He's seen the way ahead for Channel 4. And it's not down Brookside Close

He might be sidelining a soap but critics fear the new director of television will still show too much flannel

Twenty years almost to the day, a large crowd of trendy young things gathered at a suitably squalid student house in Brighton for a Channel 4 launch party. We celebrated (with a specially hired large-screen TV) what we saw as the birth of broadcasting for our generation, a "right-on" cultural beacon that at last offered an alternative to the safe bourgeois values of The Generation Game and The Two Ronnies.

Never before, we thought, had a television station been so entwined with its audience, its likes, dislikes and social attitudes. "There was an ownership there – people were members rather than viewers," explains Tim Gardam, who was promoted last week to director of television for Channel 4 as part of a shake-up in which the station got rid of 200 staff. "That's why people get very angry if we get it wrong."

And Channel 4 has got it very wrong indeed over the past few years, losing its character, its edge – and its audience. Viewer figures were down 14 per cent in the first few weeks of the autumn schedule, for instance, and a disastrous 20 per cent during peak times.

Young and professional men, in particular, have deserted it in droves. The 20th birthday celebrations have practically been cancelled, and another round of redundancies announced.

The question is being asked: in 2002, just who or what is Channel 4 for?

To add insult to injury, Channel 5, once dismissed as the downmarket home of endless soft pornography, looks set to swap places with its older, and wearier, counterpart.

Poised to take over from Channel 4 as Britain's second-biggest commercial broadcaster after ITV, Channel 5 has moved upmarket with some well-chosen documentaries, lifestyle shows and serious blockbusting movies. Meanwhile, Channel 4 was taking the ill-advised "Cosmopolitan" option of seeing just how many items on sex it could squeeze into its schedule in a desperate attempt to revive its flagging audience figures. Is it really Channel 4's job, for instance, to give us "documentaries" about Ulrika Jonsson's sex life or the wacky world of the tabloid blonde Anna Nicole Smith, as it did last week?

Gardam, like his boss Mark Thompson, is an old BBC hand, having spent 20 years at the corporation editing programmes such as Panorama and Newsnight. As director of programmes, the 46-year-old Cambridge double first has presided over programming (and several terrible mistakes such as hiring daytime TV stars Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan for £1.5m from ITV) since he joined Channel 4 in 1998 and he appears to agree that there may have been too much sex, or rather bad sex, on his adopted channel.

"Lesbian Love Stories wasn't very good," he admits before extolling the virtues of any number of other Channel 4 sex shows, including one about gayanimals ("one of the funniest things I've ever seen"), another on sex between old people a long time ago, and another about A Man's Best Friend – his penis. "It wasn't titillating," claims Gardam, who's a dead ringer for the exasperated TV executive in Alan Partridge, "just very funny."

Whether the rest of the population shares Gardam's sense of humour – and taste in television generally – will be tested by the response to Channel 4's new £430m schedule, out this week. But perhaps humbled by recent criticism, he freely admits to past mistakes, including making, on occasion, programmes such as the survivor show Lost that were infinitely more fun to make than to watch.

But he is still reluctant to give up on one of his biggest signings. Richard & Judy has been granted a short reprieve, although no one is placing bets on its long-term future on the channel. The excruciating breakfast offering RI:SE is also allowed to limp on. The increasingly tedious Brookside, however, has finally been been pushed to the margins of the schedule and faces the axe.

"We had to get the ground clear, as we have to be about planting arresting and noticeable new shows. But it gets more difficult as you get older to move away from things," confesses Gardam.

The £16m spent on broadcasting tales from a Merseyside Barratt-style cul-de-sac will now be ploughed into a substantially increased £26m (up from £19m) budget for drama – which Gardam, whose language is almost caricature TV-speak, proclaims as the "fabric" of the new Channel 4 schedule.

"Our new drama series will give a signature to the channel as a whole. We need to create programmes by which viewers can navigate," he says. "Our real challenge is to create a sense of difference in an age of conformity, a sense of originality, excitement and danger.

"I'm not proud of the fact that so much of our drama spend has gone on a soap. Channel 4 drama has been very weak with one exception, Teachers, and, more recently, White Teeth. Next year, there'll be drama every week."

Indeed, Channel 4 has new drama series coming out of its ears, although even Gardam seems strangely lacking in confidence about whether they can provide that "originality, excitement and danger" formula. Many seem somewhat derivative.

He describes Twenty Things to Do Before You're Thirty as "our Sex and the City", for instance, before adding: "I wasn't sure about it when I saw the script. It's a commitment to talent, really, as Jane Fallon, producer of Teachers, desperately wanted to do it as her next project."

Second Generation, about a father's relationship with his daughters as the family business goes down the pan, is branded "an Asian King Lear", while Buried, a drama about a middle-class black man in prison, is "a British Oz". A good slice of Channel 4's biggest-ever programming budget is also going on another risky venture, Chris Evans' latest creation Boys and Girls, to go out on Saturday nights when the channel has recently been notoriously weak. This is expensive TV, from a man whose judgement has lately been in doubt, and as Gardam says: "The show just came out of Chris's head completely. He pitched to me in this office for three hours. I've just bought into his conviction and his hunger, and we're buying 13 live shows rather than the conventional run of six or eight. So it's a very big deal indeed."

And of course there will be another series of Big Brother, arguably Channel 4's biggest recent success story, and more wall-to-wall Graham Norton while he's still signed up with the channel. "Intelligent populism" is how Gardam describes his channel's fare, lightly pep- pered with the usual worthy stuff, of course, such as investigations into Rwanda or anti-Semitism. But its original supporters might disagree.

"Our real difficulty at Channel 4 is being adventurous without being forbidding," Gardam explains. "The world has changed since we started. In 1982 Channel 4 had an anti-establishment view of the world, but that has lost its meaning as New Labour is the establishment now.

"There is now a hedonism and bloody-minded self-enjoyment, which we have to reflect, such as through Graham Norton who at his best has redefined the chat show into something friendly, rude and very funny.

"The same social battles no longer have to be fought. But we still give our older viewers the signature knowledge they don't get anywhere else.

"But for our younger viewers, we touch on their time, their lives and their take on now. Both sets of viewers are united by their independent, self-reliant view of the world."

Gardam says he sets himself a test each week, asking whether his viewers are still thinking "Thank God for Channel 4", as many did back in 1982. This winter's viewing figures will tell whether anyone does any more.