ITV poaches Grade

After much speculatio in the media about what was going to happen to the flailing Company,ITV has staged a major coup by springing Michael Grade from the BBC.

The timing couldnt really have been worse for the corporation.

Grade had been foremost in his insistence that the license fee should be raised abouve inflationin his negotiations with the treasury,but now moves to an organisation which will argue quite the oppostite.

For ITV it couldny come at a better time,having been left floundering without a chief executive since the summer and predators circling

The Telegraph in its leader says this morning

"For ITV it has pulled off a coup on several fronts. It has poached one of the two most senior figures at its main rival. This would have been destabilising at any time but with the BBC's funding settlement due any week, the news could not have come at a worse time for the Corporation.
ITV also gets a businessman who understands broadcasting and, crucially, understands programming. In his time his channels have brought us The Professionals and the South Bank Show at LWT, EastEnders at BBC1, and Friends and ER at Channel 4. He has proved willing to cut long running but terminal shows, including the 1985 axing of a lame and limping Doctor Who, paving the way for the Doctor's recent successful reincarnation.
None of the other executives on ITV's short list could compete with this kind of experience. Outside broadcasting Grade's career has been less spectacular but it will be on his TV career that he will be judged."

The Indy lists what his first tasks will be

"Mr Grade's first task will be to fend off the unwanted takeover attempt by NTL and decide how to handle Rupert Murdoch, the biggest shareholder.
A priority for Mr Grade will be to convince ITV's regulators to allow it to charge advertisers more - the current restrictions cost the broadcaster hundreds of millions of pounds."

Steve Busfield writing in media Guardian comments

"It would be fair to call it the transfer of the century. No-one saw it coming and, at first glance, it is absolutely the right move for ITV and a nightmare for the BBC.

This is a tremendous coup for the ITV board. Hats off to them. We doubted their recruitment process and their ability to lure a halfway competent executive into a troubled organisation - but they have."

Roy Greenslade in the same outlet writes

" it"will also give both Rupert Murdoch and Richard Branson pause for thought as well. It has been negotiated, according to Randall, over a period of several weeks "with great stealth", during which NTL, where Branson is the largest stockholder, made a bid for ITV, and Murdoch's BSkyB bought up 18% of ITV's shares in order to block that NTL bid."

Emily Bell offers an opinio on the reasons for the defection

"One piece of gossip has circulated which might point to Grade's decision to metaphorically fork his fingers at the government. It is thought that the level of executive pay at the BBC, which is set by Grade, had been particularly badly received by Gordon Brown, who is used to dealing with the more lowly remunerated public servants such as the governor of the Bank of England. One of the unwritten pacts for the government securing Grade and Thompson in 2004 was that the duo should be allowed to run the BBC their way. It is clear that the licence fee settlement has not gone the way either would have wanted."