I was interviewed by a whole range of people on the programme, including one who was very much against me. At that time Jane Hewland was a senior producer who was later to become Head of Features and Current Affairs at LWT. Today she runs a successful independent production company, Hewland International, which makes a lot of programmes for BSkyB. After meeting me, Jane decided I wasn’t the right sort for LWT, although I only discovered this years later when, as Director of Programmes at LWT, I got access to my old file, and was able to read what Jane initially thought about me. By then Jane was working for me, so I included her comments about me in the speech I made at her leaving party. She’s never forgiven me. I have her original report framed and hanging in my office. She said of me:
He was so glib, fast talking and sure of himself and so contemptuous of all the TV people he has met so far I fear we would never be able to break his spirit and bring him to see the light as we see it. I think he would just turn out to be a pain in the arse, get disgruntled with us and leave.
At the final interview for the Weekend World job I had been told by Nick Evans that the most important person on the Board was John Birt, who was then head of Features and Current Affairs and was all powerful. At the interview I thought I did pretty well, answering most of the questions intelligently, and getting a few laughs at the same time. In particular John Birt laughed quite a lot – or so I thought.
I discovered afterwards that I had muddled up the people on the Board and that the man who was laughing was actually Barry Cox, the head of Current Affairs. The only person on the Board I didn’t take to was the person to my left, who kept asking me really awkward questions and didn’t laugh once. When Nick Evans called to ask me how I had got on I described this man to him and discovered it had been John Birt.
I didn’t get the job on Weekend World, but I must have done all right because I was asked to apply for another LWT job as a reporter on their regional current affairs programme, called The London Programme. I went in to meet the editor, Julian Norridge, and we ended up talking about the Cuban revolution, the subject of my thesis at university three years earlier. Quite what Cuba had to do with London I had no idea, but I got the job.
Suddenly one of the blackest periods in my life was over: I had got the job in television I’d always dreamed of having. There are three periods of my life that had a profound influence on me, on my career, and on the way I think. The first was the three years I spent at York University. The second was about to begin – the six years from 1977 to 1983 that I spent in the current affairs department at LWT. The third wouldn’t come until 1989, when I went to the Harvard Business School.
When I joined LWT in the autumn of 1977 it was a really exciting place. The company had won its ITV franchise in 1968. After a disastrous start, when it nearly went broke, it had recovered and was looking for ways to ensure it got its franchise renewed by the Independent Broadcasting Authority in 1980. The Current Affairs and Features Department under John Birt was expanding fast. Weekend World had introduced a new, more intellectual form of current affairs on British television, and two well-funded local programmes had changed regional programming. The first was the London Weekend Show, a programme for teenagers presented by Janet Street-Porter. The second was the programme I was joining, The London Programme.
The LWT style of journalism had been pioneered by John Birt, who had developed the whole approach when editing Weekend World. Many in television, then and now, have mocked his philosophy, but I would defend it to this day. What John argued was that understanding the issue or story was more important than necessarily getting the right pictures, and that if you couldn’t get the pictures it didn’t mean you had to abandon the whole programme. But the approach went further. Birt argued that demonstrating there was a problem wasn’t enough: you also had to explain what could be done about it. His thesis, known as ‘The Bias Against Understanding’, was first outlined in an article written by Birt and Peter Jay in The Times in 1975. What this analytical approach to television current affairs meant was that, first, you were able to tackle difficult subjects that weren’t necessarily televisual, and, second, you couldn’t get away with just saying that something was an outrage: you had to show that there was something the policy makers could do about it.
The programme I joined, The London Programme, had been the idea of Barry Cox when he was a producer at Granada. He’d had the idea of producing a weekly, well-resourced current affairs programme, in the style of World in Action but only about London stories and London issues, and taken it to John Birt. I joined for the third series.
It is difficult to explain how exciting working on a programme like that was for me at that time. It was intellectually satisfying compared to the other jobs I had had since leaving York. You had six weeks to make a single half-hour film about a particular issue, which meant you had four weeks to research it. In that time you could get to know a subject well. You were helped because you were from ‘television’, so you could get access to the experts in the field you were examining: television opens doors. But the real challenge was to understand the subject. In many ways it was more like being at university than being in the media. In those days people joked about the LWT current affairs department being ‘Balliol on Thames’, a place where programme makers spent weeks constructing theses and made programmes that no one except other programme makers, MPs, and Whitehall mandarins watched. It also kept up the tradition of the long summer vacation when the current affairs department would empty for weeks on end.
My first ever television programme was a story I had discovered while working in community relations and was about landlords harassing tenants. This was followed by one about the chances of London flooding, and here I had an amazing piece of luck. The programme was made to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the great London flood of 1952. The Thames barrier was then being built and the programme asked what the chance was of London being flooded again before it was finished.
Three days after the programme was broadcast in the autumn of 1977 there was a surge tide, with the wind in the right direction, and London was inches from being under water. The Labour Government of the day was terrified and asked LWT to repeat the programme so that people would understand the danger and what they should do if the worst happened. Michael Grade, then the Director of Programmes at LWT, repeated it at 10.30 p.m. on the Friday night and we got an enormous rating, the largest for any London Programme that series.
I read recently that, according to some academic study or other, people born in May, like me, are the luckiest, and it’s certainly been true in my case. My old managing director at LWT, Brian Tesler, once told me he would invest in any company I ran – not because I was brilliant, but because I had ‘the luck’ on my side. Most things I touched worked. When I was at TV-am in 1984 the astrologer Marjorie Orr did my chart and told me I could expect twenty wonderful years when all would go right. The trouble was, the twenty years ended in 2004. I must ask her some time if it was just coincidence that I was fired from the BBC the very moment the twenty years was up.
I had a pretty good first year at LWT and, at the end of it, was asked to join Weekend World as junior producer, progressing during the year to become a full producer. The programme I was most proud of while at Weekend World was one I made on the European Common Agricultural Policy, a system that only about six people in the world seemed to understand. I became the seventh and tried to explain it to the nation on this intellectual programme by telling a joke.
I told the story of a German cow. We saw it milked and then followed the cow’s milk to the dairy, where it was made into powdered milk. The powdered milk was then bought by the EEC intervention board, who stored it in enormous sheds as part of the EEC milk mountain. Eventually it was sold back to the same farmer to be fed to the same cow who had produced the milk in the first place. When I finished the programme I was convinced that the Common Agricultural Policy was doomed. It was so inefficient and made so little economic sense. How wrong I was. It’s still going strong today, costing the average family of four in Britain something like £1,000 a year.
My year on Weekend World was not a happy time – not because of the work, but because of what happened in my private life. On