Like a 70-year-old drunk uncle at a wedding attempting to remain relevant as he harps back to his glory days, Channel 4 has become a faded in the wash, busted flush. Many see its planned £1 billion privatisation as a ‘shame’, but like many mainstays that came before it, the time for change is nigh. I for one will not miss what it has become, with its self-righteous woke snarling as it not only pushes an agenda but rams it down the throats of the general populace.

Like the drunk uncle: C4 used to have credibility and worth. In the 1980s it was edgy, society changing, bold and brave as the first gay kiss in 1994 on Brookside with the delectable Anna Friel signified, although it was watched as much for curiosity and adoration reasons as opposed to cultural re-education. It only took a handful of years for the station to go rogue and bite the Tory hand that fed it, as while Friel and Stephenson puckered up, the iron lady was prohibiting local authorities promoting homosexuality. Still, Friel’s screen mother managed to tone things down a notch by burying her husband Trevor under the patio, so all was well for a while.

Read more: The little known rule in the Highway Code that applies to dog walkers

Countdown, the first show ever aired on the channel, remains, 7,500 episodes in, as living proof that if it ain't broke, don’t fix it. Yet, alas, the excitement we found back in 1982 as my family sat around just before tea waiting for the opening credits as if it was the coming of a new messiah is now nothing but a faded memory.

Having hit the heights with some of its output, excellence has been hard to come by and is now non-existent, replaced by the ever more desperate need to shock. It has turned into a slightly more upmarket Channel 5, with body obsessions now a mainstay, where you get to see nude folk standing in a plastic box, aka Naked Attraction. Yet now the shock barrel has now been scraped well and truly dry by way of live dissections courtesy of that strange German Professor Gunther Von Hagens, soft porn thanks to anything shown after the watershed, and political one-sidedness that makes Jeremy Corbyn look like a moderate. Red Triangle showed incest and cannibalism, and season’s greetings have been wrapped up in controversy and ire since 1993 with the Alternative Queen’s Speech, which has been undertaken by such luminaries as Ali G, the Iranian president and a queen lookalikey.

Read more: 'Liam Gallagher at Knebworth proved I'm not too old to live forever'

Big Brother and Embarrassing Bodies ramped up the shockometer, in part, yet, despite the mad, bad and dangerous, some attempts to shock have produced prime home run winners such as the watchable and thought provoking It’s a Sin. That however, besides Gogglebox and 8 out of 10 cats, are pretty much the only programmes of note: a show about watching people watch TV and another that takes off and alters countdown. Not much of a legacy now, is it?

Thatcher’s original remit upon setting up the channel was too ‘shake up’ the BBC, which she hated with a passion. And so, Government funded, which means bankrolled by you and me, the channel pushed and pushed the left-wing rhetoric, playing Russian roulette with its funding until, understandably, the hand that feeds it finally decided to cut off the money supply, and so to privatisation she goes.

Talking heads have of course been incredulous with fury as the one true mouthpiece of the ever more outlandish comes to be slayed, not by the people, but by capitalism, as they come to bear in the face of vastly increased competition from the new kids on the block, Netflix and Sky.

In time, private investors will rue their decision to part with circa a billion as content becomes even more watered down, viewing figures continue the slide into the abyss and she becomes yet another digital channel clogging up the cultural landscape shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Quest, Watch and Gold. Jon Snow will come back with an ever more peculiar and eclectic range of ties in which to prick interest, but it will be too little too late as we switch over to QVC and go do something more culturally enriching instead.

  • Brett Ellis is a teacher