Alexis Petridis on pirate TV

What a bunch of pirates did for the arts in Britain
William Burroughs
William Burroughs … Channel 21 favourite. Photograph: William Coupon/Corbis

I can't remember why I started reading about pirate TV on the web, but I'm glad I did. Pirate radio is an essential part of British musical history, but you never hear much about its televisual cousin. Pirate TV stations were harder to set up, and their content harder to provide. Furthermore, they belong to the past: even before the digital switchover, there was no need for pirate TV in a world where YouTube had turned everyone into a potential broadcaster.

None of that stops pirate TV being fascinating. It's packed with intriguing characters, such as Radio Caroline founder Ronan O'Rahilly, who came up with the bizarre idea – apparently with the backing of John Lennon and Yoko Ono – to start a light entertainment channel broadcasting to Britain from an aircraft flying over the Irish sea; the 70s hippy collective Videofreex, who broadcast for five years in the Catskill mountains using a transmitter given to them by Abbie Hoffman; then there's Franco "Bifo" Berardi, an Italian Marxist who set up a network of tiny local TV stations as a challenge to Silvio Berlusconi's excessive media power.

In Britain, the most intriguing forgotten story of all is that of Network 21. For a few months in London in 1986, if you retuned your TV slightly down from ITV's frequency at midnight on a Friday, you'd be hit by live footage of Diamanda Galás and Einsturzende Neubauten, interviews with Derek Jarman and Leigh Bowery, clips of the Sex Pistols on the Bill Grundy Show, Jacques Brel, a special on transgender performer Lana Pellay, and avant-garde video montages of the likes of William Burroughs, Andy Warhol, Miles Davis and Genesis P-Orridge

Someone has put its entire output on YouTube and it's fascinating. On the one hand, Network 21 is very much of its era, right down to the fact that (along with i-D magazine and L'Oreal), it was one of the companies that chose to advertise between the tracks on Flaunt It, Sigue Sigue Sputnik's debut album. On the other, it occasionally seems way ahead of the curve: it was interviewing Sonic Youth when they were still a minor preoccupation, and covering advances in Aids medication a year before the government's Don't Die of Ignorance campaign.

Network 21 attracted a lot of media attention, which ultimately spelled the end: it was raided by police just before its first birthday. It's a forgotten footnote worth celebrating: there's never been arts programming quite as bold on British TV.