The happy reaper

`When I first came into television somebody told me `the only serious difference between a television company and any other company you've ever been involved with, is you just get a better quality of whingeing'." Gerry Robinson throws back his head and laughs.

It is seven years since his Compass Group took Granada over ("in deep trouble") and turned it around. From 1991 to 1996 he was chief executive. He is now chairman. However, as he takes up his new appointment as chairman of the Arts Council of England - also in deep trouble and seen by the greater and lesser stars that make up the arts firmament as a lumbering, irrelevant Leviathan - he should take a deep breath. I can guarantee whingeing of an even higher order is not far away.

Curiously, for this most English institution, both Robinson and the current chairman of the arts council, Lord Gowrie, are Irish. Gowrie, born in Co Wexford, moved when he was 13 to Dunlewy, Co Donegal, just 10 miles from Dunfanaghy where Gerry Robinson was born 49 years ago. Their cultural backgrounds, however, are worlds apart: Gowrie, aristocratic Anglo-Irish politician and poet; Robinson, ninth child (of 10) of the village carpenter, now a self-made millionaire. The outgoing is a patrician Tory; the incoming, a wet-behind-the-ears New Labour man, former Thatcherite who turned left in the run-up to the last election. ("As a management team they're first rate").

However prestigious, many would see the arts council appointment as less cultural plum than poisoned chalice. Lord Gowrie describes the current funding legislation as "a mad hatters' tea party". Robinson isn't worried. It's no different from schools, he says. "Take something which looks like a disaster, can't possibly be cured: it's under-funded, it's the quality of the children coming in, their ethnic background. But change the headmaster and two years down the road it's 10 times better."

But public firing squads are noisy affairs with built-in media flak. When Robinson sacked David Plowright, then MD of Granada Television in 1991, he got a letter from John Cleese. "It said: `Fuck off out of it, you upstart ignorant caterer.' The funny thing was when I'd been chief executive at Compass [a former loss-making division of Grand Met's catering operation where Robinson led the management buyout] people were saying `nice chap Gerry, but of course, he knows bugger all about catering'. Suddenly I arrive at Granada and I know everything about catering and bugger all about television. Then when Granada took over Forte, they said, `what do these television people think they know about catering?' " More laughter.

Gerry Robinson, looking unnervingly like a young Anthony Hopkins, laughs a lot, particularly at other people's jokes (in this case mine) and generally oozes an easy charm. His jewel of an 18thcentury house in Holland Park - one of the best addresses in London and literally worth millions - is the only sign that Robinson makes more money in a month than most of us earn in a lifetime.

At 17 he was an accounts clerk at Lesney (maker of Matchbox toys). After qualifying as an accountant he moved up through the ranks (via Lex/Volvo) and by 1980 was finance director of Grand Met's UK Coca Cola business. And on it went. There was a downside: a broken marriage. But now Robinson sprawls on a vast sofa in the vast drawing-room, a happy man.

The anger felt by his two older children when his first marriage broke up has long since gone. Tonight six-year-old April, daughter from his second marriage to Heather (there's also Timothy, aged three), is spending the night at her big sister Samantha's flat and is very excited. Tomorrow Richard (20) is playing golf with his Dad. No one, I suspect, can stay angry at Gerry Robinson for long, which perhaps explains his success. When the smiling crocodile does have to snap his teeth, the victims, he says, often seem strangely relieved, even grateful.

Where does it come from, I ask, this beguiling lack of front? The years spent with the Holy Ghost Fathers in Lancashire? (He is now agnostic. He left the seminary he says "because I met a girl who seemed a hell of a lot more exciting than being a missionary in Africa".)

"No. I think it's the Irish. I recognise it whenever I deal with Irish people in business. You don't get the arrogance. There is a more down-to-earth quality that is more normal in Ireland than here." Although Robinson has lived in England since he was nine when the family upped sticks "in the usual Irish way" and settled in London's East End, and has only the hint of an accent, his Irishness is not in question. The long summer holidays of his adolescence were spent back in the house in Dunfanaghy which his father had simply boarded up when they left. Now they have a cottage in Donegal where the family spends at least 10 or 12 weeks a year.

"Life takes on a different tinge there. People care about different things in different ways. From the moment we arrive, the children are preoccupied with other children." Very different from life in millionaires' row in London where "the idea of somebody dropping in with their children just wouldn't happen". The Robinsons are currently renovating a house in Donegal and the big move back isn't far distant. "I would think that two or three years from now I would be based in Ireland and operating in London. Five to seven years from now I would be based in Ireland and not operating in London." As for sorting out the English arts council, he's optimistic. Not for nothing it seems is Gerrard Jude Robinson's middle name that of the patron saint of lost causes.

"The whole thing is a melee and Chris [Smith, UK Minister of Culture] wants it to work. And if you want to make any kind of argument for adding to the support of the arts, you better be running it well." As a non-commercial arts organisation, the arts council presents entirely new challenges to anything he has faced before. "I love this stage. I absolutely love it. First of all it's new and you're learning, and in a field you know very little about." As for the birds-nest of an operation the arts council appears to be - funding everything from puppeteers to the Royal Opera House - it's essentially no more complicated than Granada, he says. "It's in television, roadside catering, hotels, television rental and yet something that employs 80,000 people spread all over the world, is run at the centre with about 33 people."

Robinson arrives with a reputation as a man with a scythe. (Worse, in arts world terms, an accountant with a scythe.) But the statistics, he says, don't bear this out. Kindness should not be confused with cowardice.

"If you have someone who is patently hopeless, if you are too weak to correct that in some way, then you've really messed up the 30 or 700 people who work under them." Knowing where you're going is crucial. And that direction must come from the top. "If you don't know what you're aiming for, the chances of getting there are nil. Like getting the stationery cupboard right while the company goes to the wall. It happens a lot."

This week he's interviewing for the new secretary general, the arts council's chief executive. No one has been sacked: the job has been on hold for nearly a year, a symptom of the general malaise. He sees the role of chairman as "essentially to make sure that the key people are the right key people and there is a sense of where the organisation is going".

Robinson's arts credentials have been damned with faint praise by media commentators, ignoring his last two years as chairman of the Royal Court, the most innovative theatre in Britain. The truth is quite other and his passionate belief in the value of the arts, if I am any judge, is unfeigned. "If there is one rationale for funding the arts at all, it is funding it in a way for it to be innovative and being willing to take risks. Otherwise what's the point?" There will be, he says, no dumbing down. No Birtian cull. As for his lack of specialist knowledge, it's a positive advantage, he says.

"When I took over at Granada, I just went around saying: `I don't really know anything about this. If you think it's a good idea, do it; if you don't, don't.' Then people have to think, as opposed to thinking `they're very clever up there - they must be to have got there - so if they make the decision, it'll be all right.' But if people have to think for themselves, very few stupid things come through. Because people are inherently smart and people are amazingly in tune with what works."