Stay classy, TV newsland

I remember, distinctly, the scene, 32 years ago, in the Sky TV press office in Osterley. It was late afternoon and Sky’s five channels were due to go on air at 6pm. We kept reminding ourselves that no-one had ever launched as many TV channels at the same time (this was February 1989 - until Channel 4’s arrival in 1982 the UK only had had only three terrestrial offerings). Sky News would be the first “live” channel on Sky with in-vision presenters. Everyone was nervous. Sky’s HQ - three converted industrial units on what was still a muddy site, underneath the Heathrow flight path - was still being constructed around us, which meant that the inaugural news bulletin, presented by Penny Smith and Alastair Yates, had to be fed through an outside broadcast link in the car park connected to a facility in central London. Anything could have gone wrong. Thankfully, it didn’t.

The parallels were there this last Sunday when upstart GB News launched at 8pm with a monologue from Andrew Neil (who was Sky’s executive chairman in 1989), promising “to do news differently”. As the newcomer’s chairman, Neil - who still has the huge-shouldered, hunched gate he had when I encountered him in the Osterley boardroom - promised: “We are committed to covering the people’s agenda, not the media’s agenda.” This, as has been well documented, is GB News’s PR schtick: to draw in the anti-woke brigade and satiate their belief that the BBC and, indeed, Sky News, are now portals for left-wing liberal thinking, and give them a voice (the fact that we’ve had a right-of-centre Conservative government for over ten years, which has delivered Brexit, doesn’t seem to have sunk in amongst those breathlessly endorsing GB News in comments beneath the Mail’s various puff pieces on the channel).

Like Sky, though, the build-up to GB News launching was coloured by a media narrative similar to that we endured in the latter half of 1988 as we worked towards launch day. Being a then-Rupert Murdoch-owned channel, the tone had been somewhere between cynical and hostile, such was the proprietorial tribalism amongst the UK’s various media corporations. As a cousin of News International - home, then, to The Sun, News Of The World, Today, The Times and Sunday Times - Sky News was envisaged as “The Sun on TV”, somewhere between the tabloid’s cor-blimey popularism and a Thatcherist political bent. We were even known as “Tits at Teatime” in rival newsrooms (when Channel 4’s Drop The Dead Donkey appeared, there were eerie similarities - even the desk phones and vending machine in the fictional GlobeLink newsroom were identical, which suggested some well-placed research).

So, despite the political colour that was part of the chatter before GB News’a launch on Sunday, we should, I suppose, give it a chance. It’s opening night technical hitches (Neil’s monologue looking like it had been lit by candle, Scottish academic Neil Oliver’s microphone not working, and so on), may have given it the air of satirical pisstakes, but these were teething problems that could have happened to anyone. As Hugo Rifkind writes in The Times today, the media should give their new competitor some slack, given the rate of attrition that the journalism profession has experienced in the online age: “Any journalists resenting the expansion of their own industry probably ought to be in a different one,” he commented. 

There is a notion, in the old days of printed newspapers, that when you launch a new product - be it a brand new paper or a redesigned one - you do so with a scoop. To some extent, it’s a marketing hook to put you on the map. After a while, everyone - broadsheet or tabloid - soon levels out, covering more or less the same stories in their own particular style. It is, actually, quite a skill to write for a tabloid: trying to cram into 250 words for The Sun what you’d have more than a thousand to make use of in a broadsheet. I can speak from experience, it’s more challenging than you’d think. I’ve also worked with journalists of all creeds, and regardless of their publications’ political orientation, all work to the same objectives. It would, though be horrendously naive to think that all journalism is objective and without nuance. Which is why GB News is, to me at least, a curious experiment. Its debut-edition scoop is to declare a culture war and somewhat cynically tap into the same opposition to political correctness that has Piers Morgan railing about Harry and Meghan’s apparent snowflakery, and ends with footballers being booed for taking the knee at Wembley. There was just a little dog whistle about Neil’s opening: “We are proud to be British. The clue is in the name,” he intoned (and from someone who spends much of his time living on the Côte d'Azur…).

GB News knows full well what it’s doing (and the number of endorsements from people with “defund the BBC” in their social media profiles speaks volumes). Certainly, opening night excitement - even with the Euros on - buoyed the channel’s numbers, with 336,000 viewers tuning in to watch Neil’s opening statement, according to TV industry magazine Broadcast. Sky, by comparison, had just 46,000 viewers, but 8pm on a Sunday night was never going to be a big battleground for eyeballs amongst channels not predisposed for mass viewing. Time will tell whether GB News will genuinely prove the challenger it pretends to be. There’s no doubt that it has attracted a strong calibre of presenters to its line-up, poaching the likes of Simon McCoy from the BBC News channel and former ITN anchor Alastair Stewart to a roster of experienced journalists, including several from Sky News itself. What this says about them, politically, is a matter for debate, and the channel’s editorial content so far hasn’t shown any great surprises, with Nigel Farage and Priti Patel amongst its early interviewees.

It certainly is trying to do things differently. Television news in America, for example, is a largely homogeneous experience: drop into any TV ‘market’ (i.e. a city or large town), and you will see an identical format: a male and female anchoring partnership, a chipper sports presenter and a mildly amusing weather presenter. Yes, Anchorman. Unlike America, however, television news here does vary, thankfully, and GB News takes its place in a landscape where, say, the BBC’s 10 O’Clock News and ITV’s News At Ten do have distinct stylistic differences. Whether they have any editorial differences is a matter of personal opinion. One thing, though, is that I’ve never had any quarrel with the political orientation of any of the mainstream channels’s news output. That, I know, might inflame those who cast the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, ITV’s Robert Peston or Sky’s Beth Rigby as lefty activists - all three regularly get pelted from both sides, leading to the maxim that they must be doing something right if that is the case.

GB News has opted for something else, editorially, and subtly alternative with its look and feel. It’s breakfast show looks like ITV’s GMB but in a studio painted on a limited budget; it’s mid-morning show could be coming from the comfy sofas in the office canteen. And, two full days in, it was still suffering from sound problems - this morning, I had to have the TV volume turned up to 70 just hear anything Colin Brazier, as he sat on the couch wearing an open-necked blue shirt as if we’d caught him during his coffee break, rather than a news bulletin. I’d ask whether this consciously casual approach is what the occasional viewer actually wants, given that rolling news channels are mostly watched by people dipping in to see what’s going on in the world. 

GB News believes that it is resetting the way news is presented, arguing - not too discreetly - that existing platforms talk down to viewers. I’m not so sure that’s the case, but again, GB has found its schtick. If you believe that the BBC, ITV and Sky talk down to you, then you’ll find news presented by someone hanging out in the canteen works for you, although no one ever complained about John Craven’s jumpers on Newsround lacking gravitas (though in fairness, his demographic was somewhat different to Kenneth Kendall’s on the Nine O’Clock News).

Anchorman: staying classy in San Diego

Rolling news channels have always found their strength during times of crisis. Only saddos like me have them on constantly in the background while they work during normal times. For the most part, as the description provides, they are repetitive, especially on mundane news days. But it’s when the news hots up, and situations become dynamic, that a news operation is fully tested. Before Sky had even launched, it covered the Lockerbie disaster as part of its trial operation, making the industry sit up and notice as word got around the media village that the channel wasn’t, after all, going to be a televisual version of its print cousin. Live reporting from ‘hot’ news stories - be they wars, disasters or political eruptions - are the mark of a news broadcaster, and its reporting (and production) talent. It’s why the publicity biographies of many news anchors are such colourful affairs, proudly claiming to have been on air during moments of global notoriety. I once had to deal with the fallout of two Sky presenters having a punch-up in the Osterley corridor following an ego spat that began with both claiming to be on air at the moment Nelson Mandela walked free from Robben Island Prison. I swear to this day that someone involved in Anchorman must have heard about it, given that it escalated into a war of attrition that ended with the pair “rolling” down a corridor, not unlike Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in Women In Love (though, thankfully, fully clothed). 

GB News will want to avoid any such chicanery, as it seriously dents a channel’s reputation and detracts from the core mission of delivering news as authoritatively as possible. That is when it will truly be worth considering. For now, we can chatter about the gimmicks, the Wokewatch on-air clickbait, and controversialists like Dan Wootton or Michele Dewberry mixing it up for kicks (Sky’s early days had a confrontational debate show featuring Norman Tebbit and Labour MP Austin Mitchell), However, it is when sharp, analytic journalism is required that any news organisation comes into its own. Anyone can read wire copy of what has happened, but it’s a whole different matter being able to objectively explain why it has happened.

In its charter (no doubt, an Ofcom-mandated requirement), there is no mention of GB News’s headline-grabbing intentions. Actually, it’s a pretty standard declaration, pledging to stand for journalistic independence, a fact-based approach but also respect for opinions and freedom of expression. It’s focus is, notably, the UK (the clue is in the name, as Neil stated) and what is “good and bad – it’s about covering what is going on, not just what is going wrong.” That might be a pointed statement about pepping up our lives with feel goodery, but sadly, news doesn’t arbitrate that way. It’ll be interesting how long GB News can remain so differentiated.

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...