Greg Dyke: Inside Story. Greg Dyke

not only was it the wrong programme, as the appetite for a serious news and current affairs programme at that time in the morning was very limited, it was also badly produced. The news didn’t start on time, the items were too long, and frankly it was boring. It had no character, no humour, and there was no team feeling amongst the presenters.

      By then Clive Jones was in charge and was desperate to make changes to improve things. I told him his job was not to make the programme better but, if possible, to make it even worse, so that when we did unveil the much promised relaunch the contrast would be that much greater. I think those were the worst three weeks of his life in television.

      The problem we both faced was the staff. There were some very talented young researchers and producers being led by much less talented people who were being paid far more money; but the one thing that virtually all of them shared was that they were shattered. They had joined with such high hopes: TV-am had advertised for staff with a picture of the Famous Five saying ‘Join us and make history’. They had worked ridiculously hard only to find themselves and their programme publicly ridiculed. Four months into ‘making history’, most of them were desperate. They were trying to leave in their droves; many were very emotional. It was certainly different from LWT, which was full of smart, funny, and flamboyant people. In the end, Clive and I sat down together and worked out which members of staff we thought we could save and which were either so hopeless or so damaged by the experience of TV-am that they ought to leave. We settled on a list of sixty-odd people who had to go, and by one means or another we managed to lose all but two over the next six months.

      The great thing about crisis – and TV-am was a very public crisis – is that while most people collapse, a few blossom. Lynn Faulds Wood, the consumer editor, turned up smiling in my office very proud of what she’d achieved. I agreed with her and doubled the number of slots she had in the schedule. Mark Damazer, then a young producer and now Deputy Head of News at the BBC, and Adam Boulton, now a great success at Sky News, had managed to produce some decent political coverage so I invented a morning political slot for them called ‘Spotlight’, edited by a talented producer called Andy Webb. I also brought in some people from outside. We desperately needed people who understood popular journalism and what the audience actually cared about, as opposed to what Peter Jay and Michael Deakin thought they ought to care about. I had known Peter McHugh since we worked together on the Newcastle Journal in the mid Seventies. He was, and still is, one of the best judges of a popular story I’ve ever met. He was working on the Daily Mail and hating it, so it wasn’t difficult to persuade him to come. He’s been a very successful Director of Programmes at GMTV for the past decade. I also persuaded Eve Pollard – another journalist who understood the target audience – to leave her job as Assistant Editor of the Sunday People and join the features department at TV-am, promising her two on-screen gossip slots a week and that we’d teach her about television. She ended up as Features Editor before going back to Fleet Street, where she was editor of the Sunday Mirror between 1987 and 1991 and of the Sunday Express from 1991 to 1995.

      Clive and I also put together a completely new team of on-screen presenters in a remarkably short period of time. Nick Owen had already become the male anchor, and we poached Anne Diamond from BBC’s Nationwide to be the female lead. Clive had spotted a female weather presenter on Tyne Tees Television called Wincy Willis, so I phoned her and she joined us within a week. We brought former ITN newsreader Gordon Honeycombe out of semi-retirement to read the news and later we were joined by Lynn Faulds Wood’s husband John Stapleton, who left Newsnight to do our serious political interviewing and a few bits beside. He’s never forgiven me for asking him to read out the newspaper bingo numbers every morning.

      I remember taking the new team of presenters out to lunch one day. I explained the scale of the problem we faced but how exciting it would be if we succeeded. I also warned them that if it worked they would become famous and at least one of them would become a monster. Of course it’s not for me to say if that is what happened to any of them.

      The relaunch went fairly well and we managed to increase our peak quarter-hour ratings in the first week from the pathetically small 0.2 (i.e. 0.2 per cent of the whole potential TV audience) to a not quite so pathetically small 0.3. We claimed a 50 per cent increase in ratings in the press and, for just about the first time, ‘ailing’ TV-am got some positive responses. We never mentioned that these figures were so small that, taking into account the margin for error in the research process, it was still quite possible we had no viewers at all.

      It was around this time that we introduced Diana Dors and her diet on TV-am. Every Friday she would turn up and weigh in; over sixteen weeks she managed to lose 5 stone. One of my better ideas was that one Friday we should pull onto the set the amount of weight she had lost in lard. Seeing a pallet full of animal fat next to Diana had a dramatic effect. Whether Diana actually lost all that weight I was never too sure. Clive and I always suspected she’d started her first weigh-in with a lead belt around her stomach and had then taken off one of the weights week by week. Either way, it was our most successful item and Fridays became our best day in terms of ratings, thanks to Diana.

      When the diet was coming to an end Diana kept promising to tell the viewers the secret of how she had lost so much weight. We were all worried that she was intending to plug a commercial product, which would get us into real trouble with the Independent Broadcasting Authority; given that we already had enough problems with the IBA I was determined to stop her. So on the day of her final slot I told Clive that under no circumstances was she to take anything onto the set that could resemble a commercial product. Clive duly did the check, but I’m afraid Diana was far too smart for all of us.

      As she sat down with John Stapleton for her usual Friday diet chat on the sofa she suddenly reached into her bra, which in Diana’s case was pretty large, as her bosom had always been her trademark, and pulled out a cheap-looking calculator. She then announced that this Diana Dors Calorie Counter was the secret of her diet and that it was available for only £5.99 if people wrote directly to her at TV-am. Over the next week we received at least ten thousand letters from people wanting to buy the calculator, but I was so angry I refused to give them to Diana, arguing that they belonged to TV-am, not to her. She even took us to court to try to get them. She didn’t win, she never got the letters, and the viewers didn’t get their personally signed Diana Dors Calorie Counter.

      Of course Diana had been a big star in the 1950s and 1960s, Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe according to the tabloids. Although her best days were long gone she was still a massive personality and the public were still very much interested in her. I asked her agent once if she would be willing to present a show for TV-am on Sunday mornings. He came back and said that, being a Roman Catholic, her Sunday morning mass was very important to her, to which I said I assumed that meant she wouldn’t do it. He replied, ‘No, what it means is that it is going to cost you a lot of money.’ Instead I asked David Frost to do the programme, thus bringing about the birth of Frost on Sunday, a programme that was still running (though on the BBC) twenty years later.

      Diana died of cancer within a few months and because she was a TV-am star we decided to do a special programme about her on the Saturday morning, the day after she had died. We invited on her friend, the singer Jess Conrad, who decided to use the opportunity to plug his latest record, and Barbara Windsor, who, like Diana, had also been a busty blonde film star. She was delightful about Diana on the set but when she came off she turned to me and said: ‘You know I hated her, don’t you?’

      But while Diana made a difference to TV-am it was children’s programming that proved to be the turning point for the station. In the June half-term week we ran half an hour of children’s programming every day at 9 a.m. It was made by a very talented producer, Anne Wood, who later went on to fame and fortune by creating the Teletubbies. At this time Anne had discovered a talented puppeteer called David Claridge, who played a series of characters, the most important of whom was called Roland Rat. Little did I know then that the rat would haunt me for the next twenty years, with The Sun describing me as ‘Roland Rat’s dad’ on more than one occasion. In this one half-term week our peak quarter-hour ratings increased by two points, and it happened when Roland was on. I decided there and then that our big chance for turning everything around would come in the school holidays in the summer.