The whole atmosphere is so entirely sui generis that I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a little Channel 5 logo
The whole atmosphere is so entirely sui generis that I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a little Channel 5 logo actually appeared in the corner of my visual field and remained there despite the most frantic rubbing.Airey is a smallish, slight, vaguely mannish woman, with a brownish un- hairdo. Outside the window London’s West End roars in a muted sort of a way; and through the glass walls on the opposite side of the office I can see Elspeth and various other 5 employees toiling away. There are quite a lot of Channel 5 logos posted around the place. “There was no one else involved on either side, and insofar as these things can be, it was wholly amicable.” We mull over the possible impact of the job – she regularly works 15 hours a day – on the relationship; and although she acknowledges that her partner “probably thinks it should take a degree of responsibility”, she says that really “we just acknowledged that we’d grown apart”.We’re sitting at a round, blond-wood conference table, and to my left, on a rack of tasteful shelving, there are suspended five televisions tuned to five different channels. It’s now a year on from the course and Airey and her partner of 19 years have, indeed, recently split.
He said of this course that a third of the intake “see the light” and leave their jobs, and a further third leave their partners. In a factitious piece for the Times on her PA, published in July, Airey said: “I was offered a senior job at Sky recently, there were several reasons why I turned it down, but one was because Elspeth” (the PA) “didn’t want to commute to Osterley.”At the same time as these human resources problems were bothering Airey, she was dispatched to Harvard to undergo an elite business course which has groomed such stratospheric telly talents as Dyke. From there she abseiled to Channel 4 as Arts and Entertainment Controller. And it was while she was bivouacking at C4, that Greg Dyke, the Channel 5 expedition leader, selected her for his assault on the summit of commercial television.She’s currently Programme Director at Channel 5 – and as such is, according to Management Today, the 49th most important woman in Britain – but my hunch is that once the station is firmly established, she’ll jump ship This is a woman who has ambitions to be the boss Last year she was courted by Elisabeth Murdoch to join Sky.
She cut her teeth researching, then programme planning at Central, before vaulting over to commissioning at ITV Network Centre. We don’t look to TV execs for ethical wisdom or social policy; indeed, it’s not quite clear to me why we look to them at all, and not simply over their shoulders to the goggle box they service. It’s only since the launch of Channel 4 in the early Eighties that the big cheeses in TV have gained any kind of notoriety at all; arguably the salience of the Grades, Birts, Yentobs and Jacksons is a function of the need for competing broadcast networks to extend their branding through their organisational hierarchy and into their very personnel.Airey, 38, is a judo black belt whose self-confessed love affair with television had her applying for trainee positions after university. well, I was incredibly annoyed and angry.”"I expect you’ll feel the same way about me when you listen to the tape over and over again.”Well, no, Dawn, I didn’t feel the same way about you, because you aren’t a cabinet minister – you’re a television executive.
“You see, I actually quite liked Beckett in the flesh, but when I got home and listened to the tape over and over again, and discovered that what she’d said to me amounted to precisely nothing: nothing of herself, nothing substantive about politics … DAWN Airey – crazy name, achingly sensible person – had been a little unsure about being interviewed by me: “When the press office told me you were interested I asked them to give me some of your recent pieces and .. well … the one on Margaret Beckett – ”
” – Savage, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah.”"I’ll tell you what it was Dawn,” I hunker forward, elbows on blond wood, hands cupping regulation Covent Garden espresso. Noblemen can cross South-east England in the aftermath of a heavy storm and still arrive on Dover beach in flowing robes without a speck of mud.The few moments when Herzov does let the boys in the special effects department have some fun are largely counter-productive: the dry ice that billows down from the central lighting rig during the storm suggests that a spaceship is about to take off.`King Lear’: Royal Exchange, Manchester (0161 833 9833), to 23 October. The elegant velvet and satin costumes bear witness to the excellent dry-cleaning facilities available in the pre- Christian world. The designs place this Lear in a medieval world of goblets and gauntlets, long sleeves and tall hats, coarse matting and rugs.
