Greg Dyke: Inside Story

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 I had to get down to the programme relaunch itself. The problem I faced was that 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.

It is important to understand the difference between David Claridge and Roland. David was a miserable, rather dull man who only came alive when he put his hand up this puppet’s rear end. He then suddenly became clever and witty. As with so many puppeteers, I am not at all sure which was the real David, himself or the character he played. I certainly preferred the latter.

As David, he came to me one day to complain that Roland and his mate Kevin the Gerbil hadn’t got an office. I looked at him as if he was mad and tried to explain that they weren’t real and that, being puppets, they didn’t need an office. David was having none of it: to him, they were real. In the end I relented, had the broom cupboard cleared out, and handed it over to Roland and Kevin.

On another occasion, when we were making Roland Rat in Switzerland, David fell on the ski slopes and as a result took to his hotel room. Later that day the floor manager looked in to see if he was OK only to find David, Roland, and Kevin snuggled up in bed together. David was fast asleep, with Roland on one side of him and Kevin on the other.

But the funniest experience dealing with David Claridge came after the rat had saved TV-am – an event that led to the famous joke that it was the first time a rat had saved a sinking ship. By then Roland was our biggest star, so it clearly mattered when we got a call to the press office one Friday telling us that the Daily Star planned to run a story on their front page the following day in which they would claim that Claridge had hosted a Soho club called ‘Skin Two’ for rubber and latex fetishists. Almost anywhere else I’ve worked this would have led to a great crisis; but TV-am was in permanent crisis, and when Tim Aitken, Clive Jones, and I met to discuss this prospective story we couldn’t stop laughing. Imagine it: the saviour of the station, the man behind the most popular children’s characters of the day, involved in a sexual fetishists’ club.

In the end we got lucky. I was deputed to phone the programme department of the Independent Broadcasting Authority to give them the news, but it was the day their Director was leaving and everyone had been out for a rather long leaving lunch at which the alcohol had clearly flowed generously. When I got through and explained the problem all I got from the other end was someone shouting rather loudly at me saying that he wasn’t bothered about that sort of thing, and then the phone went dead.

Our luck held. The Daily Star didn’t run the story on their front page after all; it was replaced by a story about Billy Connolly’s divorce instead, and Claridge, Roland, and the rubber story were relegated to page seven or nine, where they duly disappeared.

In planning the TV-am schedule for the summer of 1983 Clive Jones and I decided to send the Rat out on the road. Anne Wood bought a 1957 Ford Anglia, which we painted bright pink, and off they went to produce a half-hour show every morning for six weeks. The difficult question was what to do with the other three hours in a period notoriously short of news.

Here we had the idea of doing the programme live from the seaside beaches of Britain. In fact it was the idea of a woman called Juliet Blake, who came looking for a job. We took her idea and gave her a job as compensation. Juliet now lives in Los Angeles but is still a good friend. We were lucky that it turned out to be a scorching summer, but that also had its downside as Eggcup Towers had no air conditioning and we were all dying from the heat. The story going the rounds at TV-am that boiling summer was that the Board had had to choose between air conditioning and an executive flat when planning the building and they’d chosen the latter.

To produce By the Seaside, as I imaginatively called the idea, we needed an outside broadcast (OB) unit, a star, a producer, a director, and a union agreement in a matter of just a few weeks. In most organizations that would have been difficult to deliver, but at TV-am anything was always possible. In a matter of weeks we had them all.

We found an old OB unit sitting unused outside Ewart’s studio complex in Wandsworth. The trouble was that Keith Ewart, who owned the studios, wanted £12,000 for it and TV-am was out of cash. I went to the finance director, who refused to sanction it; so instead I rang Tim Aitken, who was on holiday in the South of France. He was wonderfully pragmatic when I told him the finance director’s view. ‘Silly bastard. We’re going bust anyway.’ So I agreed to buy the OB unit and sent someone over to collect it. Luckily we managed to get it out of the yard, towing it because the engine didn’t work, without actually handing over any cash. I think it was some years before Mr Ewart’s cheque actually cleared.