wept when he heard who was replacing him. Grade plunged Channel 4 downmarket, sanctioning tacky programmes such as The Word (featuring viewers eating worms and bathing in pigs’ urine), Eurotrash (nudity and transvestism) and Dyke TV (which needs no explanation). Grade was memorably dubbed ‘pornographer-inchief’ by this newspaper.

After he left, the channel didn’t try to recover its former role. Instead, it embraced reality television, most memorably with the banality and intermittent cruelty of Big Brother, which ran for 11 series before moving to Channel 5 in 2011.

Needless to say, there is still some enterprising television on Channel 4, and its documentaries and coverage of some sporting activities are noteworthy. But there are also loads of forgettable game shows, soap operas and reality television programmes that could be viewed almost anywhere.

Channel 4 has also kept alive Michael Grade’s tawdry legacy. For example, last year it broadcast Naked Attraction, a dating show in which participants bared everything for the camera. It featured lengthy close-ups of male and female genitalia, as well as frank discussions about contestants’ sexual attributes.

It’s true such material can be found on other channels — but that is exactly my point. There is no longer anything about Channel 4 that justifies it being in public hands. Why on earth should we taxpayers be required to remain owners of this dumbed down and often vulgar bazaar?

In short, Channel 4 no longer offers a distinct voice. It is no better, and often worse, than the BBC. Its purchase of the Great British Bake Off for a reputed £75 million shows that it follows rather than leads. At enormous expense, it’s putting on a programme — though without its main star, Mary Berry — shown previously on BBC1 at a fraction of the cost. It has also recruited the low-life comedian, and former drug user, Noel Fielding.

Racket

As for its news coverage, the famously Left-leaning Channel 4 News even outdoes the politically correct BBC in its embrace of fashionable causes — hatred of Donald Trump, scaremongering about Brexit and tacit support of unregulated immigration.

The interesting thing is that while the BBC receives a great deal of scrutiny, and rightly so, the often more egregious faults of Channel 4 go largely unnoticed. This is because its audience is small. For all its dumbing down, it remains a minority channel.

One racket that goes unchallenged is the enormous salaries paid to its senior executives. Its outgoing chief executive, David Abraham, receives £881,000 a year, which is roughly twice the pay of his opposite number at the BBC, Tony Hall, who runs a far bigger public service broadcaster.

Meanwhile, Jay Hunt, Channel 4’s chief creative officer, pocketed £612,000 in 2014, the latest year for which figures are available. This far exceeds the salary of her counterpart at the BBC.

It is surely wrong that senior executives at a small public service broadcaster should be paid so much more than those running our much larger public service broadcaster. I’d say BBC salaries were about right for those working for a big organisation in the public sector, while those of Channel 4 executives are outrageous.

Gesture

There is one thing in karen Bradley’s new plans that one is tempted to support — namely her proposal that Channel 4 should be relocated from London to Birmingham or Manchester in the cause of diversity.

The prospect of these sleek metropolitan fat-cats having to leave the fleshpots of the capital is amusing. But, of course, Mrs Bradley’s plan is an example of gesture politics. Shifting Channel 4 would be expensive, time-consuming and ultimately futile.

How much better if, instead of forcing Channel 4 to decamp from its offices in Westminster, Mrs Bradley grasped the key issue and put it on the market. There would be eager suitors, some of whom could run a much more enthralling TV station.

Her predecessor, John Whittingdale, funked the opportunity of reforming the BBC when the licence fee came up for renewal, and it is now guaranteed for a further ten years. It has been claimed he wanted to impose radical reforms on Auntie, but was prevented from doing so by David Cameron, who was terrified of upsetting the Liberal establishment.

karen Bradley is making a similar mistake. But are these potential critics really so fearsome? Paying off the public debt should be the priority. The day is long gone when it made sense for Channel 4 to be in the public sector.