One of my complaints about most news and current affairs programmes is that they never deal with the good things in life, only problems and issues. If you had watched LWT’s regional output at that time you wouldn’t have known that anyone in London ever actually enjoyed living there. I decided The Six O‘Clock Show would counter that. Its aim would be to tell the funnier side of life in London, to put on the eccentrics, and to tell the sort of stories people told each other in the pub, in the shop, or at work – the stories that would never have found their way onto a news programme. My hunch was that these were the stories that people really wanted to hear.
For instance, we once found a small cutting in a local paper about an eccentric man who had spent ten years building a model of the Titanic out of matchsticks. When it was finally completed he had launched it on the pond on Wimbledon Common and, true to form, it had sunk on its maiden voyage. We decided that The Six O’Clock Show would raise the Titanic. We hired a frogman, put Janet Street-Porter into a rubber dinghy, and sent them, plus a camera crew, out to find the sunken model. Unfortunately, the pond was too shallow for our frogman to dive under the water so he could only walk up and down in his diving gear, with the boat’s proud owner telling him roughly where his pride and joy had sunk. Sadly, our diver found the boat by treading on it and the Titanic ended up being raised in two pieces.
We made three pilots for The Six O’Clock Show. All three were bad, but the final one was spectacularly awful. The problem was we had a monkey on the show that escaped in the studio and ended up swinging around on the lighting rig. The poor director, Danny Wiles, had no idea whether to use his cameras to follow the monkey or concentrate on what was left of the show. I was very keen to shoot the monkey, but not with the cameras. At the drinks party afterwards I was downcast. I could see my career as an editor disappearing even before it had started. I cheered up when one of the team, Tony Cohen, who was then a researcher but who became my alter ego for many years and now runs one of the world’s largest independent production companies, Fremantle Media, turned up with his wife Alison and their new-born baby.
After the drinks I was sitting with the show’s executive producer, Barry Cox, discussing what we could do to save it when I got an agitated phone call from Tony. He explained that he was at the hospital because the monkey, which he claimed had got drunk in hospitality, had scratched his baby and the doctors were demanding to see it. I told the story to Barry who then uttered the immortal words, ‘Did this happen on London Weekend property?’ All turned out OK in the end. We never found the monkey, but Tony’s son Ben suffered no unpleasant after-effects and is now a strapping, six-foot-tall 22-year-old.
Despite the pilots, and to everyone’s surprise, including mine, The Six O’Clock Show was a smash hit and became the most watched regional programme in Britain. One week we even got into the top ten programmes in London and were sent a case of champagne by the management. Looking back now I think its success was rooted in our ability to reflect the social, economic, and political changes that were happening in London at the time and talk about them in an entertaining way. It was a time when London was experiencing a massive change in social habits, when yuppies, cocktail bars, and crêperies were replacing traditional life in the working-class areas of the capital.
Every week we did three or four stories like the Titanic item, stories about another side of London. Michael Aspel presented the show. He was not Michael Grade’s first choice – he wanted Terry Wogan to leave the BBC to do the show – but Michael turned out to be a great success. He was very witty and managed to stand above the chaos that was sometimes around him in the studio. The show sounded very London, with a cast of character reporters on the road and in the studio that included Janet Street-Porter, the former Mastermind winner and London cabbie Fred Housego, and the brilliant Danny Baker, all of whom had strong London accents. The team was completed by a small, wonderfully mad, rather posh man called Andy Price, who was an on-the-road reporter.
I decided that we should capitalize on Janet’s accent and turn her into a working-class heroine. The problem was that Janet wanted to be seen as being cultured. It was fine to begin with, but one evening, after she had spent all day shooting an item about pigeon fancying, she burst into my office to tell me she’d had enough of being covered in pigeon shit and didn’t want to be seen that way any more. She told me she wanted the audience to know she liked ‘fucking opera’, as she put it. I explained that that wasn’t her role, that Michael was the cultured one in the team. As a result, Janet decided to leave and we replaced her with Paula Yates.
In many ways it was the juxtaposition between Michael Aspel and Danny Baker that made the show work. One represented suave London of the Sixties and Seventies, the other uppity London of the Eighties. Remember, this was the London of Ken Livingstone ‘mark one’, when he was both dangerous and very funny and was hated by the Thatcher Government of the day. The Six O’Clock Show was also dangerous – and live. That’s why it worked. Things went wrong. One week Tony Cohen fixed up for part of the show to come live from the beach at Southend but he mixed up the tide tables and halfway through the show the tide came in and wrecked the whole thing. On another occasion a live outside link went completely wrong when it was invaded by a bunch of kids. It was only saved as a piece of television when Andy Price, who was presenting, lost his temper and picked up one of the kids and threw him across the street. This was live on television.
For me, The Six O’Clock Show was the first programme that was completely mine, and totally under my control. From running it I learnt much about teamwork and leadership. I learnt about encouraging everyone, from the most junior to the most senior, to be part of the team and come up with ideas, and about the importance of celebrating success – and mourning failure – together as a team. And I learnt how important the leader was to the team. These were all themes that I developed further over the next twenty years as I went on to run larger and larger groups of people. I also learnt how important it was constantly to push the system and to defy the rules, because that way you got a better end result. But taking on the rules at LWT meant fighting both the management and the unions.
These were the days when the unions ran television. Earlier in my time at LWT I had been the trade union representative for the producers and directors; in fact when I became Managing Director of the company in 1990 I had to renegotiate some of the ridiculous deals that I had won from the management when I was a union negotiator. I learned just how ridiculous the whole thing was when, on my first ever shoot at LWT, a man turned up driving a car with no one and nothing in it. I asked who he was and was told he was the electrician’s driver. So where was the electrician? I asked. I was told he liked to bring his own car as well so he could claim the mileage allowance on top of having a driver. In those days all the crews demanded expensive lunches every day in fairly upmarket restaurants. If they didn’t get them they made your life a misery as a researcher or a producer.
The LWT management were feeble when it came to standing up to the unions. When another friend, Andy Forrester, and I were the union negotiators for the producers and directors we demanded a 20 per cent wage increase. We nearly fell off our chairs when the management’s second offer was 18 per cent – we couldn’t get out of the room fast enough. We always called it the ‘pop-up toaster deal’ because on top of the 18 per cent we got everything else we had asked for, including company televisions and video recorders for all our members. We reckoned if we’d asked for a pop-up toaster we would have got that as well.
It is difficult to believe now, when there are so many outstanding women working in television, but in those days there was not a single woman director working in the Current Affairs and Features Department at LWT, and very few female producers. I was determined to break this and be the first to employ a female director. I had always been a strong supporter of the women’s movement and wanted to put my beliefs into practice.
I found a great director for The Six O’Clock Show called Vikki Barras, who went on to invent What Not to Wear for the BBC. She applied for the job of director and got it, but the union objected as she hadn’t got the right sort of union card. The LWT management immediately folded and agreed with the union that we couldn’t