Weekend Spy: Joining the debate: 18DoughtyStreet

18DoughtyStreet, the political internet TV channel with the aim of filling the gap created by the lack of political debate on television, attracted a lot of media attention when it first launched in October. Despite teething problems, with many keen viewers unable to stream the live broadcasts online, the channel is now managing to pull in up to two thousand viewers a night. With extended hours, more programmes and an improved website on the way, it seemed like a good time for Digital Spy's Joanne Oatts to pay a visit to its Bloomsbury studio and talk to founder Iain Dale about how the channel came about.

Iain Dale is no stranger to a challenge. When he opened a political bookshop in 1997, after ten years as political lobbyist, he had no idea whether the residents of Westminster would welcome it. But nearly ten years later, Politicos is still going strong. Dale also headed up David Davis' 2005 Tory leadership campaign. Now he has turned his hand to television. With the help of YouGov founder Stefan Shakespeare and Conservative blogger Tim Montgomerie, '18DoughtyStreet' was born. So where did the idea come from?

"About four years ago I did a business plan for an internet radio station, because I had discovered one in America that just centred around politics, particularly centre right politics, and I thought 'Well if it can be done in America, why can it be done here?'" says Dale. "I thought Politicos radio had a nice ring to it," he adds, but then he was selected as a Tory candidate for the upcoming election and couldn't take on another big project, so the radio station idea folded. But then six months ago Dale met up with long standing friend Stefan Shakespeare, founder of YouGov, after he had returned from visiting the States. "He was flicking through the cable channels, and he saw this one channel where there was literally two chairs, two people and a camera and that was it. He said it was a really interesting discussion, and we sort of thought 'If that could work there...'"

Shakespeare assisted with funding and in August they took possession of the Bloomsbury building which was to become the inspiration for channel's name. Dale admits that originally he didn't think it would come off. "I had taken six months off, I had been David Davis' chief of staff in the Tory leadership contest, and I was basically knackered at the end of it. I started up my blog again and spent six months doing that and few other things, and then it got to May or June and I sort of thought, 'Better decide what to do', and this was sort of bubbling away in the background."

The station went on air on October 10, with only a run up of six weeks from moving into the premises. "Thinking back it was a ridiculously short period of time," notes Dale. "We did it deliberately because we wanted to get into internet television right at the beginning, because either next year or the year after, that's when it is going to take off. So we wanted to spend two or three months experimenting. We didn’t have a big launch, but we had a lot more media coverage than we expected. We didn't go soliciting it. I suppose we should have realised that it would be seen as something interesting."

On launch, the channel had its problems. But the channel's head of technology, Mike Rouse, says that streaming video over the internet is a problem faced across the industry, in that the technology hasn't quite adapted to the fact that everyone's machines supports different formats. Since then the channel has used the time to find out what works and what doesn't. "I'm not sure we're totally there yet," Dale admits.

The good news is that a new website is due to launch around January 10, with massive improvements having already been made since the channel started. The new site will have a 'YouTube' type element to it, where people can upload material which may then be shown on the channel. Dale admits the website has been the biggest weakness of the channel's success so far. "We bought a hundred video cameras to give out to people all around the country and around the world (to record features) and the uploading facility just won't work. So we've got all these people wanting to make films but we can't use them, unless they physically bring them into the building! So the new website will have a huge impact on the programming and make the website more interactive and more interesting."

The team behind 18DoughtyStreet includes people who, while experienced in their own technical fields, have little television experience, let alone internet television experience. But Dale feels this has helped the channel progress. "One of things we found in the beginning was we constantly being taken hostage by people with television experience. We kept saying 'We want to do this,' and they kept coming up with 20 reasons why we couldn't. I just got rather frustrated with this. I divide people up into 'can do' and 'can't do' people. And we had a couple of people who seemed to delight in telling us we couldn't do something. We'd go away and think about it and come back and say 'We can do it because we know someone else who's done it.' We'd get there in the end but at the time it was like walking through treacle," he says. With those people now having left the channel, and a young and keen technical and production team of 15 people on board, Dale is more confident in where the channel is going.

With this young 'off-screen' team in mind, is the channel looking to recruit a more diverse range of 'on-screen' talent, to try and attract a younger, mixed audience, some of whom maybe apathetic to current political issues? "It is difficult to find female presenters, and even guests, who have got the political knowledge to do it. It's an indictment on politics really. We're doing quite well on the younger side. The guests that come on the Up Front programme are under 40, some under 30. Conservative Future, we get quite a few from them and a number of left or left-of-centre bloggers that we use," says Dale.

But he adds that the channel never set out to be completely balanced in terms of its political leanings. "Everyone knew that Tim Mongomerie and I were known Tories. We knew we'd be called 'Tory TV'. And in a sense I actually welcome that, because anyone who watches the channel would see it's not like that," says Dale. "And they'll be some times when I do my show and I'll be the only Tory on the panel, but then there are other times when everyone is from the right. But that doesn't mean they are all going to say 'Oh I agree with that', it doesn't happen like that."

Dale does admit they have had trouble trying to get Labour guests. "Whenever I've rung the Labour press office, they've never actually come up with anybody." Government minister Hazel Blears, currently courting controversy regarding her local campaigning against Labour health policy, will be appearing in the New Year, however. "We've had many Labour MPs on, but they're all people we knew well. Liberal Democrats love it, and I think they were quite sceptical because a lot of them knew that I am quite virulently anti-Liberal Democrat, but they've all loved doing it and they all go away telling their mates, 'Oh you want to do that, it's good fun.' I do want to get more non-Conservatives on, but not just for the sake of it," he adds.

The channel makes a policy of not deliberately going for "the usual subjects" that you might see on Newsnight or Question Time. "We're trying to get away from that, we've got a whole new generation of people. Some of whom have been brilliant and some who haven't been. The problem when you have people you don't know, is you don't know how they're going to perform."

With opinionated guests being key to political programming, has the channel ever had any really nasty moments where the debate completely dried up? "We generally have two or three people on for two hours and the first hour we spend talking about issues of the day and the second hour we spend looking at tomorrow's papers. There have been one or two occasions when I have been sitting here thinking, 'Oh my god.' There was one particular occasion when we had one person drop out at the last minute, and we had two people for the last hour. It was like car crash television. Both of them were mono-syllabic."

On the whole, the great thing about 18DoughtyStreet is that is does showcase political debate, at a length which would never be broadcast on linear television. For example, for the channel's 'end of year review' programme before Christmas, an hour-and-half discussion with a Liberal Democrat MP, a Tory MP and Peter Whittle and Danny Finklestein from The Times saw the group talking about foreign issues and domestic issues for 90 minutes.

"This is what this channel is all about. This is what you're not going to get on the BBC," says Dale, who also recently did an hour long interview with leading political historian Peter Hennessy for the station. "He doesn’t do many interviews. We streamed that for a whole weekend, and I had so many emails from people saying 'This is fantastic, we don't get this anymore,' and 'Haven't seen anything like this for years.' So I think we've struck a chord with a certain group of people and the key thing now is to widen that group."

With around one to two thousand people tuning in a night, the signs look very promising for the channel. Dale is certainly pleased to point out that Sky News demoted journalist James Rubin for getting just one thousand viewers a night for his World News Tonight programme. "If we're doing what Sky did in an hour then that's fantastic," adds Dale.

So is Dale looking to claim a spot as the next Jeremy Paxman? "I don't do confrontation. I just don’t see the point of it. I don't think you get anything out of people by doing that. That doesn't mean to say I don't ask them difficult questions. We had Mark Oaten on (Liberal Democrat MP who resigned from the party's leadership race after a tabloid sex scandal involving male prostitutes). I wasn't looking forward to that, because I thought 'I'm on a loser here', because if I don't ask him all the questions people think I ought to, I'll get slated, and yet I don't want to appear completely puriant. I think at the end of it he was happy with how it went, and I was happy with how it went. And I did ask him some difficult questions, but not in a way that he felt that I was being too invasive. And we didn't get any comments afterwards saying, 'Oh you let him off the hook'."

So why does Dale think the broadcasters have taken political debate off their schedules? "I'm not sure people are any less interested in politics, it's just that there's more for them to choose from, so commercial channels are going to dish up what they think people want," says Dale. "If you get 8 million people watching X Factor, they're not going to put a political debate on. But that's where the BBC has failed its audience, because it's there to provide public service television. They do it very well in many regards, but if you look at the programming there is on BBC Two and BBC One now there just aren't the kind of things you would have seen even 10 years ago. They've got News24 and BBC Parliament, but how many people outside of Westminster even know BBC Parliament exists? I don't see what we're doing as competing with the BBC at all. I think it complements what they do. I keep being told by people who know people high up in the BBC, that they're really apprehensive about what we're doing, because they know that we're doing something they can't because it's opinionated."

Though political programmes like BBC One's Question Time also have audience participation and showcase debate, both are limited, and no subject is really given a proper length of time to be discussed. Dale also believes the type of guests on the panels of such programmes have been "dumbed down" in terms of the numbers of actors and comedians they have on. "I don't mind them having the odd one on, but out of a panel of five, sometimes you've got two or three, and you think 'Have they really got anything to add to a debate?' If they have, absolutely fine. If you're having a debate about animal rights, have Carla Lane on, she knows something about it."

But it's not just the non-political guests on Question Time that Dale dislikes. This Week, the late night BBC One debate show presented by ex-Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil, also comes under fire: "They have people on it that are purely big names, and they have nothing to say at all, and I think 'Why bother?' All they're doing is chasing ratings. To be fair that programme for that time slot gets good ratings, but for people involved in politics, why would they watch it? And although we're not trying to be a 'political geek' channel, you've got to cater for that audience as well as trying to widen it out to get people involved who aren't particularly interested in politics, or who haven't been until now."

With the technical elements of the channel now being sorted, what new programming does the channel have planned for next year? "We're going to have an hourly weekly slot with a guest presenter and we hope to get Anne Widdicombe to do one a month. We've got two people from the left lined up but I can't tell you who they are, but if we get both of them it will be quite a coup." The channel's programming output is also due to expand with talk of increasing from four to five days a week, and adding another hour to the start of the current 8pm-12midnight slot. Dale hopes that by the end of 2007, the channel will be broadcasting around 10-12 hours a day. A head-to-head programme, with an expert on a particular issue being questioned from someone from the right and the left is also in the pipeline, as well as a show with London correspondents from foreign broadcasters to "see how the rest of the world views this country."

But Dale is cautious not to do too much too soon. "If we made any mistakes at the beginning, that's what we tried to do." For a new channel, on a relatively new platform, learning from ones mistakes is ultimately the best move. It’s a shame politicians couldn't learn to do the same.

18DoughtyStreet - http://www.18doughtystreet.com