Twenty years almost to the day, a large crowd of trendy young things gathered at a suitably squalid student house in Brighton for a Channel 4 launch party. “There was an ownership there – people were members rather than viewers,” explains Tim Gardam, who was promoted last week to director of television for Channel 4 as part of a shake-up in which the station got rid of 200 staff. “That’s why people get very angry if we get it wrong.”And Channel 4 has got it very wrong indeed over the past few years, losing its character, its edge – and its audience. Viewer figures were down 14 per cent in the first few weeks of the autumn schedule, for instance, and a disastrous 20 per cent during peak times.Young and professional men, in particular, have deserted it in droves.

The 20th birthday celebrations have practically been cancelled, and another round of redundancies announced.The question is being asked: in 2002, just who or what is Channel 4 for?To add insult to injury, Channel 5, once dismissed as the downmarket home of endless soft pornography, looks set to swap places with its older, and wearier, counterpart.Poised to take over from Channel 4 as Britain’s second-biggest commercial broadcaster after ITV, Channel 5 has moved upmarket with some well-chosen documentaries, lifestyle shows and serious blockbusting movies. Meanwhile, Channel 4 was taking the ill-advised “Cosmopolitan” option of seeing just how many items on sex it could squeeze into its schedule in a desperate attempt to revive its flagging audience figures. Is it really Channel 4’s job, for instance, to give us “documentaries” about Ulrika Jonsson’s sex life or the wacky world of the tabloid blonde Anna Nicole Smith, as it did last week?Gardam, like his boss Mark Thompson, is an old BBC hand, having spent 20 years at the corporation editing programmes such as Panorama and Newsnight. As director of programmes, the 46-year-old Cambridge double first has presided over programming (and several terrible mistakes such as hiring daytime TV stars Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan for £1.5m from ITV) since he joined Channel 4 in 1998 and he appears to agree that there may have been too much sex, or rather bad sex, on his adopted channel.”Lesbian Love Stories wasn’t very good,” he admits before extolling the virtues of any number of other Channel 4 sex shows, including one about gayanimals (“one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen”), another on sex between old people a long time ago, and another about A Man’s Best Friend – his penis. “It wasn’t titillating,” claims Gardam, who’s a dead ringer for the exasperated TV executive in Alan Partridge, “just very funny.”Whether the rest of the population shares Gardam’s sense of humour – and taste in television generally – will be tested by the response to Channel 4’s new £430m schedule, out this week.

But perhaps humbled by recent criticism, he freely admits to past mistakes, including making, on occasion, programmes such as the survivor show Lost that were infinitely more fun to make than to watch.But he is still reluctant to give up on one of his biggest signings. Richard & Judy has been granted a short reprieve, although no one is placing bets on its long-term future on the channel. The excruciating breakfast offering RI:SE is also allowed to limp on. The increasingly tedious Brookside, however, has finally been been pushed to the margins of the schedule and faces the axe.”We had to get the ground clear, as we have to be about planting arresting and noticeable new shows.