New boss at Channel 4 reveals a totally different type of Reality TV

Meet the boss. The staff of Channel 4 were addressed for the first time by their new chief executive yesterday and they heard him deliver the dreaded "L" word. Channel 4, Mark Thompson said, must be leaner. Television is just like any other industry when it comes to the word leaner. Bosses claim it means fitter and more efficient. Staff know that it means redundancies.

In the case of Channel 4 the number of job cuts is likely to run into hundreds. Indeed, the 1,100-strong work force will, at the end of the cuts exercise, probably be nearer to the 650-strong workforce Michael Jackson inherited when he became chief executive in 1997.

Mr Jackson ran the channel in an era of expanding advertising revenues and on-screen successes including Friends, ER and Big Brother. Mark Thompson faces a colder climate. The channel has just made a loss for the first time in a decade. Advertising revenues were £605m last year; the year before they were £638m. Forecasts are for them to stay flat.

The gloss has also gone from FilmFour which, after a series of flops and a £5m loss last year, will no longer be a separate production arm, with Channel 4 producing movies in-house. Embarrassingly, they have to admit that the BBC's in-house team has stolen their glory – with recent triumphs such as Iris – and that they will ape the BBC model.

The FilmFour digital channel remains; but Thompson also knows that the new BBC/Rupert Murdoch run digital terrestrial platform will not be offering FilmFour; and so its subscription numbers will be down, generating more losses. Other Jackson projects have also lost their sheen. E4 has premiered series of Friends and ER; but its viewing figures are low, far worse than those of Sky One. E4 is in the spotlight at the moment because it is the Big Brother season. The rest of the year it fails to be the niche youth station promised, and the projected BBC3 will hit it hard, which is why the Mr Thompson, an ex-BBC man, has called on the Government not to approve BBC3. The network has already been forced to merge its pay-television channels, E4 and FilmFour, with its interactive department, as part of a drive to halve the £68m-a-year loss of 4 Ventures.

Mr Thompson's position is not easy. Channel 4 looks unprotected in the TV market. Some sort of tie-up between Channel 5 and Sky is rumoured; ITV has been moving towards a more centralised operation; and the BBC has the licence fee and the new digital opportunities.

Privatisation in the current loss-making climate is not an option. Advocates of public service broadcasting will be glad of that. Channel 4 spends more than £20m a year on its excellent Channel 4 News, which only gets about a million viewers.

What concerns the viewer is what the Thompson regime will mean for programming. Mr Thompson believes in what he calls big, bold projects, and is an admirer of programmes such as the epic Antarctic adventure Shackleton and the historian David Starkey's The Six Wives Of Henry VIII.

But he also lists as a priority renew the entertainment schedule. Ali G and Graham Norton can only last so long and Channel 4 urgently needs a new set of original formats. That is why he said yesterday that "a powerful arsenal of entertainment programmes" was his top priority. He wanted to develop the drama slate, "factual entertainment" – whatever that may be – and "event programming".

The founding chief executive, Sir Jeremy Isaacs, grew weary of the Jackson era, lamenting in The Independent its obsession with its brand and the overwhelming desire "to target and reach a demographically clearly defined audience – the 18 to 35-year- olds – and single-mindedly commission a bulk of programmes that suits their tastes, however laddish."

Mr Thompson's leaner channel, with the pain of hundreds of redundancies, will be justified only if he brings programming for a sophisticated audience of all ages. But detail of such programming was worryingly absent from his first address.