Broadcasting boss braves business south of the Border

At Havelock House, a labyrinthine pink castle on Belfast's Ormeau Road, just four men have been in charge of UTV since the late October afternoon in 1959 when Sir Laurence Olivier declared it to be his "unique privilege" to be "the first person to appear before you on Ulster Television". The fourth of those men, in situ since 1999, is John McCann.

“Should there be more?” he asks, before revealing he had recently mulled the idea of leaving the executive car park for the final time.

“I had intended to retire earlier this year, but in fact the board asked me to stay on for a little bit longer. So I’ll stay on, I’ll get this channel up and running and then, at some stage, I’ll hand over to somebody else,” he says. There won’t be any hanging around as chairman either – he’s not a fan of that.

“This channel” is UTV. Not the old UTV, but the proposed second one, which will target audiences and advertisers in the Republic from early 2015. Two days after McCann “dropped off” UTV’s licence application in Dublin, he is back in his Belfast office, twinkly-eyed by the prospect of moving beyond the venture’s confidential “desktop research” phase.

The conversation turns to non-traditional broadcasters which have bought their way into the market by shelling out for sports rights: BT, he believes, is “brave” to spend so much, just as Sky was brave in its time.

Ah, but does he also regard UTV's exclusive content rights deal with ITV Studios as a "brave" move? He answers, appropriately, in the language of television. "That goes back to Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, and Sir Humphrey saying to the minister or prime minister, That's a very courageous decision'," he says.

In other words, he hopes it isn’t a brave thing to have done – courageous decisions were synonyms for losing ones in Sir Humphrey’s lexicon – but he doesn’t know this for sure yet.

“When you go out and you spend money on rights, you always expect to be able to drive the audience. But until you actually get that audience, I suppose you don’t totally relax.”

As for the size of the audience he expects to attract via exclusive rights to programmes such as Coronation Street, Emmerdale, Loose Women, Mr Selfridge and Whitechapel, as well as its planned peak-time news hour, McCann is reticent.

“I genuinely don’t want to predict that. I mean, I have a business plan with a share in it, but I actually just don’t want to say, because it’s a hostage to fortune.”

Whatever the audience share settles at – and mid-to-high single digits seems likely – it will be an important number because it will be a proxy for the loss of business incurred by others in the market, principally RTÉ and TV3.

And no, launching the new channel is not a precursor to buying a weakened TV3. “TV3 is not on our agenda at all.”

But UTV’s advance south of the Border is perhaps a more daring move than it might seem for a company that has long captured television advertising “overspill” from the Republic and already owns six radio stations here.

The group, which is the largest publicly- quoted company in Northern Ireland and the only one of the old ITV franchises to have remained independent, has not been as active on screen under McCann's reign as it has been on radio.

Last year, UTV earned 80 per cent of its operating profit from its radio empire, and Euro 2012 meant it even took in fractionally more revenue from its single biggest radio asset, TalkSport, than it did from the UTV channel.

On the walls of its Belfast corridors, the corporate art collection gives way to publicity posters for in-house productions such as Come Fly with Julian and Lesser Spotted Ulster.

Cost-cutting
Could Lesser Spotted Leinster be next on the slate? In truth, any indigenous production is likely to be limited. UTV tends to concentrate on news and what McCann calls "the bits and pieces" that make a channel feel more local, rather than, say, make its own drama. Not to worry.

"Some people I've talked to in the local community think we actually make Coronation Street in our studios here," he marvels.

Nor has he fostered export ambitions. Belfast’s Titanic Quarter is now a production hotbed for larger-scale international companies, but making programmes for non-domestic audiences is a game of hits and misses that McCann, who originally joined UTV in 1983 as “its finance guy”, has not, to date, been prepared to sink money into.

What this means, however, is that almost all of UTV’s business has been exposed to the decline in advertising markets in Ireland and Britain, and the cushion of a 25 per cent audience share in Northern Ireland, higher than for any other ITV franchise holder, couldn’t prevent repeated rounds of cost-cutting in its home region.

“This recession has been far longer and far harder than anybody ever anticipated – certainly far more difficult than I had anticipated,” he admits. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Thanks largely to its acquisition of TalkSport in 2005, UTV Media has nevertheless been in the ascendant, and it is an interested party whenever radio assets come on the British market.

However, most of the assets with which it has flirted lately have found their way into the balance sheets of two companies, Bauer Media and Global Radio, for a pretty penny.

Audience growth
"I couldn't have justified anything like the prices that were being paid. If they can make a go of it at those prices, then good luck to them. But at those prices, no," says McCann.

“Would we have liked more radio stations? Yes, we would have, because we think we’re good at running radio stations.”

The turnaround at the once "cheap and cheerful" loss-maker that was TalkSport is a case in point, and he lets his hand fly up into the air to signify the surge in its audience since he decided that the price of live rights to 64 Premier League games a season was justified.

He also spent money on name presenters, “unashamedly” picking up Richard Keys and Andy Gray after they “exited Sky, stage left” under a cloud of sexism, because, unlike television current affairs shows where he believes “the presenter shouldn’t be the story”, TalkSport needs what might politely be termed strong personalities.

“If you have heard men talking about sport, they love to argue it out and they love to go, ‘Ah no aghhh’.

“So you must have presenters that are opinionated, because they draw in the punters to go on air and say, ‘No, no you’re wrong, it should have been errghhh . . .’ and all that sort of thing.”

His re-enactment of a typical post- match analysis is funny, because of what he has just told me: “I’m not into sport, even though I own – we own – TalkSport, you know.”

What, no sport at all?

“No, none at all, I never have been. Sport just doesn’t do it for me at all. But I understand that men like sport – most men like sport – and I understand what we have to do to drive the audience for TalkSport.

"It's a bit like the main channel. I don't watch I'm a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! and I don't watch The X Factor," he says, amused at the very idea.

“But you don’t have to actually like something to be able to deliver it to an audience. It’s about getting the audience right, and to be honest it’s about getting your cost base right as well.”

Every presentation he makes to shareholders or “financial folk” begins with the same metric: audience growth.

“The business is actually relatively straightforward. You’re trying to drive as big an audience as possible and then sell that audience. It’s very simple, but actually it’s amazing how many people can’t seem to do that, you know.”

Show-making skills
Speaking of shareholders, UTV's largest is investment holding company TVC, which at UTV's last two AGMs has either abstained or voted against his re-election to the board and the directors' remuneration package (McCann was paid £460,350 last year, excluding pension entitlements).

Their opposition follows the resignation in February 2012 of UTV chairman John B McGuckian, a non-executive director of TVC, after McCann and four boardroom allies questioned his independence. Two other non-execs, including TVC chairman Shane Reihill, followed McGuckian out the door.

“I think we’ve all moved on from that. TVC are professional business people and we expect them to behave like that, and they do behave like that.”

There “may be some residual feeling”, he concedes, and describes it as “unfortunate” that the AGM votes have gone the way they have. “But that’s their call.”

Another relationship that has had its "ups and downs" is that with ITV, with both UTV and another "affiliate" of the UK's "Channel 3" network, Scottish group STV, clashing with the company over payments for network programming.

But after years of tension worthy of the Rover’s Return, “peace has essentially broken out”.

ITV's rediscovery of its show-making skills has helped. For McCann, the "difficult patch" began when the slot-shifting News at Ten garnered the nickname "News at When", and it worsened during a period of flops in which commissioners seemed embarrassed by "the big audience grabbers" that had been its staple.

“They kind of lost their way for a while. There were comedy shows that didn’t work and I can’t even remember the name of them. Something to do with wallpaper . . . ”

Moving Wallpaper?

"Moving Wallpaper, that was it. Oh, it was awful. And I kept saying to them at the time, 'This is wrong'."

Incredulity creeps into his voice. “ITV were doing things like saying, ‘Let’s focus on the youth market at 10 o’clock at night, let’s put in young people’s programming there, you know, late teens, early 20s’.

“Now I don’t know what you were like when you were 18, 19, 20 or 21, but you weren’t sitting at home, I imagine, watching television at 10 o’clock at night.”

Ahem. Well. It’s possible that is exactly what I was doing, er, some nights.

“Some nights, yes, but most nights you were probably out in pubs and clubs and doing things that you probably shouldn’t have been doing,” he insists. He wasn’t one for staying in either.

Now ITV is back in the mainstream, where it should be, and UTV’s new “southern service” will pitch itself at the mass market in much the same way. All seems more or less well in McCann’s particular corner of Havelock House.

After “a few false dawns”, advertising revenues are on the up, while the “Netflixification” of the industry has been overstated, he believes. Since the 1990s, people have been telling him that linear television is dying, but there’s little evidence of it yet.

“I’ve watched my three older kids get married and have kids themselves. And they don’t go out. They put the kids to bed and then they settle down in front of the TV. It’s a bigger screen TV, but they’re doing exactly the same as their parents did.”

UTV: the channel for people who have just put their kids to bed. It’s probably not the advertising slogan it will use in the Republic, though there sure are plenty of tired parents around.

The not-so-small screen has stayed the course, much like McCann himself – for now.

CV: John McCann
Name: John McCann
Position: Group chief executive of UTV Media
Age: 60
Career: After training as an accountant, he worked at Ernst & Young and at the Industrial Development Board (now Invest NI). He joined UTV as its financial controller in 1983, expecting to stay for just a couple of years, but got embroiled in a three-year industrial relations dispute that culminated in a strike (during which UTV ran a management service). He became general manager in 1989 and a decade later became the first Catholic to lead the company.
Family: Belfast born and bred, he is married with four grown-up children (three daughters and one son).
Interests: For fresh air, he would do "a wee bit of cycling", he says, but "it's not sort of Lycra-type cycling". Media-wise, he watches news programmes and "any good quality drama or documentary", citing
ITV's critically-acclaimed murder drama Broadchurch. He also enjoys "escapist movies", and his office bookshelf features volumes by Alan Greenspan and independent television producer Peter Bazalgette.