THE JAMES MACTAGGART MEMORIAL LECTURE 2008 PETER FINCHAM Thank you and thank you for inviting me. It’s an enormous honour to be asked to deliver the MacTaggart lecture. It really is one of those “are you sure you meant me?” moments. Over the years the MacTaggart has had some mighty distinguished speakers – people who have influenced television greatly, behind the screen, on the screen, beyond the screen. Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch, Dennis Potter. Giants all of them. But just as John Lennon’s wonderful song Woman was eventually displaced at the top of the charts by Joe Dolce’s Shutuppa Your Face, so I find myself here today, following in their footsteps. It’s a humbling place to be. A year ago Jeremy Paxman began his MacTaggart with the words ‘Oh dear. What a terrible trade we work in.’ Nobody shouted him down. He caught the mood of the moment. These august surroundings favour the reflective. Self- analysis, with a dash of self-reproach, even a hint of self-flagellation: that’s the flavour we like at Edinburgh. To many of us telly people this is the nearest we come to going to church. The MacTaggart sometimes has the whiff of a sermon about it, and I’ve occasionally found myself shuffling forward in my seat and getting ready to say prayers at the end. Well here we are, twelve months on. Still a terrible trade? I hope not. I’m going to attempt something that’s perhaps unfashionable this evening and outline a vision for television that’s unashamedly optimistic. I think it’s a great medium, with a great future. But we need to remember what it is, and not fool ourselves into thinking it’s something that others tell us it ought to be. It’s a medium whose fundamental aim is to entertain its audience. If we succeed in that we’ve got a future. If we don’t, we haven’t. Whisper it quietly – we’re in showbusiness. I’ve been coming to Edinburgh for many years – as a student, as an eager up- and-coming independent producer, even – I kid you not – as the musical director of Cameron Mackintosh’s touring version of Godspell. Two memories stay in the mind. As a callow 21 year old, playing the piano in the Cambridge Footlights May Week revue, I first toyed with the idea of a career in what nowadays we call the creative industries. My aim was to write musicals. I saw myself as a less commercial version of Andrew Lloyd Webber - commercial being a dirty word in the student lexicon. 1 Alas, it was not to be. My musical career started badly, lost momentum and fizzled out altogether. A significant handicap was that I wasn’t very good at my chosen instrument, the piano. My Footlights colleagues – Griff Rhys Jones, Jimmy Mulville, Rory McGrath, Clive Anderson – used to mock me mercilessly as I sat at the side of the stage hammering out the wrong notes and coming in on the wrong cue. Many of them of course have gone on to enjoy highly respected and lucrative careers in the media, and I like to think that in recent years I’ve got as much pleasure out of turning down their programme proposals as they did out of making fun of my piano technique. My eventual entry point into television was pretty random. Sometime in the late 80s, while running a small radio commercials company called TalkBack, my partners Mel and Griff and I hit on the wheeze of suggesting to the BBC that we make Alas Smith and Jones ourselves. We’d read somewhere about the growth of independent TV production, and thought ‘we’ll have a go at that’. We put the idea to the BBC and to our surprise received a letter from the controller of BBC One saying he was keen to strike a new deal and was delighted to subcontract the production to TalkBack. The controller’s name was Michael Grade, another MacTaggart luminary. Later that very same day he left to become chief executive of Channel Four. He is now of course my boss at ITV. Small world. Armed with Michael’s letter and the kind of self-confidence that stems from complete ignorance, I bought a book about TV production, copied the budget form from the appendix and started filling it in. Lacking any other skills, I put myself down as executive producer. I took the view that this was the job I was least likely to get found out in. Let’s take a show of hands. How many people here have described themselves at one time or another as executive producers? Let’s hope the lightbulbs don’t need changing. My second big memory of Edinburgh is much more recent. A year ago, in fact. I’d put my executive producing days behind me and made the surprising leap to becoming controller of BBC One. Being an e.p. – as I learned to call it - was all very well but it had its drawbacks. I remember Dawn French once introducing me to the glamorous actress Amanda Donohoe on the set of a series we made called Murder Most Horrid. ‘What do you do?’ she asked. ‘I’m the executive producer,’ I answered, and I swear that during the seven syllables that make up the title she’d turned away and washed me out of her life for ever. 2 By contrast, saying that you’re the controller of BBC1 is a nice, put-that-in-your- pipe-and-smoke-it type of reply to strangers who ask what you do at parties. When I joined the BBC, I found it a remarkably warm and welcoming kind of place. I’d worked for many years in an environment where you needed to make money, or you went out of business. Programmes were wonderful things, but profits were perhaps more wonderful still. Lurking in the background when making key editorial decisions was the thought, screw this up and we’ll have to remortgage the house. That kind of reality, only too familiar to those of you who run your own businesses, and I respect you for it, concentrates the mind. At the BBC, somebody turns up with a wheelbarrow full of money each April and says can you make sure you spend it by next March. They’re keen to know what you’re going to spend it on, but it’s not quite the same as worrying about whether there’s enough cash in the bank to pay the VAT. Anyway, I loved being at the BBC – believe me, I’m not here to attack that remarkable organisation, quite the opposite – and I think it’s fair to say that, like the maiden voyage of the Titanic, my time there went very smoothly for a while. It only takes one iceberg though, doesn’t it, and sometime in the summer of last year I hit mine. What followed was variously called Queengate, or Crowngate, or any other gate they haven’t used before, and when I came up to Edinburgh last year it was pretty much at its height. I took part in a ‘controller session’ – I’m doing another one tomorrow - in which I was interviewed by Jeremy Vine for an hour. His victims on Newsnight rarely got more than five minutes. I wasn’t so much brought into the hall as smuggled in with a blanket over my head. A week or so earlier I’d had the bizarre experience of being tipped off by one part of the BBC – the press department – that it would be a good idea to stay with friends that night because another part of the BBC – the news department – were sending a crew to camp outside my house. As I discovered, being at the heart of a media storm is an odd mixture of the surreal and of the very real. Not much fun, to tell the truth. Crowngate of course got mixed up with the whole Trust in Television crisis which broke over the industry last year, and which has continued lapping at the sands ever since. It’s been a grim and unsavoury episode in television’s history – money taken from viewers on false pretences, competition winners faked, awards given to the wrong people, the interests – and the votes – of viewers ignored or over-ruled. Let me be quite clear – we should all feel remorse at this collective lapse of standards. Inadequate systems, poor supervision, investigations, recriminations, apologies – it all has a peculiarly British feel to it, but as we now know from the 3 fireworks and the singing at the Olympics opening ceremony, fakery in television is a global phenomenon. Earlier in the year I was invited to meet a group television executives and presenters from the central Chinese province of Hunan, who were visiting the U.K. to find out how we do things over here. I didn’t know who was who, though one of them had a penetrating stare and struck me as looking a bit like a Chinese Jeremy Paxman. During the coffee break I asked our host, who was British, how famous the presenters in the group would have been back in Hunan. ‘Oh, quite well known,’ he replied. ‘What sort of audiences do they play to?’ ‘Not usually more than a hundred million.’ Not like Jeremy, then. We went on to talk about trust in television and he told me the salutary tale of a reporter on Bejing TV’s Life Channel called Zi Beijia.