Finger on the button
Is this Britain’s Silvio Berlusconi moment? It’s not something that British television has experience before, Richard Desmond’s takeover of Five. A vigorous British proprietor taking over one of the major television stations – read all about it in tonight’s Express which emphaises the plan to invest in quality content, and reminds of Mr Desmond’s charitable work too.
(Rupert Murdoch, by the way, is different – his relationship with Sky will always be a bit more remote, because he has a global empire to run. And because he smarter about how he runs his operations. His titles don’t bang on about the man’s charitable work after all).
Don’t bet against Richard Desmond, Five’s new owner, becoming editor-in-chief. Dawn Airey the incumbent chief executive will surprise if she lasts long under his regime (although if she has a get out to RTL the outgoing owner that will be outrageous). No doubt she will be hoping to outlast Rosie Boycott (the incumbent at the Daily Express when the new man arrived). But Mr Desmond is the owner now, so why shouldn’t there be shows for his celebrity friends, Katie Price and Diana Spencer.
Watch Richard Desmond’s theatre on Sky News, where he offers to “invest £50 million” in the next five years — a tiny amount in TV terms. Then he shows enthusaism for airing Big Brother on his channel, which is plausible, before saying preposterously that he wants to show Coronation Street and Panorama on Five. And when asked if he cut costs in his Express days (of course he did), he admits to asking a chess correspondent based in South America to leave, as if that was the full story.
Anyway, there are a few Ofcom regulations for Mr Desmond to contend with, but Five isn’t ITV, and the requirements are pretty mild, a bit of news, a bit of original production, the rest is easy. Although, with a Communications Bill to fill, the new Five could go one step further and lobby for an end to the impartiality restrictions when it comes to news.
And there are clever ways, through programme titles, or just the relentless use of the same celebrities, to ensure that Five ends up plugging OK!, and the Daily Star without breaching guidelines designed to separate editorial from advertising.
Meanwhile, late nights can be taken care of with the help of The Fantasy Channel, finally bringing Five viewers the Hot Tub Ranking (gents, go look it up, ‘public service telly’ I promise) they always craved. You can feel the synergies, particularly when the expensive American programming goes, the pricy Natasha Kaplinsky gets lobbed in the bin and when OK friends like Alan Titchmarsh end up doing the news.
On the other side, the Express and Star can act as the Provisional wing of the movement, fighting the BBC (whose licence fee will be whacked), giving it to ITV (who, may after all be hanging onto Peter Andre) – giving it the old unregulated verbal from which Five might indirectly benefit. Which is how cross media ownership is going to work in the new era, where unregulated papers do the dirty work of the television machine, where the hands-off public company model is dead, in favour of the big boss owner who tells us what to think and how we should be entertained. Like a little Italy, eh.
PS: Does this mean the Daily Mail will be nicer to the BBC?
