‘How GB News Found More Profit in Provocation’ by Andrew Davies—guest blogger

When GB News launched in June 2021, it presented itself as a new entrant into Britain’s television news landscape. The channel promised to challenge what it saw as the perceived consensus of established broadcasters such as the BBC and Sky News, offering viewers what its founders described as a broader range of perspectives and a stronger emphasis on voices outside London. It was, in essence, pitched as a conservative-leaning but still recognisably journalistic alternative within the UK’s regulated broadcast environment.

In the early days the project had a veneer of seriousness thanks largely to veteran broadcaster Andrew Neil, who joined as chairman and lead presenter. Neil insisted the channel would respect the impartiality rules enforced by Ofcom, even while allowing presenters to express stronger views than were typical on British television.

Unfortunately for that plan, Neil departed only a few months after launch. Once he was gone, the channel seemed to discover its true calling: not sober journalism, but the far more lucrative art of “shouting at the television”.

The schedule gradually filled with presenter-led shows built around personalities rather than reporting. Populist right political figures and commentators such as Nigel Farage, Lee Anderson, Matthew Goodwin and Jacob Rees-Mogg appeared as hosts, delivering nightly monologues about "the state of the nation". News bulletins became secondary to opinion and commentary, while the need to produce clips that could spread online became increasingly central to the channel’s programming.

There were also practical reasons for this shift. Television news is expensive to produce. Investigative reporting, foreign bureaus and large editorial teams require substantial resources. For a new entrant such as GB News (already suffering significant financial losses in its early years) building a full-scale news operation capable of rivalling the reporting power of the BBC or Sky News proved impossible.

Talk-based programming built around strong personalities, by contrast, is far cheaper and far more adaptable to the digital media environment. Instead of trying to compete directly on reporting, the channel competed for attention. And attention, in the modern media landscape, tends to favour the loudest voices in the room.

In the age of social media, clips that provoke outrage, applause or controversy are far more likely to circulate widely online. A heated monologue or combative debate can travel far beyond the television audience, attracting millions of views on platforms such as YouTube or X. In this ecosystem, controversy can function as a marketing strategy.

Gradually, the channel’s identity shifted from a conservative news alternative toward something closer to the shock-jock tradition familiar from talk radio. Instead of competing primarily on reporting, it increasingly competed on provocation. Critics argue this has created a cycle in which outrage drives engagement, engagement drives visibility and visibility becomes essential for financial survival.

The case of GB News illustrates a broader tension in contemporary media: the conflict between journalism and the economics of attention. In a fragmented market dominated by social media algorithms and viral clips, the pressure to entertain can easily overwhelm the ambition to inform.

From The Avengers to Line of Duty: How UK TV Became Police Procedural

The Freeview TV channels in the UK are a goldmine of TV nostalgia. Each day they show repeats of the the crime-adventure shows made by ITC Entertainment, a company run by Lew Grade that aimed to make UK TV shows that appealed to both UK and US audiences.

As a child in the 1970s, I would watch repeats of these shows. They included Danger Man, The Saint, The Avengers, The Baron, The Prisoner, Department S, The Champions and Randall and Hopkirk. Shot on 35 mm film these shows were presented in a stylish and imaginative way, creating a world that seemed vast and exciting and full of visual flair, exotic locations and imaginative storytelling.

Edwin Astley who wrote most of the theme tunes and scores for these shows, apart from The Avengers, The Champions (he wrote the score only) and The prisoner, gave these shows added drama and energy. I was always surprised that after the 1960s he didn't write any more TV music.

Then in the early 1970s, UK TV began to dispense with these sorts of shows in favour of more realistic and gritty police procedural ones. Though earlier TV shows such as Z Cars and Dixon of Dock Green were already realistic to some extent, it was not until shows like The Sweeney (shot on grainy 16 mm film) that this approach began to dominate.

The dominance of the police procedural continued through the 1980s with Juliet Bravo, The Bill and Inspector Morse, into the 1990s with Prime Suspect, Cracker, Wycliffe, Dalziel and Pascoe, Silent Witness and A Touch of Frost, and carried on into the 2000s and beyond with Heartbeat, Midsomer Murders, Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, New Tricks, The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, Waking the Dead, Line of Duty, Lewis, Broadchurch, Happy Valley and countless others. And though Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes had a fantasy-based premise, their execution remained firmly realistic.

While police procedurals have their own merits, there is something inherently stifling about an unbroken stream of detectives, case files, paperwork, and routine investigation, week after week, year after year—without the flair, imagination, or sense of adventure that made the ITC show so brilliant.

Seeing these older shows again on Freeview is not just nostalgia but a reminder that television used to thrill and inspire.