Channel 4 in Leeds: How Yorkshire is key to the broadcaster as it turns 40

The milestone caps off a period of anniversaries marked at Channel 4 in Leeds over recent weeks. On October 17, it was three years since the broadcaster officially opened up its office in the West Yorkshire city (at first in a temporary space, before settling into City Square’s Majestic, which had caught fire in 2014). And on October 15, it was two years since it launched its 4Skills initiative – a massive investment in training to create opportunities for people across the country – in partnership with numerous Yorkshire organisations.

Sinead Rocks, the broadcaster’s managing director for nations and regions, who works in Leeds, believes its basic principles remain very similar to what they were in 1982.

The publicly owned but privately funded channel originally set up as, and remains, a publisher-broadcaster, meaning it does not make its own programmes but instead commissions them from independent production companies.

This “caused a massive explosion” in such companies in the 1980s, she says, but mainly in the south of England.

With the advent of Channel 4 in Leeds, though, those in the north are suddenly in a prime location and the broadcaster’s commitments to regions outside of London are considered stronger than ever.

Sinead, who is from Northern Ireland, says: “When I joined Channel 4 to lead the break out of London, if you like, when we established our HQ in Leeds and our offices in Glasgow and Bristol, we had set ourselves a voluntary target that we wanted to spend 50 per cent of our commissioning budget outside of London by 2023.

“We are mandated by the government to spend 35 per cent, so it was a voluntary increase on that.

"Three years ago that looked like a challenge and, gratifyingly, we managed to hit the target two years early, so we hit it in 2021. Last year, 55 per cent of our money was spent in the nations and regions and 66 per cent of the hours of broadcast came from companies in the nations and regions.”

Leeds has also become home to the 4Studio department, which publishes digital content to engage the channel’s younger audience, and has grown from one person to around 120 - but is rising.

Janine Smith, head of content at 4Studio, says that mostly involves what you would “loosely” call digital marketing which might appear on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and TikTok.

“We put out 25,000 pieces of content on social (media) platforms last year. All of that was made in Leeds by the team, pretty much,” she says.

That includes clips from shows, interviews with talent, behind-the-scenes footage and more. Other work includes branded content made with advertisers and sponsors, as well as digital programming such as short-form documentaries.

It has been “built from nothing and 85 per cent of the people are all based in the north,” says Janine, who adds that many are young and new to broadcasting.

She says that it’s been “brilliant for me to get that fresh perspective and being surrounded by all those young people because they are the people that we're trying to create the content for. Our big focus is on 16 to 24s and if we've got a room full of them, we become our own focus group, almost.”

About 300 roles are now in Leeds but that’s growing, says Sinead, and includes top decision-markers such as Caroline Hollick, the head of drama, among others.

While there was a good independent production set-up in Yorkshire already, it suffered from a skills gap that needed addressing, because there were too few people ready to fill some roles roles in a growing regional industry.

Channel 4 launched the Leeds-based 4Skills programme in 2020 and, from 2022, aimed to create more than 15,000 opportunities nationwide – with a particular focus on young people and those from disadvantaged backgrounds – by spending £5m annually for three years. It helps budding professionals with the likes of apprenticeships, work experience, production training and its Content Creatives scheme, which enables paid placements aimed at young people across Yorkshire.

Sinead says: “What we had seen previously was, in some roles, like exec producers, people had had to move to London to get the kind of work that further built their CV and experience. Now we need to make sure that it's not just a handful of people getting picked for all the plum jobs. We need that talent in Bradford. We need it in Leeds. We need it in Manchester. We need it everywhere.”

An example of how 4Skills has impacted lives is the commissioning of Dance School (its working title), a coming-of-age drama created by Theresa Ikoko (Rocks) and Lisa Holdsworth (Discovery of Witches, Call The Midwife) and made by Leeds-based indie Duck Soup. Ten people were offered the chance to undertake a 22-week programme of extensive training, culminating with 10 weeks of work on the eight-part drama. “If we were based in London, there's no way we would have been able to do such a big skills initiative alongside it,” says Sinead. “Things like that are very exciting because, at some point in 2023, you'll have a brilliant drama, which is very Leeds-focused, very Leeds-set, made by a company from Leeds, but will also have given a huge number of young people the opportunity to work on it and to get experience that has the potential to be life-changing.”