GEITF 2002: Former Channel 5 Boss Attacks ITV
David Elstein, the former chief executive of Channel 5, has launched a scathing attack on ITV, claiming that the network has been brought to its knees by a decade of “profound mismanagement.”
Speaking at this year’s Guardian Edinburgh International TV festival, Elstein, a former head of programmes at Thames TV and once a contender for the job of director general at the BBC, accused ITV’s senior executives of being grossly incompetent. He said: “ITV has been taken over by business executives that know nothing about finance. Their ability to loose money hand over fist is phenomenal.”
Elstein, who played to the sizeable crowd of senior TV executives, blamed ITV’s falling audience share on its “dysfunctional” management structure and claimed that the network has made a series of bad decisions that could see it fall into American hands. He attacked the decision to appoint Mick Desmond and Clive Jones as joint managing directors, saying: “The situation is like two men fighting over ice cream while the sun’s shining – and David Liddiment is trying to put the air conditioning on.”
Elstein lambasted ITV’s decision to try to compete with Sky as a digital sports broadcaster and suggested that the collapse of ITV digital was somewhat inevitable. He accused ITV’s chief executives of losing sight of the core terrestrial TV business and denied that the decline in audience numbers for ITV programmes was part of a cycle that would right itself. He said: “ITV is an incredibly valuable business. If it were properly run it would be making hundreds of millions of pounds each year, but when it takes its eye off the ball it runs into problems.”
Former ITV chief executive, Stuart Prebble, who was on the panel of ITV executives, agreed that the network had been dogged by the inefficiency of its management structure, which he described as “plainly dysfunctional”. He spoke of the need for streamlining at the network centre and said that the single ownership of ITV would be a significant step forward for the company.
This met with agreement from ITV’s outgoing director of channels, David Liddiment, who interjected from the floor to say: “We need a single vision that we can all get behind, in this market place ITV needs to be single minded.”
Chief executive of Channel 5, Dawn Airey, has been hotly tipped as the person best qualified to bring this ‘single-midedness’ to ITV and speculation suggests that she is set to take-over from Liddiment as director of channels. ITV’s joint managing director, Mick Desmond, refused to comment on whether Airey had been offered the position. However, Elstein said: “Dawn would be a great candidate, but she’s very shroud, but I doubt if she’d be willing to enter this blood bath before its over.”
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Reports on this year’s Guardian Edinburgh International TV Festival will appear on NewsLine throughout the week.