The Beeb would panic over a disrupted narrative; Channel 4 simply wonders where the story might be going and follows it to the end.
Taking advantage of TV's longer runtimes and potentially infinitely unfolding narrative, Channel 4's Catastrophe has also been working to unravel our expectations of a romantic comedy – and, by extension, romance itself – by painting a portrait of a relationship as an ongoing, but not necessarily improving, thing.
Donovan's narrative, channelled through Julius's own benumbed perspective, avoids melodrama and facile psychology.
The fictional narrative channels to the subconscious a sense of historical cause and effect that is often too subtle for reason to grasp.
At the end of the opening section, however, the novel springs a number of narrative surprises, switching channels without leaving the network it's established.
I'm also developing a 3-channel narrative installation stemming from this project for an upcoming installation this summer.
It's clear, however, that Mitchell has a problem when it comes to sustaining a straight narrative without benefit of channel-flicking.
Christopher Tayler eventually warmed to the book, but also said: "It's clear that Mitchell has a problem when it comes to sustaining a straight narrative without benefit of channel-flicking" and "with one or two exceptions, the characters fall into goodies and baddies as well, and their doings – including the central love story – don't often rise above the needs of the plot".
This male obsession with sex is sometimes effectively channelled to narrative ends but it never really reaches the density of, say, Nobokov's Lolita, partly because it sounds too much like the obsession of Anglophone Indians from professional classes, an obsession that is defined, even in its absence, by the paucity of ordinary sexual opportunities available to that particular class in India.
People can immediately get information about a product or brand from more than one source and therefore can spot its 'fit' to their personal narratives faster than in channel communication, where information flows to and from a single source.
But his best material, such as the unexpectedly multilayered teen pregnancy scenarios explored on his Chicken and the Egg EP, does the opposite, sneaking some bracing critical thinking into narrative scenarios theoretically exhausted on Channel 4's Dubplate Drama.
