Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Businessman who led the management buyout of Compass and later ran Granada, acquiring London Weekend Television and taking over the Forte Group.
On the island
Eight records
Casta Diva (from Norma)Favourite
I just love it. It just moves me. It it haunts me almost. It's as simple as that.
Magnificat and Canticle to Our Lady
And it just reminds me of my time at Seminary in Castlehead in in Grangeover Sands.
I'd Be Surprisingly Good For You
This record is closely related to my oldest daughter. She and I used to used to sing this together when she was quite small, and she'd be terribly embarrassed to hear this, but it was a wonderful time for me.
National Philharmonic Orchestra
I associate very much with Heather and myself getting married. It was uh the music that was played uh during the wedding ceremony.
I think is the first song that I shared with my my son Richard, and we also used to sing this together.
Mady Mesplé and Danielle Millet
It's just one of those uh pieces which, although it's been used commercially, still remains for me uh just a very, very beautiful song.
I heard this piece of music in a film which was about the concentration camps, and the it was about the orchestra being kept alive because they were talented musicians, and there was just something enormously haunting about the piece.
There'll Be Better Days Even For Us
This music we played when Heather was having April. And uh we played it really throughout throughout the pregnancy. And I have I have a sense in which um music really does get through, perhaps even before the child is born, and it's certainly it's meant a lot to us since.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:00What does Mrs. Robinson think of her ninthborn these days, Jerry? Has your success surprised the family, or did they always know you had it in you?
I think for my mum the whole thing is a mystery, and that's showed itself in a number of ways. I I think the way that it showed itself most clearly was on one occasion her saying to me, Do you have your own office? And she has no sense at all, I think, of what it means. She she's pleased about it, but no more pleased than she is about the achievements of some of the others.
Presenter asks
3:18You've often almost boasted, I feel, of the fact that you're actually quite fundamentally lazy. You're not a workaholic, which sets you apart from so many captains of industry. You go home. Is that a considered approach?
I'm very, very easy about the time that I spend at work and it's certainly by most standards very short time. It'd be very unusual for me to be in the office beyond five thirty. Very unusual. Certainly be unusual for me to be in the office before nine, nine thirty in the morning. Not at all unusual for me not to be there on the Odd Friday here and there. Not not at all unusual. And I think that comes from a feeling that we all kid ourselves that we're the ones who lead the whole thing forward. Most things actually happen at a a level within an organisation like Granada that you don't … Get near Touching. … It's a bit of both, I think.
The keepsakes
The book
The Collins History of the World
J. M. Roberts
simply because for me it's it's the history book that put all the bits that I knew into a context. It's it's a wonderful, wonderfully complete book about the history of the world.
The luxury
Presenter asks
5:40You walked into Granada television, knowing that they would be suspicious of you, resentful, because you were going in to tell them how to run their business. How nervous were you at that point?
It's extraordinary, but I I never ever thought of Granada in any sense as joining the media. For me it was a company that had got itself into considerable difficulties. I thought this was something that could be turned around very easily. So it was almost it was almost mechanistic.
Presenter asks
8:20Why was it necessary to sack David Plowright?
Well, what happened with David now and I got on very well with David. I liked him very much. He's a charming man, clearly someone who'd achieved a great deal. David was sixty-one years old. He was already past the retirement age within Granada. He was not going to like somebody new coming in in the way that I did. Why why would he? I I wouldn't like it under the circumstances. So after trying over a couple of month period to actually get David to change one or two of the things that we did and getting nowhere. … I simply decided it was a waste of time, a waste of his time and a waste of mine, and that we should find a gentle exit. And actually we planned a gentle exit and got very close to pulling it off, and went slightly wrong at the last minute.
Presenter asks
13:28You went to the seminary when you were eleven. How did your parents afford it?
Well, it wasn't it wasn't fee paying in any serious way. You you chipped in what what you could. It was essentially financed by the church, and and therefore the the fees involved were very, very small.
Presenter asks
25:26Your critics say that selling off assets was burning the house to roast the pig, that it smacks of asset stripping. They're right, aren't they?
You have to look at the difference between the value of assets and the profits that those assets give you. We have retained or are retaining about eighty percent of the profit making capacity of the business. … If you are going to improve the underlying performance, you are going to get out of those parts of the business that are very high asset value and not giving return.
“Somebody once said to me and I think it's very valid that the only serious difference between television and any other business is you get a higher quality whinging in television than you do in any other business. And there's some truth in that.”
“I think you achieve a great deal by stupidity. I if you don't actually know what you're going to hit, you're deeply in it before you know the difficulties.”
“I think people are sometimes surprised when I do dig in on something in a pretty hard-nosed way. They misread in some ways the geniality. What I have is a clarity about what's wanted.”
“I'm absolutely clear that, you know, five years from now, maybe seven years from now, and certainly ten years from now. I'll be absolutely disinterested in what's happening in the business world.”