London - Janet Street-Porter was yesterday appointed editor of the Independent on Sunday. The youth television pioneer (52) will be undertaking her first major print journalism post. She succeeds Kim Fletcher.
Janet Street-Porter is the polar opposite of the grey, safe television executives she once lambasted as "male, middle-class, middle-aged and mediocre" in a speech in front of many of them at the Edinburgh International Television Festival.
Her career and outspoken pronouncements have been as forthright and colourful as her magenta hair.
Born Janet Bull in Fulham, west London, she abandoned architectural college for a journalistic career. She worked for women's magazine Petticoat, the Daily Mail women's section Femail and the Evening Standard in London as its fashion editor for four years. In 1975 she went to London Weekend Television, where she gained celebrity as the presenter of a pop and youth programme, the London Weekend Show.
She won a BAFTA award for originality for ground-breaking Network 7 on Channel 4, a programme which spawned a new breed of "yoof" programmes that cut as fast as pop videos and featured on-screen text. In 1988 she joined the BBC and became head of her own youth television department.
But she left in 1994, later complaining her creativity was being stifled by bureaucracy. She had an unhappy - and brief - sojourn at L!ve TV. Technical problems and clashes with the head of television, Mr Kelvin MacKenzie, tellingly recorded in a documentary, led to her departure.