MEDIA FORUM: Is Channel 5 close to becoming a real rival to ITV?

Will there be substance to Channel 5's revamp and is the much-maligned broadcaster about to make its schedule better, Alasdair Reid asks?

It rather irks the senior management at Channel 5 that there's such a time lag between reality and perception where their baby is concerned.

And who can blame them? Well, one or two people, actually - the sorts of pursed-lipped critics liable to quote all sorts of stuff about karma and making your own bed and lying in it.

But enough already. The channel has surely paid its dues and it has put the really dumb years behind it. There's a bit of a buzz about Channel 5 these days, largely due to the fact that Dawn Airey, who became the chief executive more than a year ago, has been successful in recruiting some pretty sharp minds to the cause.

For instance, the programming chief, Kevin Lygo, has been raising aspirations on the back of some art and history programming, for goodness sake, and the marketing director, David Pullan, was previously one of the marketing masterminds at the UK outpost of MTV. When Pullan arrived, the word was that he was being brought in to reinvent the whole look and feel of the station, thus completing its evolution and burying memories of its tawdry early years.

The word was not wrong. The rebranding campaign, with a little help from TBWA/London, will begin on 16 September and there will be a whole new on-screen image. For instance, the distinctive colour bar is to be dropped, the onscreen graphics and station ident material will be more up MTV's sassy street and the channel will be rechristened as plain 'Five'.

It comes at a time when its majority shareholder, RTL, has declared it will not be bidding to buy either Carlton or Granada and will be focusing all its UK efforts on Channel 5. When people sneer at Channel 5's pretensions these days, Nick Milligan, Channel 5's deputy chief executive, tends to remind them that he works for the biggest and most successful broadcaster in Europe, bar none.