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tv events
on and off the ball
Maggie Brown looks back at the lows and highs of this year’s Edinburgh and Cambridge TV events
The abiding image of the Edinburgh TV Festival 2003 will be of Tony Ball, outgoing chief executive of BSkyB, check- ing his watch, anxious to be off to his Barcelona second home.
Ball delivered the keynote MacTaggart lecture, at a festival where the impact of multi-channel television shaped many sessions.
But his attitude was revealing. From the professionalised press room downwards, Edinburgh is transmuting into a conventional festival, where speakers jet in and out, often barely joining in the debate around the sessions.
It is noticeable how few senior broadcasting figures – Greg Dyke is an exception – either attend as a regular delegate, or are pre- pared to hang around in the lob- bies and the bars to be pestered.
As custom dictates, the annu- al lecturer turned up for a PMT (post MacTaggart) session the following morning. Ball’s speech got a low key, even dismissive, initial reception.
Two proposals, fixed formats for each BBC channel, and an end
to the BBC buying American films and programmes seemed fair.
But his third idea, to force the BBC to syndicate a number of its successful programmes, to ensure it was pressured into innovation, met with puzzled hostility, not just from the Corporation.
What Ball was trying to do, after stripping out BSkyB’s self inter- est, was flesh out Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell’s assertion that the licence fee represented “creative venture capital” for the nation.
But the real practical objec- tion must be that this is not the way the world works: viewers identify BBC-made shows with the BBC, while the creative talent join a production on that basis. Under Ball’s scheme the next series of The Kumars at No. 42 would be franchised out to the highest bid- der, Channel 4 or even ITV,
There were no good rows or scintillating exchanges. It was left to Chris Albrecht, chief executive of Home Box Office to wind up the festival with his observation that British television drama needs to be riskier - and trust the writer’s vision.
The Royal Television Society’s Cambridge Convention – The End Game – was a high octane event, etched into broadcasting’s collective memory.
With ITV’s fate still in the bal- ance the most jaw drop- ping session was when the heads of two of the world’s richest media groups were ques- tioned about taking it over. Granada’s Charles Allen and Carlton’s Michael Green were sit- ting in the front row, staring at them, just 15 feet away!
Mel Karmazin, silver haired chief operating officer of Viacom – the company behind CBS and MTV – gave the most polished performance. Which is why he’s tipped as the most acceptable US bidder.
He expressed his belief in “local” programming, described his policy of letting the content people get on with that side of things, while, true to his advertis- ing background, he worried about the figures. The buzz was that he’d be pleased to take over ITV’s sales houses. Or collaborate.
By his side was rough dia- mond, Haim Saban, never before exposed to such an audience.
Blessed with a fortune from Power Rangers, he heads the Saban Capital Group, with £25.3 billion under management. Saban has just bought the sec- ond largest German commercial broadcaster, ProSieben SatEins, at a knock down price.
Saban barked that he would not invest “a dollar” if the ITV sales houses were divested, a policy he mocked as “insane.”
Even more telling was his blast at the “unbalanced reporting” of the Middle East he’d watched while in Europe, including Sky News. Delegates walked away from this session scarcely believ- ing what they had heard.
It led to Greg Dyke attacking Number Ten for forcing through the sale of British media assets to
US owners, which left the question dangling; how tough are the content/public interest tests in the Communications Act?
Ed Richards, Ofcom senior partner and the ex-Number Ten adviser rumoured to have backed the policy, was drawn into a charged exchange with Dyke, saying he was “absolutely wrong.”
Tony Ball observed it was all theoretical: Carlton and Granada were too overpriced for the Americans to bid.
Dyke, who chaired the con- vention, seemed in teflon-coat- ed, wise-cracking form, as if in denial about the Hutton inquiry. He shrugged off a debate on the motion, the BBC is “out of con- trol”, backed by 59 per cent of the 400 delegates.
The connecting theme of the session, The End Game, looked at five scenarios for how television will change by 2010, extracting from Sky’s Richard Freudenstein that it was likely to launch Channel 6, in 2006. Michael Green said: “If they seriously go into con- tent, that is going to change the balance of broadcasting”.
Sir Jeremy Isaacs, Michael Grade, Michael Jackson and Mark Thompson, the then and now Controllers of C4, were united on stage to debate the channel’s future and seemed fairly optimistic it could dodge privatisation.
Michael Grade’s sound bite: “When they moved News at Ten was the day public service broadcasting died on ITV” wrung the response from Allen: “It was a bad commercial decision.”
As Michael Jackson, currently with Vivendi Universal, observed: “This event itself would be com- pletely impossible in the US.”
Photo: Tony Ball, outgoing Chief Executive of BSkyB
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