by Hugh Purcell
Freeman sprang a probationary test soon after Tesler’s arrival. Despite Michael Grade’s initiatives, comedy programmes were disappointing. At one of the occasional staff meetings held in a large studio someone wanted to know why. Instead of asking Bennett or Grade for their views, Freeman turned to Tesler, catching him unawares:
The only thing I could think of saying was, ‘It reminds me of my uncle who invented a drink called One Up, and it didn’t work. The following year he invented another drink and he called it Two Up, and that didn’t sell. And in successive years, Three Up, Four Up and Five Up didn’t sell either so he threw in the towel. The following year someone invented Seven Up and made a fortune.’ The implication was that we will carry on trying and get there in the end. There was a big laugh. On the way out, John said – and here’s the Jewishness of LWT coming out – ‘Congratulations, that was your Bar Mitzvah.’22
The chief executive belonged to the school of management that believes a light hand on the tiller when the company is doing well is the best way to attract new talent. It is the hiring and firing that is important. In three years LWT had recruited three of the outstanding leaders of the British TV industry of the future. Lord Grade became chief executive of Channel 4, chairman of the BBC and then executive chairman of ITV; Lord Birt became director-general of the BBC; and Brian Tesler CBE became managing director and chairman of LWT, as well as governor of the British Film Institute, vice-president of the Royal Television Society and similar honours. There was one other key appointment to come. John Birt said Freeman reminded him of football manager Sir Alex Ferguson; he was an astute talent scout and he planned ahead. No one called him a ‘people person’, in the sense that he rarely gossiped, but the consensus at LWT was that he was a shrewd judge of people. As Robert Cassen had discovered in Washington: ‘John seemed to have your measure but you never seemed to have his.’
Despite the glamorous South Bank image, the new studios and the display cabinets of awards in the foyer, LWT was no longer ‘best boy’ with the IBA. In its review of 1974, the IBA criticised the lack of resources and time given to programmes about religion, on adult education and for children. Freeman objected to its headmasterly tone and demanded clarification. When it came, Freeman was irritated further. The IBA now extended its criticism to drama: ‘Can there be some causal relationship between the uneven achievement of LWT drama and the proportion of freelance staff in the drama department? Do you have anything that can be described as a drama department at all?’ Freeman wrote a draft reply: ‘The blunt answer to the first question is “No” and to the second “Yes”.’23
The IBA did not back down and when it renewed the LWT franchise in 1975 it pointedly repeated its criticisms, as well as noting LWT’s many achievements. This criticism went back to the basic belief of Sir Brian Young that ‘the answer to the old question whether ITV should reflect or lead the interests and tastes of the public must be that it should do both. The balance it strikes between the two will always be more ambitious than is to be found in a solely commercial service.’24 Freeman did not object to that in principle but he became increasingly opposed to the IBA practice of awarding franchises to competing companies in the first place. The truth was that he was no friend of the IBA (he had turned down the offer to be considered for the post of director-general as long ago as 1970) and this would become the main issue of his chairmanship of LWT in the years ahead.
In May 1976, Brian Tesler became managing director of LWT and John Freeman moved to the little office next door as chairman. Later that year, Tesler summoned all the senior staff to a three-day brainstorming conference at the Selsdon Park Hotel in Croydon. The aim was to review programming in the light of the IBA criticisms and to inspire some corporate bonding. Tesler had been aware for some time that the management structure at LWT was virtually non-existent. The creative staff worked directly to Cyril Bennett in one-to-one meetings so that they hardly knew what each other was doing. John Birt recalled, ‘There was no sense of community or fraternity of programme-makers: there was no forum in which we discussed things in general.’ Freeman’s style of delegation and laissez-faire was all very well but this was surely a shortcoming. For a former chief of staff who admired army hierarchy and ran the New Statesman ‘like a quartermaster-general’ it seems out of character. According to Tesler, ‘John never said to Cyril “something’s not right. Where’s the organisation? Shouldn’t it be like this?” Surprising because John was an organisational man.’25
The conference opened with a hard-hitting critique by John Birt – ‘when I arrived at LWT it clearly had a flavour of the moment about it; but ideas become sterile, individuals become jaded and programmes become predictable’26 – and ended in the bar with excited talk and no doubt the telling of in-house jokes. Later that night Cyril Bennett’s body was found beneath the open window of his sixth floor flat in Westminster. There was soul-searching at LWT whether the robust self-examination at Selsdon could have been to blame. The funeral was awful, with Birt weeping on Freeman’s shoulder. It was left to Tesler to restore morale in the months ahead and to implement a management structure in which each department had a controller who regularly reported to the director of programmes. He in turn held regular meetings with all the controllers to review existing programmes and consider new ones. In February 1977, Grade became the new director of programmes and, when he left LWT in 1981 to work in the States, he was succeeded by John Birt.
In 1976 Judith Mitchell became John Freeman’s fourth wife. The gap of five years between his leaving his first family and his remarriage was because Catherine was not prepared to give him a divorce. Initially she could not believe that her husband’s liaison would last (‘What happens when Judith plays jazz at midnight, Dad?’ asked Matthew, aged nine). Nor did she want the children to think she had agreed too easily to the separation that had hurt them so much. And finally, as she now admits, she was prepared to be bloody-minded and make Freeman wait for the five years that the law at that time required; his betrayal had been too much to accept gracefully. It wasn’t so much the divorce itself, or the secrets and lies that led to it, she said, but ‘his refusal to engage, to say what the problems were, his blanking out of any discussion. This is what did the damage.’
Freeman was very angry. No longer was he aloof and beyond personal confrontation (‘I strove with none for none was worth my strife’). He wrote to Catherine: ‘I very seldom choose to fight, but when I do I always win.’ Robert Cassen could not believe that John was capable of treating her so badly: ‘He behaved in a very chilling way, so chilling that I found it hard to believe. To persuade me she was not exaggerating Catherine showed me some of his letters. They were cold, very cold indeed.’
Were you surprised by this? ‘No. I knew that’s how he was, though never to me. Catherine was so hurt, so aggrieved, that it was impossible for me to see John again.’27
The marriage came to an unseemly end in the Family Court of Registrar Elizabeth Butler-Sloss: John erect and composed, Catherine in tears. He agreed to give her the house in Perceval Avenue, Belsize Park, to which she and the children had moved after South Hill Park, and the sum of £5 a year. That was that.
Slowly, Catherine’s life began to improve. In 1976, she was invited by Thames TV to become editor of their daytime programmes, and so began a fruitful period that lasted for twenty-five years. She became controller of documentaries, features and religious programmes at Thames and then an independent producer-director with her own company, Dove Productions. This led to a partial reconciliation with her former husband. She was able to support herself financially and he also appreciated her success. They met for lunch and discussed the children ‘without ever disagreeing’. When Matthew became an adult he took great pride in their achievements. Matt became a leading geneticist and one of the youngest members of the Royal Society. Tom joined the Merchant Ivory film company as an editor and later worked for Pixar in America. Lucy read Classics at Oxford, became a barrister and later a book edi
tor. Freeman was an amiable, if remote, father and grandfather to Lily, James and Conor. At LWT, the chairman’s lifestyle was ‘spartan’, according to Brian Tesler. He lunched on his own off a sandwich in his small office. His favourite way of communicating was by a handwritten note, and if there was not enough room on the page he would continue writing round the side. Ron Miller told me that John Freeman was ‘very un-commercial as far as his own salary was concerned. After he left he told me what his savings amounted to and they were ridiculously small for a man of his achievement.’ In fact, he could have made a lot of money because LWT became a public company in 1977 and the shares went up far higher than expected. LWT had a Rolls-Royce and Miller tracked down the registration plate LWT 1. He offered the car to Freeman who said, ‘I wouldn’t be seen dead in it.’ According to Michael Grade, every month the LWT directors would exchange a file of their own correspondence so others could see what had been going on:
John had to go to New York for a meeting of UP/ITN that he was chairing [see later] and there was a note in the file to the chief accountant at ITN asking for an advance of $100 in cash. Then there was another note from John ‘I am returning $98 and 50 cents, plus a subway ticket’! That was John!28
Freeman was not interested in the trappings of power but he also said at this time that he did not like power itself: ‘Power is a disagreeable element in life. I tend to think those who like it have disagreeable elements in their personality and I include myself in that.’29 I read this to John Birt. His reply was unexpected but I think it is absolutely right:
He certainly did not like power for power’s sake, but he was not a proselytiser either. He did not want to impose himself on the world, and that was the theme of his career. He did not want to stand on a platform and parade his views or ask to be loved. He was not selfregarding and he was without ambition.30
Was it that Freeman wished to protect himself from self-exposure or simply did not wish to impose himself or his views on others? Probably it was both, but in either case clearly he had not been cut out for political life.
Although Freeman did not enjoy social small talk, when the occasion demanded the LWT chairman was extraordinarily capable of handling it. Michael Grade remembers arriving early at a party for advertisers and Freeman telling him that he did not expect to know any of the sixty or so guests who were coming. Yet when they arrived he handled the introductions impeccably; he knew names, companies and connections. Typically, he had prepared for the event and memorised the guest list. Chan Canasta would have been proud.
A meeting more to his liking was the confrontation with Gavin Waddell, LWT shop steward of the ACTT, over the Bullock Report of 1977 on industrial democracy. Although its radical recommendations for trade union representatives on the board, with shared responsibility for hiring senior staff and disposition of resources, did not strictly apply to LWT because the company had fewer than 2,000 employees, nevertheless the ACTT saw this as an opportunity to increase its power within LWT. ‘We will have to meet Gavin,’ Freeman told the directors, ‘but don’t worry, I’ll deal with him.’ As usual, he had done his homework and thought through the implications for a small company. It seemed Waddell had not. The outcome was similar to the famous Frank Foulkes grilling on Panorama. ‘Waddell was completely humiliated,’ remembers Michael Grade, ‘filleted like a kipper! John was coldly polite but knew every trick in the book. He would have made a gobsmacking QC.’
The 1970s was arguably the worst decade in post-war Britain with rampant inflation, a three-day week, widespread industrial strikes, even a sense that the country was ungovernable. Freeman had moved a long way politically from his socialist ideals to a centre-right position. He was a ‘dry’, as opposed to a ‘wet’, in the labelling of the times. He believed that his chairman’s priority was that LWT should fulfil its contract and if that meant taking on the unions he was ready for it. According to John Birt, he had prepared a management and nonunion labour task force that would keep LWT on the air should there be a strike: ‘He was unshakable in his resolve.’
The chairman was not always the imperturbable governor of all he surveyed. In November 1978 Michael Grade concluded a secret deal with the Football League whereby ITV won a three-year exclusive contract to televise League football in return for a load of money (£5 million). Match of the Day had become ‘snatch of the day’. The BBC was livid and threatened court action. Freeman was summoned on his own to the IBA. Somewhat shaken and fearing the worst, Freeman told Tesler that if necessary he would resign to save Tesler and Grade, because they were ‘the future of LWT’. To Freeman, loyalty to his team went as far as professional self-sacrifice. In the event, a new deal was struck that allowed both ITV and BBC to show League football – at a much higher price. Grade found out about Freeman’s resolve only afterwards.
In the summer of 1980, Freeman led an LWT delegation to the IBA. It was franchise time again, this time a formal presentation and critique before Lady Plowden. According to Ron Miller, ‘John was at his brilliant best. After fifteen minutes it looked as if he was interviewing the IBA.’ At the end of December, Freeman and Tesler arrived back to be given a sealed envelope. They opened it and read that the LWT contract had been extended for another eight years. The IBA noted its ‘diverse good qualities over recent years’. As usual, flattery got nowhere with Freeman. He was not the only ITV leader to criticise the whole franchise-awarding process, but his memo to senior staff at LWT written in August 1981, showed how determined he was to change public opinion: in effect to persuade politicians that the system should be abolished and the IBA cut down to size.
Basically, he thought that the system of fixed-term contracts, which required ITV companies to re-apply for their licences, was a huge waste of time and money. Further, the ‘amateurish and unrealistic attitudes of the IBA, many of whose members had little qualification beyond assiduous reading of The Guardian and The Observer, led it to demand changes that were plain wrong.’ He gave the example of Southern TV that had lost its licence not because it had made bad programmes but because the IBA considered another company might make better. ‘This sort of haphazard selection is a luxury broadcasting can no longer afford.’ What would happen to the BBC, he asked rhetorically, if after ‘a lean period, the board of governors and top management would be collectively dismissed in the hope that someone else might do better?’ He concluded:
We must challenge the central doctrine of fixed-term contracts followed by open public tender. The public interest and the quality of broadcasting would best be served by a system under which all contracts were either indefinite or rolling; all were subject to constant review; all subject to summary termination if, after due warning, satisfactory performance was not achieved. The corollary in logic is that the IBA’s massive apparatus of control should be substantially dismantled.31
‘At the end of his time at LWT John found the IBA very irritating and he had not much time for Lady Plowden,’32 said Sir Christopher Bland, who had been deputy chairman of the IBA in the 1970s and was soon to join LWT. In 1990 the Broadcasting Act changed the award of franchises to an auction process, incorporating safeguards for quality. After the next round in 1991 Lord Thomson, who had been chairman of the IBA between 1981–88, admitted that this was wrong too. The best way, he said, was a system of rolling contracts. This is what Freeman had proposed; but it was wisdom after the event.
By now Freeman was becoming a media mogul himself. Additional top jobs in the media were his without asking – chairman of ITN (1976–81), chairman of Hutchinson (1978–82), governor of the British Film Institute, vice-president of the Royal Television Society. Hutchinson, the publishers, had been bought by LWT in 1977 when, as Freeman said, ‘We were flushed with cash.’ It seemed a good investment at the time with a mixture of educational books and popular authors such as Frederick Forsyth. However, from 1980 it began to lose money so LWT determined to make many staff redundant. The lot fell to Freeman as chairman, which perhaps accounts for this view taken of hi
m by Terence Blacker, then an editor at Hutchinson:
I encountered him now and then, usually viewed from a distance at the head of a long boardroom table. He was sleek and weirdly charmless, so glacial and emotionally absent that one felt that, if someone had died in front of him or taken off their clothes, there would have been no flicker of reaction.33
Freeman was certainly cold in a crisis and that had been his reputation for years. However, the former senior staff at LWT deny that this was his nature. ‘Perhaps he mellowed,’ Brian Tesler remarked. ‘I had heard he was a very cold man but all I can say is that none of us found him like that.’ Ron Miller remembers a convivial drinking session with Freeman in Frankfurt when they went to inspect an outlying financial office. Michael Grade recalls how Freeman put his head round the door after Grade’s marital problems had become the stuff of Nigel Dempster’s gossip column in the Daily Express and said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ve all been “Dempstered”!’ John Birt enjoyed lively conversations with Freeman – ‘he was incapable of speaking an ugly sentence’. Aloof, private, not given to talking about himself and not a ‘joiner’, but not cold nor humourless either: that was the consensus at LWT.
Independent Television News (ITN) supplied news to the ITV companies in return for a budget and the fixed allocation of airtime. Freeman was chairman in the 1970s, a time of industrial unrest and staff dissatisfaction at ITN similar to that at LWT but on a much more disruptive scale. Coincidentally, at exactly the same time as the Selsdon Park conference at LWT discussed lack of communication at management level (1976) so at ITN the editor Nigel Ryan commissioned the Pearson Inquiry into the same thing. It reported that ‘24 per cent of comments and criticisms were the absence of any form of constructive communications’. Hitherto, when the political editor Julian Havilland had complained about this to the chairman, Freeman had given him ‘a dusty answer’ (a favourite Freeman phrase) but now a management structure was set up not very dissimilar to that by Brian Tesler at LWT. Soon after Nigel Ryan left, not because of this but because the board had turned down his proposal to expand news into current affairs with more programming. Here Freeman was adamant: ‘I held the view that the only way ITN could survive was if it remained a nuts and bolts operation without fancy points.’ The ITV companies did not want poachers on their land.34