Ever since then I’ve always tried either to talk or write to the people working for me when their life is in crisis because of a marriage break-down, a family tragedy, or some other major problem. A small gesture from the boss at a time of crisis can really mean something. I also learnt from that time onwards how important it was to keep a decent balance between work and the rest of your life, although I haven’t always managed to achieve it. These were the days in television when you weren’t seen as a ‘proper’ producer if you didn’t sleep on the cutting room floor and ignore the rest of your life. It was complete nonsense.
In later years, when people came to see me and said their marriage was breaking down, I always told them to try again. Marriages and relationships inevitably go through difficult times, but sometimes they recover. And I’ve always insisted people take their holidays despite whatever crisis might be happening at work, because holidays matter in family life. I’ve only ever had to cancel two, the first when Granada launched a takeover bid for LWT in late 1993 and the other in the summer of 2003 after Dr Kelly committed suicide.
Thankfully, Christine and I had not had children so our break-up was relatively uncomplicated. We simply split what we owned and went our own ways. Some years later, when we were both with other people and Christine wanted to get married again, we discovered that, due to a mistake of our own making, we weren’t actually divorced. We both had to turn up in court to affirm that we no longer wanted to be married to each other – a very odd experience. We hadn’t seen each other for some years and it was like meeting someone you were at university with, rather than meeting your ex-wife.
Much later, more than twenty years after we had split up and when I was Director-General of the BBC, the Mail on Sunday went in search of Christine with the obvious intent of getting her to dish the dirt on me. They found her at her home in Yorkshire, but when she said there was no animosity between us and that, although we no longer saw each other, we were still fond of one another, the reporter gave up and went back to London. No story there.
At the end of my year on Weekend World Nick Evans and I were asked to become a team to run The London Programme. He would be the editor and, after just two years in television, I would be his deputy. We had two small adjoining offices, the states of which reflected our differing personalities. His was always neat and tidy, with a completely clear desk at the end of the day. Mine was always a tip, with piles of paper everywhere. My problem was that I really wanted a desk like his but could never quite achieve it; so on the nights when I was working late and he’d gone home, I used to sneak into his office and work at his desk. It was bliss.
Nick and his wife Jenny were great friends to me during this time. As anyone knows who has got divorced, or has seen a long-term relationship split up, these are times when the emotional swings are enormous. The highs are higher but the lows are much lower. Nick and Jenny helped me through so many of the low times. Sadly, much later, their own marriage split up as well and Nick has recently remarried.
Running a weekly current affairs show with one of your best friends was a lot of fun. What I discovered was the importance, in a creative business, of people with good ideas. In my relatively brief time in television I had always worked on stories that I had found myself, or on issue-based programmes I had suggested, so I had always assumed most producers worked on their own ideas. When I became an editor I discovered it wasn’t true. There are brilliant producers who have few ideas themselves, but they can take an idea and make it into an outstanding programme.
What I discovered in the two years I was doing that job was that people with good ideas are worth their weight in gold. I discovered later that the same applies in business. When I was at the Harvard Business School some years later, one of the professors came up with a great description of this when he said ‘Man can live for three weeks without food, four days without water and five minutes without oxygen; but some men can live a lifetime without a good idea.’
The point is that in programme making you can screw up a good idea and make a bad programme, but you can never make a good programme out of a lousy idea. Whenever I’ve talked to people coming new into television I’ve always told them that you can learn the process of making programmes relatively easily; what really matters is the originality and quality of your ideas.
Nick and I ran The London Programme for two years. We had a good team with us and tried to make it a fun and exciting place to work. As always, we made some good programmes and some bad ones. The hardest job of being a programme editor is having to ‘save’ a programme – to try to turn a potentially disastrous programme into one that is at least average. I always remember Nick trying to do this with a programme on local government finance. The end product was totally incomprehensible, but at least Nick had made it look stylish: a week earlier it had both been incomprehensible and looked terrible. It is exactly the same in news. Producing a programme on a good news day is ten times easier than when there is nothing happening. The latter is the test of a good editor, as I was to discover later at TV-am.
In January 1982 LWT began another ten years as the weekend ITV broadcaster in London, which was good news for the company, although the renewal of the franchise wasn’t unexpected. LWT’s only challenger was from a consortium led by quizmaster Hughie Green. Even better news was that, instead of taking over – as usual – from Thames Television at 7 p.m. on Friday nights, LWT would in future start at 5.30. LWT had another hour and a half to fill each weekend, and another hour and a half’s worth of advertising to sell.
I was given the job of filling some of that extra time – the hour between six and seven every Friday night. After just four years in television I was given my own programme. I was to be the editor of what became a mould-breaking programme called The Six O’Clock Show, which was due to launch in January 1982. It was only called that because we didn’t have a name to put on the door of the office when we first brought the team together in September 1981. In the next three months we came up with about twenty different names and put them all forward to Michael Grade, LWT’s Director of Programmes at the time, for him to choose. In the end he chose the name on the door. The name of programmes doesn’t really matter; it’s the content that is important. Who in their right mind would call a situation comedy about a couple of wide boys from East London Only Fools and Horses, and yet it is one of the great television comedies of all time.
LWT in 1982 was a company with enormous confidence. It had won back its franchise and had a series of big hits on its hands. Cilia Black’s Surprise! Surprise! was hugely popular and that year it launched another entertainment show called Game for a Laugh, which became Britain’s Number One show in a matter of weeks. A new LWT drama called Dempsey and Makepeace became another big hit while Weekend World and The South Bank Show were there to prove that the company had an intellectual heart. Into this mix came The Six O’Clock Show.
The Six O’Clock Show broke the mould for a number of reasons. We were the first programme to use single-camera tape: up until then it had only been used for news. LWT had just got a union agreement allowing the company to use electronic news gathering (ENG) and we decided to see if we could use this new technology in an original and more creative way. We pre-planned every three- or four-minute item we were to shoot as if it were a thirty-minute documentary. We had a budget that people in television would dream about today, which meant we had a producer, a director, and a researcher on every short item. Because tape was so much cheaper than film, we shot masses of it on every item and only used a tiny proportion of it. As a result, we got some gems at times.
The aim of The Six O’Clock Show was to create a different feeling: that this was Friday night and Friday night was the beginning of the weekend. In fact, I wanted to call the show Thank God it’s Friday and commissioned