Big Shot of the week
SIR PETER BAZALGETTE, 64 CHAIRMAN, ITV
WHeN Sir Peter Bazalgette was appointed chairman of Arts Council england in 2012, howls of outrage could be heard whistling all the way down London’s South Bank.
To our chin-stroking cultural beards, putting ‘Baz’ in charge of the artistic landscape was akin to making Sylvester Stallone creative director of London’s Globe Theatre.
While the television exec is, to some, a creative genius who laid the foundations of the independent production sector, to many he is a cultural vandal, responsible for much of the sub-par tat which dominated television schedules during the late 1990s/early 2000s.
Ready Steady, Cook, Changing Rooms, Ground Force, and, of course, Big Brother are all his. Remember Channel 5’s The Farm, which saw bisexual Rebecca Loos manually stimulating a pig? Arise, Sir Baz!
Arts commentator Norman Lebrecht called him ‘a cynical operator with no known values’.
JUST imagine the furore if, as some feared, he’d been made director general of the BBC during the postJimmy Savile scandal musical chairs. Instead, he is now chairman of ITV, a £312,000-a-year post he has occupied since Archie Norman’s departure last May.
His great-great-grandfather, Victorian engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette, designed London’s sewage system, and the joke goes that while he rid homes of ordure, his great-great-grandson has been pumping it back in again. Ho, ho. Yes, Bazalgette’s heard them all.
But then, barbs bounce off Baz like hailstones off a roof. A busy, effervescent creature not without charm, he possesses a wry smile which betrays delight in winding up his detractors.
Despite the odd nod toward formality (he’s a member of the snooty, all-male Beefsteak Club) his uniform is standard Soho TV executive garb: loose-fitting suits and modish sneakers with a weakness for garish pink hosiery.
Such self-confidence was honed at Cambridge, where contemporaries remember him as the university celebrity, penning a gossip column for the student newspaper and rising to union president. He’d been desperate to escape the suburban middle-class life embodied by his stockbroker father. Ironically, for the first 12 years of his life, the Bazalgettes didn’t have a TV.
After gaining a third in law, he began mulling a career in journalism. His father’s dismissal of journalists as ‘ghastly types who hung around in pubs’ convinced him to join the BBC trainee scheme.
After moving from news to work as a researcher on That’s Life, he dazzled presenter esther Rantzen with his innovative flair and anarchic sense of mischief.
A lifelong foodie – he lists ‘gluttony’ as one of his hobbies in Who’s Who – his big break came when he set up the BBC show Food And Drink.
After that made household names of chef Michael Barry and wine expert Oz Clarke, Bazalgette was inspired to set up his own production company, Bazal, spawning such stars as Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and Charlie Dimmock.
BAZALGETTE’S programmes made him a wealthy man. Conservative estimates put his fortune somewhere north of £15m. Home is fashionable Notting Hill where he and wife Hilary, a successful lawyer, host an annual summer party attended by a scattering of ministers and highfalutin arty types.
The couple, who have two grownup children, are regulars on the opera scene – he chaired the english National Opera for a year – and attributes his passion for music to hearing his classical pianist mother performing as a child.
The ITV job looks tailor-made for him, but the television market is a remarkably different beast to the one he enjoyed in his heyday.
With more and more of us now choosing our own TV schedules via online streaming services, the future of network television looks precarious.
Bazalgette this week shrugged off the threat posed by Netflix, describing the company as ‘frenemies’, but industry analysts aren’t so nonchalant.
His inspired appointment of Dame Carolyn McCall from easy-Jet, a chief executive of proven pedigree, at least gives ITV a dream top team – on paper anyway. They could make a formidable partnership, so long as they gel.
Baz will need to keep his friends close, but his frenemies closer.