BBC4, a comparatively new TV channel, has a character of its own. From the start it aimed to be “a place to think”, and it was always designed as something “that the commercial market would never do”, says Roly Keating, its controller and formerly head of arts at the BBC. Its first week’s schedule indeed verged on a parody of non-commercial TV, with township opera from South Africa and a performance by a Senegalese singer in a London church hall. A top-rated show will typically draw some 50,000 viewers – almost negligible in television terms. Yet that narrow appeal makes BBC4 a model of what a publicly financed broadcaster ought to do. It has roamed into territory where its ratings-driven sister channel, BBC1, seldom dares to tread. Despite a tiny 35m budget, it boasts an intelligent prime-time talk show and a world news programme so internationally minded that its London provenance is barely visible. BBC4 may wear its gravity a little too heavily at times, but it supplies a variety and thoughtfulness unavailable on prime time BBC1. The more the other BBC channels chase the ratings, and the more that BBC4 refuses to be dictated to by them, the more the channel looks like a model for what BBC television could look like.