Ground Floor: With the winter months drawing in, the likelihood of spending evenings curled up in front of the TV increases. So does the chance of you skimming through the TV listings muttering darkly that "there's nothing on", while at the same time zapping through the channels in the hopes that something will catch your attention
The TV moguls need to reel you in but it has become increasingly difficult to assess what viewers want on a long-term basis. Which is why the schedules are full of copycat programming emulating the last successful show.
Whether viewing quality will be improved by the Carlton and Granada merger is still very much open to debate. And whether Michael Green will be watching any of it is equally debatable.
The Michael Green affair has catapulted shareholder power into the headlines over the last few weeks. Admittedly, we're not talking about the power of individual shareholders here, we're talking about the might of fund managers and, in particular, Fidelity Fund Management, which owns a large chunk of Carlton and which had decided that if the merger was going to work, Mr Green had to go.
Naturally, Mr Green had no intention of going. Carlton, the company in which he'd first bought a stake in 1987, was sticking by him. But the truth is, Mr Green was on borrowed time ever since the ITV Digital debacle last year. When things went so spectacularly wrong there, he blamed almost everyone but himself, most particularly labelling the UK government as "useless".
He conceded that he'd made some mistakes but his gravest error was in not first checking out the technology, because the ITV Digital signal was practically unobtainable. You'd think that when setting up a business one of the first things you'd do is make sure that the platform on which it was based was sound, but Mr Green is a deal-maker rather than a corporate builder and it seems he was more excited by the concept than the spadework.
It wasn't only the digital debacle that caused problems for him - in January this year both Carlton and Granada were hit harder by stock market falls than other sectors, mainly because analysts could see that advertisers were defecting in droves. ITV's share of total viewing fell from nearly 30 per cent in 2001 to 23.7 per cent in 2002 and the advertisers were voting with their feet, thus putting Mr Green and his counterpart in Granada, Charles Allen, under more pressure.
Both came under fire in March for their remuneration. In Mr Green's case a third of the investors voted against his pay package on the basis that the link between performance and pay wasn't transparent, and a sixth either opposed or abstained from the vote on his re-election. Mr Green took home £707,000 (€1.03 million) for the year but was also awarded £1.4 million in share options. Shareholders were aggrieved given that he'd presided over a fall in the share price to around 90p from a high of £8 a couple of years earlier.
But both Mr Green and Mr Allen stayed on and merger talks continued. The proposal was that once the two firms merged, Mr Green would become chairman and Mr Allen would become chief executive of the new entity. Rather unfortunately for those who would be working for them, neither man actually gets on very well with the other (there was an unattributed comment made that they fought like two ferrets in a sack) and so the merger was always going to be difficult.
The fund managers looked at the deal and didn't like it. Eventually they issued their ultimatum to the Carlton board - get rid of Mr Green.
As you'd expect, the board rallied around its leader and offered a compromise to the shareholders, suggesting that Mr Green could step down as executive chairman to the role of non-executive chairman by May 2005 and that they would appoint a "strong" non-executive chairman to work with him in the meantime. The thing is, Mr Green is seen as an abrasive and difficult character to work with. Worryingly for those who dislike him, he'd also made a comment that he expected to keep working as a full-time chairman of ITV and had no intention of retiring until he was in his 80s.
The older we get the less ageist we all become, but the idea of an autocratic 80-year-old running the show was too much for Fidelity. They told Carlton that Mr Green was the wrong man for the job, citing his past record (which, to be fair, is mixed - the digital route was a disaster but he had built Carlton up from a small video production company) but also pointing out that he wanted to be far too hands-on. Eventually Carlton capitulated and Mr Green was ousted.
The whole affair is definitely worthy of a documentary (I suppose there's no chance that there was already a team of programme makers following Mr Green and Mr Allen around pre-merger) and would undoubtedly pull in the kind of viewing audience Carlton can only dream of at the moment. Probably the hardest blow for Mr Green is that Mr Allen, who also had to take part of the blame for the digital disaster, has managed to emerge merely shaken but not, as yet, stirred. Most commentators believe, however, that Mr Allen is on borrowed time and his continuing tenure reflects a desire by the fund managers for continuity rather than a ringing endorsement of his management skills.
For everyone who has ever wanted to see shareholders flexing their muscles, this has been an incredible saga. Meanwhile, the appointment of Murdoch junior to the top slot at BSkyB has prompted talk of more shareholder intervention, since the father and son duo at the helm is probably more than many of them can bear. The Murdochs own 35 per cent of BSkyB but it is, after all, a publicly listed company.
It's about time investors started protecting their investments. Next thing you know, we'll be demanding more of our fund managers too.
