I see David Plowright has died. The man who made Granada great and was then sacked for his principles to be replaced by the money grubbing Gerry Robinson and Charles Allen.
A little bit of TV history for those too young to remember:
David Plowright
December 11, 1930 - August 24, 2006
Chairman of Granada Television who promoted quality but was sacked despite saving his company’s ITV franchise
DAVID PLOWRIGHT was one of the last of the great television executives who made their way up the corporate ladder from humble beginnings in programme production. It contributed to his ignominious sacking from the chairmanship of Granada TV in 1992 by Gerry Robinson, the new chairman of the parent company, Granada Group.
Plowright had accepted the need to slim down and restructure his company but was resistant to the pace demanded by Robinson. He had come from a wholly different culture and he remembered the days when Granada was a production company with a benevolent relationship with its programme staff. He was never entirely happy with the landscape produced by the 1990 Broadcasting Act in which Granada would increasingly act as a “publishing house of the air”. Plowright himself believed this legislation to be dangerously flawed.
David Ernest Plowright was a Yorkshireman; hard working, tough, blunt occasionally to the point of tactlessness, who was to give his loyalty to the old Lancastrian enemy — Granadaland. His father, William, was the editor of the Scunthorpe Star and his mother, Daisy, was a lady of unfulfilled artistic ambitions who was to find her outlet in two of her three children, David and his sister, Joan Plowright, the actress who became Lady Olivier.
Plowright was educated at Scunthorpe Grammar School and after National Service, became in 1950 a reporter on his father’s paper. He married Brenda Key in 1953 and they had a son and two daughters.
In 1954 he moved to the Yorkshire Post where he was, briefly, equestrian correspondent as well as a reporter and feature writer. He retained a love of newsprint but in 1957 he joined Granada in Manchester where he became local news editor.
By 1960 he was a current affairs producer and in 1966 he became the head of World in Action, the flagship current affairs programme of the ITV network. In 1969 one of his programmes, The Demonstration, won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The same year Plowright became controller of programmes, a post he held until 1979.
Plowright’s progress up the corporate ladder continued steadily. In 1975 he was made joint managing director, taking over as sole managing director in 1981. This was also the year that saw his conversion of the Coronation Street and Sherlock Holmes film sets into Northern tourist attractions. It was all part of the showbusiness tradition that Granada and Plowright himself had inherited from the station’s legendary founder, Lord Sidney Bernstein. From 1981-92 he was a director of Granada Group.
Plowright’s nickname, “the Plow”, testifies to his qualities of determination and hard work. He became an excellent foil for the patrician, Sir Denis Forman, then the chairman of the company. Where Sir Denis was diplomatic, Plowright was blunt. Sir Denis’s chief interest was in the arts and, unlike Plowright, he had never been a journalist. But although Granada’s reputation for excellent, investigative TV journalism was due in no small part to Plowright, he also played an important part in GTV’s other area of excellence, drama.
He was able to persuade Lord Olivier, married to his sister, Joan, to produce a series of classic plays under the banner of Laurence Olivier Presents . . . Other notable productions included King Lear in 1982 in which Olivier played the title role.
It was Plowright’s determination and weight behind it that was responsible for the continuing production of Brideshead Revisited particularly when filming was interrupted by the 1979 ITV strike. Other television executives would have seen an opportunity to cut their losses. Brideshead was eventually transmitted in 1981 and, along with The Jewel in the Crown, came to be seen as the very summit of the quality a revenue-rich ITV could achieve before the Broadcasting Act.
One thing that Plowright could not abide was interference with or censorship of his programmes. He had several clashes with ITV’s regulatory body, the Independent Broadcasting Authority (later the ITC) while defending his beloved World in Action. Colleagues recall him shaking with rage after such telephone conversations with the authority.
Plowright became chairman of Granada Television in 1987 on the retirement of Sir Denis Forman. He proved himself to be equipped for the task during an extremely difficult period. It was not just the technology of television that was changing but also the intellectual climate in which it operated. The cosy and, for ITV, commercially rewarding duopoly in terrestrial television was under attack from a combination of satellite technology and an ideologically inspired government. Granada was part of the consortium that successfully bid for the UK Direct Broadcasting by Satellite licence but when this proved a commercial disaster and the company, British Satellite Broadcasting, was taken over by Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Television, Plowright resigned from the board in protest. Nor did he have any better luck with Granada’s involvement with Superchannel, which attempted to sell British programmes to Europe via satellite and cable systems.
Plowright’s greatest success, however, was retaining Granada’s broadcasting licence in the 1991 ITV franchise round. His bid was, at £9 million, extraordinarily low, particularly as it was opposed by a rival bid of £35 million from Phil Redmond’s Mersey TV. But Plowright had prepared his ground well. First, he had been behind the Campaign for Quality Television, a pressure group run by Simon Albury, a Granada producer on leave of absence, which had helped to persuade the ITC’s new chairman, George (now Sir George) Russell, to introduce a “quality hurdle” to be cleared in the tendering process for the new licences. Secondly, he made it clear that if Granada for the first time in its history failed to renew its contract then he would consider selling ITV’s most popular programme, Coronation Street, to satellite TV. The combination of a commercial threat with a pious appeal to quality was a classic Granada move and the successful £9 million bid was a personal triumph. His reward was to be sacked early in the new year.
Plowright’s departure from Granada sent shock waves through the industry. Letters of protest were sent to the newspapers from production staff, writers and actors. The names were a roll call of Britain’s creative talent and included Harold Pinter, Alec Guinness, Alan Bennett and Richard Eyre. John Cleese sent an insulting fax to Gerry Robinson, the chairman of GTV’s parent group, the most printable part of which called him an “upstart caterer”. But the real import of Plowright’s dismissal was obvious to all. The accountants, not the programme makers, were in charge. To Robinson, Granada Television was a profit centre, to Plowright it was an upholder of the traditions of public service broadcasting.
David Plowright was made the deputy chairman of Channel Four in 1992 (a post he held until 1997) which many people saw as a gesture of industry solidarity. He became a visiting professor of Media Studies at Salford University, from which vantage point he allowed himself some criticisms of the new values of the television industry; and he became chairman of a television news partnership, the European News Service. True to his northern loyalties, he was happy to accept American money for this, and strove mightily to keep it away from a takeover by London-based media companies.
He was appointed CBE in 1996.
David Plowright, television executive, was born on December 11, 1930. He died on August 24, 2006, aged 75.
