Andy Duncan, the chief executive of Channel 4, can’t really be enjoying himself. After a rap on the knuckles from Ofcom over the handling of the Celebrity Big Brother race row in the winter, and a row over the handling of a competition phone-in on Richard & Judy, the broadcaster is back in trouble again.

This week Channel 4 has been fighting the Palace over the Diana documentary, and another race controversy on Big Brother this week. No wonder some — as did John Humphrys on this morning’s BBC Radio 4 Today programme — are wondering aloud whether Channel 4 has lost the plot.

In an era where pretty much everything has been privatised, the fact that Channel 4 is state owned is a miracle: that is justified because the broadcaster is meant to be innovative, and cater to minority tastes. Or that’s the theory: right now the broadcaster looks so populist and so accident prone, there are questions as to whether Channel 4’s status (or indeed Mr Duncan himself) is worth preserving.

The most important viewer in all this is Gordon Brown, whose winter visit to India was marred by the Celebrity Big Brother row. There are faint whiffs across Whitehall that a privatisation is being considered by the incoming Prime Minister, although such is the state of broadcasting at the moment, it wouldn’t raise any more than a £1 billion, and only then if another broadcaster like Five or Sky wanted to buy it.

Channel 4’s record is nothing like as bad as its detractors would suggest – its output is a mixture of the serious and populist. Programmes like Big Brother keep it in business – otherwise there would be no Channel 4 News. But the broadcaster does have a credibility problem, which is why some did not give it the benefit of the doubt over the Diana programme, in which the supposedly controversial images were in fact hardly revealing and part of a sober and well research documentary.

By throwing Emily Parr out of Big Brother, and for that matter, pretty much abandoning money-making phone-ins too, the broadcaster is battling to get on top of its problems. But what Mr Duncan, and Channel 4 can’t afford at this sensitive time, when it needs political support, is another series of Big Brother spiralling out of control. The trouble is that all Mr Duncan can do is hope that the housemates behave themselves for the rest of the summer.

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