C4’s Alex Mahon says ‘terrible behaviour’ against women ‘tolerated’ for decades

Alex Mahon & ITV Studios’ Angela Jain

Channel 4 CEO Alex Mahon has said that “terrible behaviour” towards women has been “tolerated” over the past two decades across the industry, as the former Shine boss addressed the allegations against UK presenter Russell Brand.

C4, the BBC and Banijay are investigating the conduct of Brand, following allegations over the weekend accusing the star of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse. Brand has denied all the accusations.

The incidents are claimed to have taken place between 2006 and 2013. During this time, Brand hosted a show on BBC Radio 6 Music and worked on C4’s Big Brother spin-off shows (produced by Endemol, which merged with Shine before being acquired by Banijay).

Mahon, who was speaking at the start of the RTS Convention in Cambridge today, led UK production firm Shine from 2012-2015 and told the audience – largely UK-based broadcast execs and producers – that they were at the “forefront” of driving change.

She added that while behaviour of the type Brand has been accused of “is less prevalent now, there remains a problem and it is something we must confront. More change needs to come.”

Introducing the two-day event in Cambridge, UK, the current C4 boss – who took over in 2017 – said that the agenda had been prepared “months in advance” so would not be exploring the subject explicitly, but would be woven into discussions.

Evolution of the ‘Netflix correction’

Its main focus instead would be exploring the amount of content available to viewers, with Mahon admitting that the current level is not sustainable.

“There’s not enough money, not enough eyeballs and too much video to sustain everything we have created,” she said.

“We’ve seen the great Netflix correction and now we have ‘The Great Restart’. The industry has come to a juddering halt and we have to ask ourselves some serious questions.”

The C4 chief also touched on the US writers strike, arguing that the strategies of streamers – namely providing no residuals and buying content outright with little insight into who was watching – was not sustainable.

Instead the industry needed to “return to a model where success and failure shared, the model of creators having no back end simply hasn’t worked.”

Mahon added that the UK industry, in particular, is “motivated by public purpose rather than shareholder purposes” for many companies, alluding to the public broadcaster remits of C4 and the BBC.