Greg Dyke: Inside Story. Greg Dyke

      I was on holiday in Aberdovey in West Wales at the time and was fully dressed in a wet suit and about to go windsurfing when the phone rang. It was Roy Van Gelder, LWT’s Director of Human Resources, who had called to tell me that the union had said ‘No’ to Vikki. Luckily Gavyn Waddell, the chairman of the shop stewards’ committee, was with Roy. Gavyn was the cleverest, most articulate trade unionist I have ever met. He was a natural leader of men and would have made a great senior manager. Like many of the union people at LWT he was also a hardline Tory and he eventually resigned from the union, the ACTT, when they gave money to support the 1984 miners’ strike.

      Fully dressed in my wet suit I demanded to talk to Gavyn. Everyone at LWT knew that, where the union was concerned, Gavyn was the person you had to get on side. After ten minutes’ discussion he agreed it was time we had a woman director and that he would withdraw the objection to my employing Vikki – which meant he would tell the activists in the union to back off. So when Vikki became our first woman director it was no thanks to the management.

      In general the LWT management gave in to almost every demand from the unions. This was the company that, in the mid Seventies, paid a videotape engineer £150,000 a year, resulting in the joke ‘What’s the difference between an Arab oil sheikh and an LWT video engineer?’ Answer: ‘The engineer gets London weighting.’ And it was the same management who, in the ITV national strike in 1979, allowed us to picket inside the building in case it rained – no cold nights and braziers for us. As usual we won the strike when the ITV managements around Britain folded and we all went back to work with another large increase in our wages.

      The television unions of those days stifled creativity and good programme making by their obsession with restrictive practices. I decided to take them on whenever I could. Sometimes I did it as an editor, and thus as part of the management; but on other occasions a few of us did it as members of the union. When the management decided that crews would have first-class travel on flights to the USA the programme makers reversed the policy at the union meeting. We argued that the effect would be no more foreign shoots, and that the losers would be the viewers.

      On The Six O’Clock Show we were ‘advised’ by management not to do single-camera live links into the programme because, although the unions had agreed we could do them, the management feared they wouldn’t like it. Today these happen in almost every live programme, but in 1982 they were virtually unheard of. I did them from day one. Eventually the union demanded we had a floor manager on these shoots. I simply refused.

      We were also told by the management that we had to have props people on location if we wanted to use any props at all. Again, we just ignored it. When we wanted a rubber boat for Janet to use on Wimbledon Common I sent a researcher out to buy one; and when we needed some golf balls sewn into the back of a pyjama jacket for an item on snoring, Tony Cohen persuaded his reluctant wife to do the job. We ignored the union’s rules whenever and wherever we could, and more often than not we got away with it. It was a lesson I have applied in every job I have had since. As I learnt later at Harvard Business School, ‘No one ever succeeded in an organization by following the rules.’

      

      In the years since Christine and I had broken up I had, as a single man in his thirties in the television business, played the field quite a lot. But in my last year on The Six O’clock Show I had struck up a new relationship with the woman who had admired my decorating all those years earlier when Christine had brought her round to our flat in Wandsworth. The relationship was based on false pretences; because she’d seen me decorating she thought I was a handyman, whereas the truth was that this was the only time in my whole life I’d ever decorated a room. By then Sue had split from her husband and had taken her two children to live in Bradford upon Avon in Somerset. I began to go down for weekends after the show ended, and Sue and I quickly decided to set up home together.

      I wanted Sue to come and live in Clapham, where I was then living, but an afternoon she spent wandering across Clapham Common soon put paid to that idea. The wonderful thing about the Common was that all of life was there – including people playing chess with enormous pieces, people with model boats, and lots of sportsmen. Unfortunately there were also a lot of drug dealers, pimps, and police and Sue absolutely refused to bring her children to live there. I think she was influenced by the fact that too many of her old clients as a probation officer lived nearby.

      Instead we bought a house together further west in London, in Barnes. Matthew was five and Christine four when Sue and I set up home together, and overnight I became a family man – although like most people who haven’t had kids of their own I had no idea what it meant. I think Sue’s sister Anne summed it up best when she described visiting us as visiting Sue, her family, and her rather strange live-in lover. And then there was Jeff.

      Jeff Wright, my old friend from my early newspaper days, had been living with me in Clapham when I sold up. He had nowhere else to go, and didn’t have a job at the time, so he came too. Our neighbours in Barnes must have wondered what sort of people had moved in next door. Sue always joked that between Jeff and me she had just about got one decent partner, although he wasn’t much good at decorating either.

      Sue went back to work as a probation officer at Wandsworth Prison. She drove there early every morning, and I agreed to drop the kids at school before going into LWT on the train. My life as a family man was beginning to take shape. And then one day I got a phone call from a Conservative MP called Jonathan Aitken, and the world changed again.

       CHAPTER FOUR A Year at TV-am

      TV-am was Britain’s first ever venture into commercial breakfast television. Launched in February 1983, it was an instant failure with the audience, which in turn resulted in a bloodbath on the Board and the organization plunging into a deep financial crisis. All this happened in just a matter of weeks during which ‘ailing’ TV-am dominated the headlines. And then I was appointed to the job of Editor-in-Chief and was told I had one task and one task only: to save the station. An interesting challenge for a 35-year-old who had been unemployed just five years earlier.

      I was originally asked to join TV-am six or seven months before it was due to be launched when Michael Deakin, TV-am’s Director of Programmes, rang me and asked me to go along for a chat. At the time I was still running The Six O’Clock Show and had no intention of giving that up. I went along out of curiosity.

      Michael was a flamboyant programme maker who had had a brilliant career in documentary making at Yorkshire Television. He had made some wonderful programmes and was a great raconteur, but he knew very little about news and magazine programming, the staple diet of breakfast television. In fact, he was never intended for the role of Director of Programmes at TV-am at all and had got the job by default.

      When David Frost created his consortium to bid for Britain’s first ever breakfast television franchise he brought together an odd bunch of high-profile people, most of whom were either too grand, or unsuitable, to do the jobs they were allocated. David mainly concentrated on building a team of five of the most famous presenters of the day. He recruited the king of the chat show, Michael Parkinson; the two most famous female newsreaders of their day, Angela Rippon from the BBC and Anna Ford from ITN; and, as a real political heavyweight, Robert Kee from BBC Current Affairs. David believed that this combination would wow the viewers with their talent and sexual chemistry. The problem with this strategy was that the people who make or break television programmes are not the on-screen talent but the production teams. A great presenter has never saved a lousy show, while there have been many successful programmes with very average presenters.

      Frost’s group of presenters became known as the ‘Famous Five’, and although they never convinced the viewers of their combined talents they certainly convinced the members of the Independent Broadcasting Authority, who, to everyone’s surprise, gave the franchise to their consortium. Frost persuaded Peter Jay, the former British Ambassador to Washington, to run the whole company as Chairman and Chief Executive, completely ignoring the fact that, although he was both a former Times economics editor and the former presenter of the prestigious LWT