Greg Dyke: Inside Story. Greg Dyke

experience of being in charge of a business. Like many economists, Jay was good at writing and talking about business but was not impressive when it came to running one. In putting his production team together, Frost tended to opt for programme executives whose track records in television would impress the ‘great and the good’ of the IBA, rather than people who had the proven skills to deliver three and a half hours of good television every morning, week in and week out.

      When the Frost group won the breakfast franchise the Director of Programmes designate was another LWT man, Nick Elliot, a former Editor of Weekend World. But Nick, who has spent the past ten years as a highly successful head of drama for ITV, changed his mind after the franchise was won and decided that instead of 5 a.m. starts he would stick with LWT, where he had been offered a new job as Controller of Drama and Arts. History was to show that he made a very wise decision. Michael Deakin, who was in the original Frost consortium in charge of features, was instead promoted to the top programming job, despite his total lack of experience in this area of television.

      My own meeting with Deakin convinced me that my instinct to stay with LWT was the right one. Michael said he wanted me to be number three or four in the programme hierarchy but didn’t seem to be able to describe what that hierarchy was, or who was doing what. Even more worrying was that he didn’t seem to know what was going to be in the programme; he appeared to believe that filling three and a half hours of television a morning was going to happen by some sort of process of osmosis. Michael only became really animated when he talked about the building in Camden in North London that TV-am was planning to occupy, a building used today by MTV but known for years as Eggcup Towers. Designed by a young Terry Farrell, who went on to become one of Britain’s top post-war architects, it was clear to me that Michael loved the building a lot more than he loved the prospect of breakfast television.

      With Jay as Chairman and Chief Executive and Deakin as Director of Programmes TV-am had people in the two most important jobs in the company who were peculiarly unqualified for their particular roles. But it got worse. They had also promised the Independent Broadcasting Authority that they would produce a new and intellectual approach to news and current affairs because they had a ‘mission to inform’. This completely ignored the fact that the most likely viewers to be attracted to breakfast television would be heavy television watchers, disproportionately women with children. Neither group was likely to be interested in the bill of goods the Frost consortium had sold to the IBA.

      With the wrong Chief Executive, the wrong Director of Programmes, and a completely unrealistic remit, you could argue that TV-am’s fate was sealed long before it went on air. Turning down Michael Deakin’s offer of a job was one of the best decisions I ever made.

      TV-am finally went live on Tuesday 1 February 1983 and was an instant disaster. Two weeks earlier, on Monday 17 January, the BBC had launched Breakfast Time, their first foray into early-morning television. It was unashamedly populist and was clearly a spoiler. TV-am had won their franchise promising to bring serious news and analysis to the early morning. The BBC had arrived with keep fit, horoscopes, and cookery. But it also had a very competent production team led by Ron Neill, an inspirational editor, and two very good presenters in Frank Bough and Selina Scott. Selina certainly brought sexual chemistry to breakfast television.

      Within weeks TV-am turned from a disaster into a bloodbath. Peter Jay was ousted in a boardroom coup led by the Aitken cousins, Jonathan and Tim. Michael Deakin only survived because he supported the Aitkens, but by then he was largely discredited. The programme had gone from bad to worse and David Frost had been replaced as the main presenter by a young sports presenter called Nick Owen. Ratings barely registered and there was virtually no advertising, partly due to the lack of ratings and partly to industrial action from the actors’ union Equity, who wanted a new deal for their members for breakfast television. Most serious of all – although not publicly known at the time – was that TV-am Ltd was running out of money. The company had been under-capitalized from the beginning so that all the founders could have significant shareholdings without putting up a lot of cash. The problem was that the business plan required it to be a financial success from day one or it would have to raise more cash from the shareholders. In normal circumstances that would not have been an insurmountable problem, but the particular circumstances of TV-am made it very difficult. City institutions didn’t like to be publicly associated with mayhem and failure, particularly when it was all over the front pages of the newspapers day after day. And the press, smelling blood, began to stalk the wounded station.

      To raise more money TV-am had to convince institutional investors that they could get the programme right, and do it quickly. They needed a new programme head, and that was where I came in. It was around this time that I got my second approach to join TV-am; this time the phone call came from Jonathan Aitken, who, although he was still the Conservative MP for Thanet, had taken over from Jay as acting Chief Executive of TV-am, while former British Railways boss Dick Marsh, an ex-Labour MP, had become Chairman.

      Aitken invited me to lunch at his grand house in Lord North Street in Westminster – the very same house his bankruptcy trustees sold eighteen years later to help pay off his debts after he lost his libel case against The Guardian and Granada Television (he was later sentenced to eighteen months in jail after pleading guilty to perjury and perverting the course of justice during the case). I remember the lunch very well. Most of all I remember the incredibly camp butler who served the lunch Kenneth Williams style. Julian and Sandy, the outrageously camp characters from Round the Horne, the popular radio programme of the 1960s, had nothing on Jonathan’s butler.

      While I sat intrigued by the butler, Jonathan set about trying to persuade me to join TV-am as Editor-in-Chief. He had approached me at just the right time. Despite the success of The Six O’Clock Show I was looking for a change after running the programme for eighteen months. And I was particularly incensed that LWT had refused to give me a company car whilst giving one to the Editor of Weekend World, a programme I had previously worked on as a producer. After all, The Six O’Clock Show added ratings while Weekend World lost them. My programme made money for the company, his lost it. Wasn’t this supposed to be commercial television? Looking back now it is ridiculous that I decided my whole future on something as trivial as a company car; but I’ve never been a believer in grand career plans. My view has always been that you take the opportunities as they come and they either work for you or they don’t.

      I was intrigued by the challenge that the chaos at TV-am offered. It never crossed my mind that I wouldn’t succeed in turning it around. As the novelist Maeve Haran, a former colleague on The Six O’Clock Show, always said about me, the only reason I had turned out to be successful in life was that I didn’t have enough imagination to contemplate failure. I suspect there’s some truth in that.

      With all the confidence of a brash 35-year-old, and despite the fact that I was a relative newcomer to the television industry, I had no doubt I could make TV-am into a success. My view was that what was needed was, firstly, a programme vision that appealed to the sort of audience likely to watch breakfast television and, secondly, a programme team who could deliver it. In turn that meant I would need to bring in new people while also trying to convince a disillusioned staff that, together, we could succeed. As it turned out, the job was harder than that – but not a lot harder.

      What I thought was a lunchtime chat with Jonathan Aitken was actually an interview, job offer, and negotiation all in one. He offered to double my current salary, buy out my pension, put me on a ratings-based bonus scheme, and, importantly in the circumstances, give me a smart company car. If everything worked out I would, by my standards in 1983, be comparatively well off for the first time in my life. Of course what I didn’t know that day was that TV-am was rapidly running out of cash and that for me to get everything Jonathan was offering would be a long and hard fight.

      Towards the end of the lunch Michael Deakin turned up and pretended that I would be working for him. I made it very clear that if I was to take the job I would have to have complete charge of all the programming. He was effectively redundant. I found out later that Jonathan was determined he wouldn’t let me leave his house that day without my signing some sort of letter committing myself to TV-am. I think he was pretty desperate to get someone who knew about magazine programming, and the BBC’s Ron Neill had