Five news is ten years old, and I was there at the begin­ning. To any­one who doesn’t know why news anchors now stand up…well, we made it semi-respectable. Most of our innov­a­tions were the res­ult of the tiny budget allowed for Britain’s fifth and final ter­restrial channel.

We had a young, multi-skilled news­room, before digital had even replaced ana­logue. We decon­struc­ted graph­ics (once using Play­mobil® char­ac­ters to illus­trate the impact of the Government’s budget pro­pos­als), out­sourced fea­tures (to young pro­du­cers like Dan Cham­bers), and got very lucky with our news anchor. Greg Dyke reviewed our pilot and told us to cut the fea­tures slot in half (which was the right call) but which meant los­ing cur­rent affairs minutage and resourcing another 3–4 minutes worth of con­tent per show.

Among the senior news execs cut­ting their teeth on Five were Deborah Turness, now helm­ing ITV News, Craig Oliver — now edit­ing the BBC 10pm and Jon Wil­li­ams, run­ning the corporation’s inter­na­tional news. It didn’t too much harm the career pro­spects of Tim Gar­dam — the con­trol­ler — who com­bined an admir­ably light touch with a brow so high he could deliver a skull-shattering intel­lec­tual head­butt to any­one temp­ted to sneer.

My old boss Gary Rogers who picked up the reins from Chris Shaw, now advises every­one who needs to know on how to set up lean, mean news oper­a­tions the world over.

ITV, Chan­nel 4, BBC and Sky’s main bul­let­ins are dir­ec­ted by people who learned their gal­lery skills on Five’s updates.

ITV and BBC news­gath­er­ing have edit­ors who learned their trade using ima­gin­a­tion and not much else to cover national and inter­na­tional news. Garden­ing makeover shows and gritty invest­ig­a­tions are dir­ec­ted and filmed by one­time producers.

A couple of Chan­nel 4’s best cam­era­men first picked up PD150s for us. We called them cam­era pro­du­cers, for union reasons.

Five’s report­ers are at Al Jaz­eera Eng­lish, CNN Inter­na­tional, BBC News, Chan­nel 4 News, Sky News, and ITV — some are still with five. Between them they helped change the way tele­vi­sion reports look and sound — not always for the bet­ter, and usu­ally for reas­ons of economy.

They’re even in polit­ics — John Reid’s spe­cial adviser was once a humble junior pro­du­cer on Five. Don’t blame us.

What did I get? Great free­dom, great friends and great…financial chal­lenges. Well, you can’t have everything.