We duly turned up and were introduced to Jonathan’s now famous wife Lolicia, the blonde who didn’t pay the Paris hotel bill in his notorious libel case against Granada Television and The Guardian. She clearly had no interest in us and obviously didn’t want to be there. It was a dull evening but two things happened that have had a profound effect on my life since then.
Firstly I met Clive Jones at the dinner. Today Clive is Chief Executive of ITV News; back then he had just been appointed Editor of TV-am by Jonathan and would work directly to me as Editor-in-Chief. It was the combination of Clive and myself that was to turn the whole place around, a combination of my ideas and leadership and his capabilities as a producer. Clive had an amazing capacity for work. A few weeks after I joined TV-am I reckoned the programme was still pretty awful. I said to him that it was only going to get better if one of us got in there at five every morning and drove the show from the gallery five days a week. I added that I thought it should be him, and that’s what he did – week in and week out until it had improved. Over the years Clive and I have worked together on many occasions and he has turned out to be a good and trusted friend. In life there are some people whom you can be certain will always be there for you. Clive is one of those people.
But the more important event that night came when Sue and I left the house in Lord North Street. We’d only been living together for a few months and we were still learning about each other. As the butler shut the front door she turned to me and said that if I wanted the job I should take it but that whatever I did I should never trust those people, referring to Jonathan and Lolicia.
In the years since I’ve learnt on many occasions that Sue’s judgement of people is better than mine. I regularly, and naively, take people at face value. She doesn’t. She knew instinctively that night that these were not our sort of people, that they came from different backgrounds, had different values, and played in a different world, one in which friendship and trust were commodities that were bought and sold. According to Sue, what Jonathan said and promised were not to be believed – a fact well and truly established at the Old Bailey sixteen years later.
I went back to LWT and told everyone I was leaving. As a result I was summoned to a meeting with LWT’s then Director of Programmes John Birt, who had been promoted into the job when Michael Grade left to go to America in 1981. John told me that if I left there would be no way back into the company, ironic given that seven years later I became its Chief Executive. However, I stuck to my guns and told him I was definitely going, and after that we had a pleasant chat.
John asked me who was going to be the Chief Executive of TV-am. I told him exactly what Jonathan had told me: that he, Jonathan, was going to give up his parliamentary seat and become the full-time CEO. A few days later the story appeared in The Guardian; Jonathan immediately announced that it wasn’t true and that if the paper didn’t withdraw the article he would sue. Months later a sheepish John Birt rang me at TV-am to tell me he was helping The Guardian in their battle with Jonathan over the story and asked if I recollected what I had told him. I suddenly realized that he had been The Guardian’s source.
I had the usual LWT send-off with speeches and videos that were characteristically rude – no prisoners were ever taken at LWT leaving events. Danny Baker, one of the presenters on The Six O‘Clock Show, ended the video sitting in a trap in a public toilet reading a limerick that went: ‘There was a young fellow called Dyke/Largely did what he liked/Went to TV-am/Never heard of again/Fucking well served him right’. When I read my leaving card I also discovered that my immediate boss, David Cox, LWT’s head of Current Affairs, had written in it ‘Fuck off Dyke and good riddance’. When I returned to LWT just four years later as his boss I didn’t need to remind him of this friendly message. He remembered it.
By the time I turned up for work at TV-am in May 1983 Jonathan Aitken had stepped down as Chief Executive and his cousin Timothy had taken on the job part time while continuing to run the family’s merchant bank, Aitken Hume. Ratings and advertising were still non-existent and if anything the programme had got worse. I’ll never forget watching it at home the week before I joined when Yehudi Menuhin was brought on to play the violin live. I sat there amazed. What producer in their right mind could possibly have believed that people rushing to work or struggling to get the kids to school had the time or the inclination to watch a classical violinist for five minutes in the morning?
When I was appointed Editor-in-Chief, TV-am had announced that I was to be its saviour and, for the first time in my life, I was all over the newspapers. My appointment even made the television news, much to my mother’s excitement. TV-am had also announced that I would relaunch the whole weekday programme three weeks after joining. So what the previous management had got wrong in eighteen months of planning I was expected to fix in just three weeks!
On my first day at TV-am I had arranged to take Michael Parkinson out to lunch. Michael was one of the few successes at the station, largely because he had himself taken charge of the programming at the weekends as well as presenting the shows with his wife Mary. Michael is a rare breed in television: a great interviewer and presenter who is also a very good producer and motivator of the team around him. Melvyn Bragg is another. We had a pleasant lunch discussing the shambles that was TV-am and what could be done about it.
I went back to the office only to discover later in the afternoon that Tim Aitken had sacked two of the Famous Five without telling me. Both Angela Rippon and Anna Ford had been summarily dismissed for something they had done on the programme on the day Peter Jay left. They had said that ‘treachery’ was happening at TV-am and this had understandably upset the Aitkens because it implied that they were the perpetrators. Tim decided to get his revenge on the two women on my very first day by firing both of them. His nickname of Pol Pot was born that day. But both women got their revenge. First Anna very publicly threw a glass of red wine over Jonathan at a smart cocktail party and made sure it was in all the papers; and later both of them threatened to sue the company for breach of contract and were paid off.
My eventful first day ended when I went into the TV-am car park to collect my first company car only to find a battered BMW that had quite clearly been in a recent pile-up. I drove it home but got stopped by the police on the way on suspicion of driving an unroadworthy vehicle. So much for company cars! Luckily I didn’t keep that car for long as one of the games we played at TV-am was executive car swap. Every time Tim fired another executive I would pinch his car and pass mine on to Clive Jones. We both ended up with very smart cars.
After the turmoil of my first day I already knew that the car wasn’t the only thing that wasn’t living up to Jonathan Aitken’s promises. On the second day things only got worse. Overnight Michael Parkinson had decided he would go into battle to defend Anna Ford and Angela Rippon and had announced to the world that if they went he would go too.
Given that Michael produced and presented the only vaguely successful part of TV-am, it would not have been good news if he had left. My job was to persuade him not to go. But like so much at TV-am, even this descended into black comedy. I sat in my office with Michael, his wife Mary, and their agent John Webber trying to persuade him to stay. We were joined by the new Chairman, Dick Marsh, who had come in to help out. The trouble was that Dick had had a vasectomy that morning and every time he leaned forward to emphasize to Michael how important he was to TV-am he would end up clutching his crotch in agony.
Distracted by Dick Marsh’s discomfort I didn’t make much progress with Michael; in the end it was Tim Aitken who persuaded him to stay by the classic combination of flattery and bribery. He offered Michael a seat on the TV-am Board. It had clearly annoyed the other four members of the Famous Five that David Frost was the only one of their number who had a board seat. Now Michael was to join him. So Anna and Angela were forgotten and Michael announced to the scrum of reporters and photographers outside Eggcup Towers that he was to stay after all.
After the chaotic events of my first two days