Channel 5 at 20

It is now 20 years since Channel 5 was launched and in that time it has gone through many changes both on and off screen. When it launched it had a mix of Football, films, comedy and chat. Channel 5 covered most of Chelsea's path to winning the 1998 European Cup Winners Cup with only the final being covered by BBC1. One of Channel 5's big selling points was that there would be a film on at 9 PM every night though this tended to be a mix of actual cinema releases, Direct to Video releases and US TV movies of variable quality. Stars like Simon Pegg and Graham Norton made early appearances in comedy shows made by Channel 5. Jack Docherty hosted a late night chat show only when he went on holiday he came back to find that his stand in Melinda Messenger had replaced him full time. After a few years Channel 5 had become more reliant on US imports such as CSI (and spin offs), Law and Order (and spin offs) and NCIS (and spin offs) to names just a few. In 2010 Richard Desmond bought the broadcaster, and one of the first things that happened was that Big Brother was brought back from the TV graveyard after being axed by Channel 4 with some suggesting this was done only to keep filling the pages of the Desmond owned newspaper The Daily Star. In 2014 Desmond sold Channel 5 to US giant Viacom for £700 million, one of the most curious things to happen under Viacom was the transferring of the US imports to the smaller sister channels with the schedules given over to home made factual programmes. The next few years for Channel 5 may be unknown but it will not be uneventful.