Obituaries of the former ITV executive, author and producer Stuart Prebble who has died aged 74 rightly pay tribute to his creativity and enterprise. One episode which has not been mentioned, in fact Stuart didn’t include it in his own autobiography, was how his skills as a political lobbyist helped to make crucial changes in the 1980 Broadcasting Act which created a new regime for commercial television in the UK. In 1989 Stuart helped to form the Campaign For Quality Television with colleagues from Granada Television and a former colleague Simon Albury as its Director. Sadly Simon died last September so we have lost two highly respected champions of the TV industry in less than 12 months.
Simon and Stuart set out to thwart what they described as ‘Thatcher’s wrecking ball’, the Prime Minister’s plan to award regional ITV franchises to the highest bidder with no quality checks. Their aim was to persuade David Mellor, the Minister in charge of steering the legislation through Parliament, that cash alone could not win a licence. Fortunately Mellor regarded them not as the salaried employees of ITV, which they were, but as a producers’ lobby, even if was partly funded by ITV.
In December 1989 Mellor met Albury and Prebble and three other programme-makers plus comedians Rowan Atkinson and Terry Jones of Monty Python. They floated the idea of a ‘quality threshold’ over which a company had to pass in order for its bid to qualify. There were several more meetings.
The Chairman of the regulator, Sir George Russell, had similar ideas and Mellor was influenced by Russell’s judgment. What was not known at the time but was revealed in Prime Ministerial papers released much later was that two of Thatcher’s most trusted advisers, her deputy Lord Whitelaw, and her Press Officer Bernard Ingham also weighed in on the producers side of the argument. (See my February 2017 blog ‘When Willie warned Maggie he was ‘horrified and deeply antagonistic’ about her plan for British TV’).
On the 9th June 1989 Lord Whitelaw wrote on House of Lords notepaper; ‘Dear Margaret,I apologise for bothering you when you have so many major problems confronting you. But I feel I would be letting you down if I did not tell you at once of my deep anxiety about future Broadcasting policy. If the leaks about the Cabinet Committee are correct -they are certainly widespread- I must stress that I would be horrified and deeply antagonistic if franchises were automatically to go to the highest bidder without clear safeguards . I am convinced that any such course inevitably leads to a major loss of quality in TV programmes. I cannot believe it would be right to sacrifice quality in the hope of greater financial gain. It would certainly be very unpopular in many quarters. Sorry to bother you.Yours ever,Willie’.
Press Secretary Bernard Ingham was even more direct to Thatcher ; ’Politically you are most vulnerable in the area of quality. You, of all people, must not go down in history as the person who ruined British television’.
The outcome was that the Broadcasting Act incorporated an ‘exceptional circumstances’ clause which enabled the regulator to disqualify a bidder whose programme plans did not meet a quality threshold. One of the beneficiaries was Granada TV itself which was outbid by a challenger but which kept its licence because the newcomer was deemed to have failed the quality test while Granada passed. Prebble and Albury had done their bosses a very big favour.
ProfPurvis 