The revolution will not be televised

Crossing the threshold of 18 Doughty Street, the headquarters of Britain's new internet political TV channel in Bloomsbury, it is hard to be assailed by thoughts of revolution (writes Sam Knight).

Polite deliverymen with invoices drop off expensive-looking cases of TV equipment. A man in a Pimlico Plumbers T-shirt fiddles around in the floorboards while an electrician runs a cable for the "On Air" light up the exposed spine of the carpeted staircase. There is a smell of fresh paint and sawdust. Next door are the corporate offices of Toni and Guy, the hairdressers. The windowboxes are full of flowers.

The impression of gentility continues right to the back of the townhouse, where the set, the very hearth of "the home of anti-establishment media", as it calls itself, is found. Corporate-looking black leather furniture sits around a glass table. There are flower petals in bowls and coasters expecting glasses of water. A pine bookcase holds the four volumes of Winston Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples.

Iain Dale, the conservative blogger, and Tim Montgomerie, the editor of Conservativehome, another right-of-centre blog, don't exactly look like rebels either. Both dressed in media-casual, the two men in charge of 18 Doughty Street work from laptops in a bright, first floor office that will become the TV station's green room, done up, they hope, as "a Georgian drawing room".

It's not as if they don't talk the talk. As you would expect of a polemical TV station that hopes to replicate the success of blogs — using opinion, fast research and a vibrant relationship with its viewers — 18 Doughty Street has plenty of slogans: it's "politics for adults", it's "talk TV", it's "David and Goliath", it's "set to storm the decaying fortresses of the mainstream media". The station's specially commissioned image (above) shows a man with a computer zapping the giant grey robot of "consensus politics".

And it's got exciting plans. From tonight, it will broadcast four hours of programmes on the internet from Monday to Thursdays. Every day there will be an hour of news and opinion from Montgomerie, inspired by the day's events and blogs, and a half-hour interview show hosted by Dale.

The two bloggers are also handing out 100 video cameras to "citizen journalists", to patrol the streets of London, seeking out the opinions and voices of taxi drivers, builders and the rest of, as Montgomerie calls them, "the little guys". They have money too. Stefan Shakespeare, a former adviser to Jeffrey Archer and the man behind the YouGov website, has provided enough funds for the TV station "to last a year without raising a penny".

All of which makes 18 Doughty Street sound like what it wants to be: a moving blog, a welcome alternative to what Montgomerie calls the "institutionally liberal, leftist bias" of the BBC. As Dale says: "People always talk about the disconnect between people and politics. But we think there is a disconnect between people and the media, that's what we've got to try and tap."

It's just — and maybe this will change — that it all seems very conventional. British political blogging, in the form of Dale, Montgomerie and their third conspirator, Guido Fawkes, took off this year on the broad, flawed back of John Prescott and his old-fashioned, tabloid fall.

The trailer for the 18 Doughty Street, meanwhile, watches like something from the cuttings floor of The Day Today, and a glance at the impressive list of upcoming guests: John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, Steve Harper, the Canadian Prime Minister, Ann Widdecombe and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, The Independent columnist, looks like the roll call from BBC's Newsnight. Montgomerie says of the station: "Most of the time it's going to be people on a sofa, talking and talking." It's hard to know what's new.

In the end it's when Dale and Montgomerie talk about the possibilities of internet TV as a whole that they sound most persuasive and, perhaps, like what they really are: fairly straightforward entrepreneurs.

They believe that some time in the next twelve months Britain is going to plug its computers into its televisions and start watching niche-interest, low cost internet TV stations like 18 Doughty Street and they want to be there first. "We believe we are in the early cycles of a media revolution, and we want to be there when the masses turn up," says Montgomerie. Or as Dale has it: "If you're obsessed with watching knitting, eventually there will be a knitting channel." Doesn't sound so rebellious after all.