The credits belonging to Film on Four the feature film arm of Channel 4 includes many of the pictures that have helped to make

The credits belonging to Film on Four, the feature film arm of Channel 4, includes many of the pictures that have helped to make the current renaissance in British cinema a reality. Like the channel itself, Film on Four is currently celebrating its 15th birthday. It's marking the occasion with A Splice of Life - a documentary (well, more a compilation of clips and quotes) to be shown on Christmas Day.Hanif Kureishi (who wrote My Beautiful Laundrette) looks back to the beginning, in 1982."There were a lot of talented people around. The one thing that wasn't around for British films was money.""When Channel 4 came in, it gave an enormous push to the film-makers," says Ismail Merchant, of Merchant Ivory. Needless to say Channel 4 had money in some of their productions (Howards End, A Room With a View).Of course, besides the famous success stories, their list includes an awful lot of lesser movies, the names of which have passed from memory.

And Channel Four Films (as they are now known) have even been increasing their output recently. Some 20 films a year should share a proposed pounds 28m in 1998, and pounds 32m in 1999. That's never going to mean 20 hits on the scale of Trainspotting, but it's still a huge gift to the film industry.Perhaps, too, one should point out that many of the films credited to C4 were only partly financed by them. While Trainspotting was all theirs, they paid only about a third of the budget for The Crying Game, a quarter of Howards End, a quarter of Four Weddings and a Funeral. But they rewrote the relationship between film and television, commercially - in the sense that television ceased to operate only as a consumer of cinema product - and perhaps artistically. Danny Boyle, the director of Trainspotting, says that watching Neil Jordan's 1982 Angel in the Film on Four slot was "very inspirational.

Here was a subject that was absolutely the province of television" - the Troubles of Northern Ireland - "made cinematic"."It wasn't just that they came in, it was the way they came in," says Nick Powell, whose Palace Pictures had an extraordinarily fruitful (albeit sometimes edgy ) relationship with Channel 4. "They were not business led - they were led by screenplays, stories, film-makers."Don't pursue money, and with luck it will pursue you Four Weddings took some $250m dollars around the world. Not bad when you consider even what the channel's cut of that must be.Film on Four had been in the cinemas for several years before they were joined perforce by the BBC Score yet another one for C4, really ... And the BBC did not, until recently, commit to cinema so seriously.