When Sky was the limit

It's not often one can claim to be a part of history, and when you do it can sound ever-so slightly high-and-mighty. But 30 years ago today I walked through the central London doors of a relatively obscure satellite TV company that would, within five months, transform European broadcasting forever and later lead an even more dramatic transformation of football into the multi-billion pound business it is today.

The company I joined on 15 August, 1988, was Sky Channel, a pan-European station reliant on mostly cheap-and-cheerful reruns of syndicated American shows like I Love Lucy and, what was then, WWF wrestling (with huge, loyal and at times passionate audiences in Scandinavia, especially when the signal dropped during WrestleMania...), continental Europe - particularly cable-dominated countries like the Netherlands and Germany - and, randomly, Swindon and Milton Keynes. Two months previously, Rupert Murdoch, whose News International was Sky's largest shareholder, had brazenly announced the plan to launch four channels simultaneously under the Sky Television banner via the ASTRA satellite system, thus bypassing the UK government which had declined him a licence to operate on a new 'official' direct-to-home satellite frequency. The idea of launching four channels on the same day might, now, with hundreds on offer, seem a little arcane, but in 1988 it was a novelty in the UK, which had only had a fourth channel, Channel 4, added to BBC1, BBC2 and ITV in November 1982.

My appointment, in August 1988, to the Sky Channel press office as a junior TV listings writer was a blessing: I was still only 20, but had been mostly unemployed for the best part of the previous 12 months following the ending of my first proper job after leaving school when the newly launched magazine, LM, went bust in May 1987. Although I’d supplemented my meagre dole money by working occasionally as a freelance music journalist for Smash Hits, Record Mirror, Sounds, the NME and even the Mail on Sunday, as well spending the summer of 1987 helping out the Sport Aid charity, I was desperate for the consistency of a salaried job...and I just hadn’t broken into the somewhat closed shop that was the London music press. When the Sky opportunity came along - via an insider who knew my former deputy editor at LM - I felt like a great burden had been lifted. Unemployment, after such a brief period of living the high life as a teenage journalist, was no fun thing. I'd gone from an 18-year-old interviewing pop stars and hanging out in TV studios to a bi-weekly bus ride into Kingston-upon-Thames to sign on, followed by a contemplative cup of coffee in Next (crashing my £14 a week dole money already in the process), before heading home for Neighbours. Now I think of it, it was a soul-destroying period, and one I've vowed never to repeat again.

The job I took at Sky didn’t, at first, suggest the great portent of the whole venture. TV listings - usually episodic details of daily screenings of I Dream Of Jeannie or Gidget plus some hoary old Western at 8pm - were essential pieces of publicity information laboriously printed on an ageing dot-matrix printer and physically mailed out to TV listings magazines throughout Europe. Once a month an entire monthly package was produced, which would take most of the weekend to generate on that wheezy old printer.

Amongst all this industriousness was the countdown to 5 February, 1989, the deadline Murdoch had ambitiously set to launch Sky Television, which would augment Sky Channel (later renamed Sky One) with Sky News, Sky Movies and Eurosport. From our office in Foley Street, a couple of streets away from that Reithian bastion, the BBC's Broadcasting House, the foundations of what is now the vast £24 billion Sky empire (currently being fought over by Comcast and Murdoch's Fox for full ownership) were being built. Within this environment I gained my first experience of working within a labyrinthine corporate organisation, as executives from across the Murdoch companies were shipped in, from Australian TV channels or the 'fortress' at Wapping, where the News International newspapers were based (occasionally I’d be sent down there on errands, enduring the intimidating atmosphere that only a few years before had generated bloodthirsty riots as Murdoch had taken on and, it would appear, succeeded in challenging the hardcore print unions on the introduction of new production technologies).

The familial ties between Sky and the News International stable was a constant source of sniping from the non-Murdoch media, whom we in the press office still had to court as we geared towards launch day. Needless to say, the likes of The Guardian and Daily Mail, we’re less than generous. The satirical magazine Private Eye still occasionally runs its 'I-Sky' column, noting "Sky plugs masquerading as news in Murdoch papers", and to be fair, some of the pieces run by The Sun, News Of The World, Today and even The Times were a little close for comfort. At the same time Sky had to endure an acrimonious rivalry with British Satellite Broadcasting, which had been granted the very DTH operating licence Murdoch had missed out on, and were offering a bouquet of channels not dissimilar to Sky's. BSB played up their Britishness and their links to its broadcasting establishment and the London creative elite. We at Sky, on the other hand, were cast as classless Murdoch proles managed by brash, course Australian TV executives. In fairness, that wasn't a bad description, and it suited us. Over at Wapping, the intimidating legend "YOU ARE ENTERING SUN COUNTRY" thundered over the entrance to the tabloid's newsroom. There was a similar "no one likes us - we don’t care" mindset over at The Sun's television stablemate.

The image of a Sky staffed by rough-and-ready types targeting council house Britain wasn’t helped by the equally tasty 'dish war' that broke out: Sky's use of the Luxembourg-based ASTRA satellite system meant that it would be available to [initially] UK subscribers owning a 12-inch dish optimistically described as being the size of a dinner plate to assuage fears about dish 'farms' sprouting on rooftops (fears that later proved well founded). BSB had their own, nine-inch square dish, dubbed the 'squarial', which would be ergonomically more pleasing than the Sky product. The fact that both aerials and their accompanying set-top boxes were being manufactured by my later employer, Philips, at a factory near Le Mans, was cleverly kept out of the press by a line of potted plants separating the two production lines.

Alan Sugar's Amstrad also got in on the business manufacturing systems for Sky, eventually becoming its exclusive supplier. Still, though, Sky and BSB took out full page newspaper ads denouncing each other's dishes, sometimes quite wittily, as well as attacks on each other's programming. BSB had tried to play up the BBC-influenced quality of its documentary channel, for example. Sky responded with a piss-take suggesting that all BSB would be good for would be nature documentaries featuring "humping rhinos".

It was around this time that Rupert Murdoch himself, and his BSB rival Anthony Simmonds-Gooding, were engaged in a fierce bidding war with Hollywood to tie up film rights for blockbusters to be shown on the respective movie channels. On one occasion, Murdoch allegedly pulled up at the gates of a Hollywood studio demanding to see a senior executive who happened to be entertaining Simmonds-Gooding at the time, purely to disrupt the discussion. On another occasion, the head of Sky's corporate affairs team, the former Sunday Times media editor Jonathan Miller, gave an interview with Time Out's Alkarim Jivani in which he vowed not to "get into a pissing competition with a skunk". Fun times.

While the politics of establishing a completely new way of offering television to the British public were being fought, Sky was setting up a new HQ fifteen miles to the west of Foley Street, in Osterley...right under the final approach flight path to Heathrow. Whereas BSB had been installed in palatial offices in Battersea (we were later to discover that their office furniture was from exclusive Italian designer brands and included kid leather sofas), Sky was moving into three ready-made industrial units, one of which housing the Sky News newsroom and studios, the other two production and corporate offices. Meantime, the company was busy signing up on-air talent for the news channel, poaching the likes of Kay Burley and Adam Boulton from ITV's TV-am, and seasoned hands like Bob Friend from the BBC. Sky News was, then, and remains today the editorial jewel in Sky's crown. I'm immensely proud to have been its channel press officer towards the end of my tenure at the company, even if it was lampooned by Drop The Dead Donkey with storylines that bore a suspicious similarity to actual events.

Actually, looking back now, 30 years on, I’m actually incredibly proud of the five years I spent at Sky. The company has (and still does) come in for plenty of criticism, but the magnitude of launching those first four channels in February 1989 shouldn’t be disregarded in this modern digital era of infinite channel choice. Like it or not, Sky revolutionised football, not just in the UK with the Premier League, but in the way the Sky-subsidised Premier League has changed European and even world football. Sky News is still one of the world's greatest news channels, easily rivaling the BBC for breadth and depth, and perhaps - and surprisingly - for balance, too.

In those first few months before the full launch, we used to say to each other "No one's ever launched four TV channels on the same day and at the same time," and at the time, no one had. When, at 6pm on Sunday 5th February, 1989, almost six months after I’d walked in to 31-33 Foley Street, Alastair Yates and Penny Smith introduced the very first Sky News bulletin, those of us at a launch event in a Park Lane hotel felt a tremendous sense of achievement, of battling the odds, a prevailingly anti-Murdoch press and even the British establishment (though it was fun to take a call earlier that afternoon from "Number 10" with, what turned out to be Woodrow Wyatt - not Denis Thatcher, as I'd thought - asking how "one operates this Sky box thingy as Margaret would like to watch the launch"). This was only the start of a bumpy ride: when Sky TV and BSB merged in November 1990 the companies were losing a combined £12 million per week (an executive had once predicted that the two ventures would "haemorrhage red ink").

I would eventually fall victim to some of the nastier politics of the frontier spirit that infected Sky's uncompromising agenda (including the dreaded, late CEO Sam Chisholm, who took a dislike to me). But the five-year journey that began 30 years ago today taught me many of the skills I put into practice still today. The phrase "startup" wasn’t used back then, but that is exactly what Sky was. In the years I spent in its midst I went from churning out inch-thick sheafs of TV listings to learning desk top publishing on the job. I helped launch The Simpsons, met my hero Spike Milligan, stuck my hand up the bottom of a puppet called DJ Kat, hung out with a then-unknown Johnny Depp (who spent the entire time smoking and being moody), met Hulk Hogan several times ("Hey dude! Call me Terry!"), spent a Saturday afternoon driving around Moscow with Jon Bon Jovi and was part of the production team of an expletive-laden live broadcast with Ozzy Osborne on the steps of St. Basil's Cathedral. And, in my last role at the company, managed the PR for an exciting, young 24-hour news channel during tumultuous events like Nelson Mandela's first walk to freedom, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the senseless bloodletting that followed the collapse of Yugoslavia. All of this in five years.

30 years on I’ve achieved much, much more - working abroad for 17 years amongst it - but today's anniversary brings back very poignant memories of a period early in my career where in a business environment not dissimilar to the chaos of war, I gained so much. I didn’t go to university, but I sometimes think that the life and professional skills I picked up after walking through that door on 15 August, 1988 more than equipped me for everything that has followed. And everything I’m about to experience. More of which on these pages soon...