Media Headliner: 'There's no chance of Channel 4 playing it safe'.(Channel 4 Television Co.)

Channel 4's Kevin Lygo is in bullish mood, maintaining that the broadcaster will continue to take risks, Alasdair Reid writes.

We encounter Kevin Lygo in an irrepressibly buoyant mood. Put it to him that these haven't exactly been the happiest few months in the broadcaster's history and he responds with robust good humour. Actually, he counters, you could argue that it is enjoying something of a golden age.

'We are Channel of the Year (recognised as such at the Edinburgh Television Festival in 2006),' he points out. 'We've won more awards (recently) than any other channel and we've just won an Oscar for The Last King of Scotland. This is a positive time for Channel 4 at a time when TV in general has been under such scrutiny.'

He's particularly tickled, for instance, that Al Gore, the renowned eco-warrior, seems so intimately aware of Channel 4's recent climate change polemic, The Great Global Warming Swindle, and has been responding to its conclusions in recent interviews.

Yes, Lygo is in buoyant mood, but he's also, noticeably, relaxed Suitably so, you might argue. In a year seemingly littered by anniversaries and landmarks, it's perhaps appropriate that Lygo has entered a new phase of his career. He will be 50 in September; Channel 4, the great love of his working life, will be 25 in November; and five, the mistress with which he had a racy, but ultimately unsatisfying, affair, has just celebrated its first decade.

So what better time could there be for him to move upstairs in the hierarchy? With the arrival of Julian Bellamy, currently the controller of BBC3, to take the reins at Channel 4's flagship channel, Lygo will make the step up to become the group's director of television and content, with the controllers of individual channels reporting to him. That includes Bellamy, plus Danny Cohen, the head of E4, and Peter Dale, the head of More 4.

The flagship channel is where the action is, however, and there's no doubting who the new programming star is within the organisation. These situations tend to favour the young pretender. Bellamy will no doubt receive all the credit and plaudits for daring successes, while Lygo will have to carry the can for embarrassing mishaps such as the racism row which surrounded Celebrity Big Brother this year.