What we’re expected to do is offer experiences to audiences who are not served elsewhere.”He likens his boss, Michael Grade, to Coronation Street’s Mike Baldwin, “a flash southern git”, while Grade in turn calls his yobbish number two “Rab C Cosgrove”. But although his sympathies will remain with the underdog, the role of the maverick is one that he’ll find harder to play.Cosgrove still wears his loafers, jeans and wool check shirt, but his new job brings with it a seat on the board and hanging behind his office door is the grey suit he wears to meetings It’s an Armani. “It’s Emporio, though,” he says defensively, as if buying from the designer’s slightly cheaper diffusion range protects him from charges of Birtist dress. “I tend to read these more than some of the bigger, cerebal pieces Formats are a great currency.

Audiences like them because they know what to expect.”Where does this leave the channel’s charter? Cosgrove says he’s committed to the remit to provide an alternative, but “because Channel 4 is a product of the early Eighties, the remit became frozen in a moment of isms: multiculturalism, feminism, etc. His aim is to wean producers from the kind of “clippings culture”, where they take a current news story and work it up into a proposal, and get them thinking more about new ways of presenting entertainment. “Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush was one of our most successful formats.” He believes that the most successful things in print journalism are clever devices. His role, he says, is more one of management, of making sure the commissioning editors know what they are looking for rather than signing up programmes himself.Above his desk are boxes brimming with 600 proposals for new show formats, a response to a tender document sent out a couple of weeks earlier. Somewhere in there, he says, are five great shows, but he has no idea what the content will be. One of the flaws about Without Walls is that many programmes that were in it got lost. Shows like J’Accuse, My Generation and The Obiturary Show [which Cosgrove's production company made] …

That sometimes damaged the shows that were in it, because it tried to hard to be a flagship. And I wondered if anyone out there was demanding a flagship arts programme.”With less than two months on the job, Cosgrove won’t be drawn into any other specifics. “Well, he’s been at the channel for something like eight years and I think it’s time, really, in the arts perhaps more than any other area, to look to new ideas … When I was looking at the output, I wanted to bring in new blood, people who maybe had a slightly different take on the programming So I made the decision that we shouldn’t renew … I think it’s the right one.”With Januszczak goes his brainchild, Without Walls.

“My feeling is that certain things work for periods of time and then they cease to work. “I’m probably more hands-on than most people who’ve occupied this job. For the first six months, that’ll unsettle people or rub them up the wrong way. But I’ve got to do it.”One thing already done is the non-renewal of the arts supremo Waldemar Januszczak’s contract when it comes up in August.