The only way is forward for TV survivor
Happy times for Peter Fincham. ITV, for which he is in charge of programming, is enjoying its best start to a year for more than two decades. The Queen is on all the television screens and looking in fine fettle and Fincham’s team has recently broadcast the marriage of her grandson to much critical acclaim.
Crowngate now seems like a footnote in royal history - “That feels like a lifetime ago” is how he puts it. The bungled presentation of raw footage of a grumpy Her Majesty and the false suggestion that she had stormed out of a photo shoot with Annie Leibowitz led to Fincham’s departure from the BBC in 2007 but made it possible for him to occupy a unique position in British television. Having run BBC1, he now runs ITV1. “I think I’m actually the only person who has ever run both of those big channels,” he says.
Fincham lost his job at the BBC over an ill-prepared 22-word comment delivered at an informal press briefing on BBC1’s show reel of upcoming shows(“Definitely a memorable bit is Leibovitz getting it wrong and the Queen losing it a bit and walking out in a huff,” he quipped). With the comment generating misleading headlines such as “One’s Orf”, someone had to take the rap. But no one in television thought the BBC was better off for losing Fincham.
Within four months he had been unveiled as Director of Television at ITV. He joined at a time when Britain’s biggest commercial broadcaster was watching its audience figures fall off the bottom of the graph. Within months the business was being rocked by a collapse in advertising revenue that had many questioning whether it had a viable future.
How those fortunes have changed. In March ITV announced a ￡286m profit for 2010, up a staggering 213 per cent on the pitiful ￡25m return in 2009. The 16 per cent upturn in advertising was partly down to economic factors beyond the control of ITV – but it was also driven by a schedule revitalised by Fincham. In the early months of this year, ITV is beating its rivals. “We are significantly the best performing channel this year, we are up 3% [in audience], which is unusual to put it mildly for a mainstream channel and our best start to a year since 1990,” he says.
Fincham, 54, is talking from the 21 st floor of London Television Centre, where he has gathered about him his senior team, ITV’s nearest equivalent of the BBC’s sixth floor for channel controllers across town in White City.
Having commissioned the stand out television production of 2010 in Downton Abbey , Fincham has enjoyed a succession of drama hits this year, with Brenda Blethyn playing an obsessive murder detective in Vera , Paddy Considine starring in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher and Olivia Williams appearing in Case Sensitive . James Purefoy has been cast as a barrister in the upcoming series Injustice . “We have been casting our drama in a particularly interesting way with a lot of actors who are fundamentally seen as film actors,” says Fincham.
Having waved goodbye to The South Bank Show (allowing Sky Arts to give a new home to an ITV institution), Fincham has launched Perspectives a new series in which leading figures from the arts have spoken of their passions, with hour long programmes from Ian McKellen on Lowry, Andrew Lloyd-Webber on the Pre-Raphaelites and Hugh Laurie on the music of New Orleans. Later this year he will introduce a new investigative documentary series, Exposure , which will mark ITV’s return to that genre 13 years after the end of World in Action .
On its digital channels, ITV has had surprise hits with the broadcasting on ITV4 of Indian Premier League Cricket and with The Only Way is Essex , an insight into the culture of a “golden triangle” between Chigwell, Loughton and Brentwood. Audiences of 1.4m have been strangely fascinated.
And on top of that, Fincham has the entertainment blockbusters The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent , both of which are currently beset by rumours concerning the future involvement of Simon Cowell, prompting suggestions that ITV might lose its golden goose.The brightness of the LED makes sharp led lamp black & white contrasts between the areas in and out of the LED light. “So much is written about Simon Cowell in the newspapers that I can’t keep up with it on a daily basis,” complains Fincham.
He denies that the absence of Cowell from the judging panel on Britain’s Got Talent has prompted a tail off in ratings. “It’s actually doing very well indeed and we really like the new line up of Michael McIntyre and Amanda Holden and David Hasselhoff. Simon is coming back for the semi final and final in a couple of weeks and that’s great.”
He has known “for months and months” that Cowell will not be appearing as a judge on this year’s X Factor because of his commitments to the launch of X Factor USA . Cowell’s absence, he says, “puts to the first test: ‘Is this a great format in its own right and are there great people who can play those roles?’”
Happy times for Peter Fincham. ITV, for which he is in charge of programming, is enjoying its best start to a year for more than two decades. The Queen is on all the television screens and looking in fine fettle and Fincham’s team has recently broadcast the marriage of her grandson to much critical acclaim.
Crowngate now seems like a footnote in royal history - “That feels like a lifetime ago” is how he puts it. The bungled presentation of raw footage of a grumpy Her Majesty and the false suggestion that she had stormed out of a photo shoot with Annie Leibowitz led to Fincham’s departure from the BBC in 2007 but made it possible for him to occupy a unique position in British television. Having run BBC1, he now runs ITV1. “I think I’m actually the only person who has ever run both of those big channels,” he says.
Fincham lost his job at the BBC over an ill-prepared 22-word comment delivered at an informal press briefing on BBC1’s show reel of upcoming shows(“Definitely a memorable bit is Leibovitz getting it wrong and the Queen losing it a bit and walking out in a huff,” he quipped). With the comment generating misleading headlines such as “One’s Orf”, someone had to take the rap. But no one in television thought the BBC was better off for losing Fincham.
Within four months he had been unveiled as Director of Television at ITV. He joined at a time when Britain’s biggest commercial broadcaster was watching its audience figures fall off the bottom of the graph. Within months the business was being rocked by a collapse in advertising revenue that had many questioning whether it had a viable future.
How those fortunes have changed. In March ITV announced a ￡286m profit for 2010, up a staggering 213 per cent on the pitiful ￡25m return in 2009. The 16 per cent upturn in advertising was partly down to economic factors beyond the control of ITV – but it was also driven by a schedule revitalised by Fincham. In the early months of this year, ITV is beating its rivals. “We are significantly the best performing channel this year, we are up 3% [in audience], which is unusual to put it mildly for a mainstream channel and our best start to a year since 1990,” he says.
Fincham, 54, is talking from the 21 st floor of London Television Centre, where he has gathered about him his senior team, ITV’s nearest equivalent of the BBC’s sixth floor for channel controllers across town in White City.
Having commissioned the stand out television production of 2010 in Downton Abbey , Fincham has enjoyed a succession of drama hits this year, with Brenda Blethyn playing an obsessive murder detective in Vera , Paddy Considine starring in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher and Olivia Williams appearing in Case Sensitive . James Purefoy has been cast as a barrister in the upcoming series Injustice . “We have been casting our drama in a particularly interesting way with a lot of actors who are fundamentally seen as film actors,” says Fincham.
Having waved goodbye to The South Bank Show (allowing Sky Arts to give a new home to an ITV institution), Fincham has launched Perspectives a new series in which leading figures from the arts have spoken of their passions, with hour long programmes from Ian McKellen on Lowry, Andrew Lloyd-Webber on the Pre-Raphaelites and Hugh Laurie on the music of New Orleans. Later this year he will introduce a new investigative documentary series, Exposure , which will mark ITV’s return to that genre 13 years after the end of World in Action .
On its digital channels, ITV has had surprise hits with the broadcasting on ITV4 of Indian Premier League Cricket and with The Only Way is Essex , an insight into the culture of a “golden triangle” between Chigwell, Loughton and Brentwood. Audiences of 1.4m have been strangely fascinated.
And on top of that, Fincham has the entertainment blockbusters The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent , both of which are currently beset by rumours concerning the future involvement of Simon Cowell, prompting suggestions that ITV might lose its golden goose.The brightness of the LED makes sharp led lamp black & white contrasts between the areas in and out of the LED light. “So much is written about Simon Cowell in the newspapers that I can’t keep up with it on a daily basis,” complains Fincham.
He denies that the absence of Cowell from the judging panel on Britain’s Got Talent has prompted a tail off in ratings. “It’s actually doing very well indeed and we really like the new line up of Michael McIntyre and Amanda Holden and David Hasselhoff. Simon is coming back for the semi final and final in a couple of weeks and that’s great.”
He has known “for months and months” that Cowell will not be appearing as a judge on this year’s X Factor because of his commitments to the launch of X Factor USA . Cowell’s absence, he says, “puts to the first test: ‘Is this a great format in its own right and are there great people who can play those roles?’”
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