Back on 28 November 2006, when Michael Grade walked in to 200 Grays Inn Road to take the ITV helm the share price stood at 110.75p. Today it was just 89.1p. That’s a drop of just under 20 percent, or as we say in journalism — nearly a fifth.
Of course, share prices can go up as well as down, and ITV should be looked at as a long term investment. Besides, it will take at least another year for Grade’s reforms to take effect. By which time we’ll all probably be able to buy it.
David Lloyd calls for a new public endowment for Channel 4 in the Guardian today.
It’s an edit of a very entertaining lecture he gave at City University last Tuesday — and which we’ll post soon on our website.
He mischievously fuelled speculation that Mark Thompson wasn’t the first choice for Channel 4 CEO when the job fell vacant, post Michael Jackson.
And in case you think students provide an awestruck and adoring audience, you couldn’t be more wrong. David’s plea for the channel was challenged most powerfully by students in their twenties who recall nothing of its output before the late 1990s. They’re a tough crowd…
The news that someone from the Jo Whiley show called in pretending to be a listener is obviously a one-off. It can never have been industry practice to behave so, erm, underhandedly…
Back in the day, however, TV execs did used to pay inordinate attention to “viewers’ calls.” The editor of a famous series — still very much with us — once phoned the duty office after one of his programmes aired to leave a “viewer’s call.”
The phone was answered by the company’s Chairman who happened to be working late.
“I just wanted to say that was one of the most powerful pieces of television I have ever seen,” gushed the exec.
“You made the bloody programme,” came the curt reply.
Rosie Boycott (onetime–Indie editor) got dumped from Hell’s Kitchen last night.
With her final words, she summarised the difference between running a newspaper and a restaurant: in a restaurant you want to serve the same piece of lemon tart every night, on a newspaper you want every story to be different…it keeps you endlessly amused.
What an unwittingly perceptive analysis of the qualities required by good editors — the need for endless amusement.
If you really want endless amusement, then Tuesday night Hell’s Kitchen was advertising for viewers in the London Paper, a News Corp. freesheet. Oh, the irony…paying for attention in something that’s being given away. Show sponsors MFI had their logo in the very corner of the ad. Marco Pierre White replaces Gordon Ramsay and casts a raddled shadow over the whole gamey show.
O tempura, o morelles…