Forty Years On, ‘Hail The New Puritan’ Shows What Channel 4 Once Dared to Air

This month marks four decades since Charles Atlas’s Hail The New Puritan first aired on British television. The mockumentary, built around dancer and choreographer Michael Clark, pulled in The Fall and Leigh Bowery and landed on a fledgling Channel 4 in 1985. No other broadcaster would have touched it.

The film was a peculiar hybrid—part performance, part fiction, all attitude. Clark’s physical vocabulary collided with Mark E. Smith’s voice and Bowery’s presence, and Atlas stitched it together without any hand-holding. It was an eccentric piece of programming for a network that, under its first chief executive Jeremy Isaacs, had committed itself to offering ‘information, opinions and ideas, and laughter and pleasure in art, and anger and tears of pain and pity, and new understandings.’

Looking back, that mission feels like a transmission from another era. By 2014 Channel 4 was airing Benefits Street, a series so aligned with the government’s anti-welfare ideology it might as well have been a policy brief. The station that once gave space to works like Hail The New Puritan was now inviting cameras into the homes of the unemployed to frame them as lazy and parasitic. The contrast is not subtle.

Atlas’s film was never going to pull a large audience. That was the point. It existed because a public channel decided it should. Forty years later, that choice reads less like a scheduling oddity and more like an argument for what television could be when it wasn’t running scared.