Interview: Ben Frow, Channel Five (Evening Standard)
By David Rowan
THINK of it as Executive Swap - the dramatic TV reality show where programme chiefs trade jobs amid bitter legal threats. When Kevin Lygo joined Channel 4 from Five as programme director earlier this month, his former bosses furiously accused him of poaching two of their top entertainment controllers.
Until last week, all Five had in return was Dan Chambers, the former Channel 4 executive promoted to take Lygo's old job. But now Chambers has stolen one of his rival's most acclaimed stars - and the talk in Horseferry Road is of a key defection to "the enemy".
Ben Frow has been responsible for some of Channel 4's biggest hits of recent years, including Property Ladder, No Going Back and Location, Location, Location. He turned Nigella Lawson into TV's sexiest cook, took a gamble with Jamie's Kitchen, and turned domestic clutter into peak-time viewing with How Clean Is Your House? Mark Thompson, the station's chief executive, calls him "one of the most imaginative and original commissioners in Britain" - but from January he will be in charge of all Five's features and entertainment.
He is best known for kick-starting the property blitz that has saturated the evening schedules with series such as Grand Designs and Relocation, Relocation. But hasn't a deluge of such formatted shows killed Channel 4's edge? Naturally, Frow sees them as innovative - at least, before the other channels copied them. "People forget how radical Wife Swap or How Clean Is Your House? were when they started," he says. "Channel 4 is very innovative, but everybody else rips it off. I always kept ahead of the curve on property." So what can we expect at Five? The property-programme market, he says, is now ready to bust.
"Everyone's looking for a new variation, and too many property shows now are just homogenised.
But you still need programmes with a good deal of aspiration - we all dream of buying a house in the south of France and growing hazelnuts, so lots of people will watch that kind of show." We can also forget the nastier confrontational documentaries that have been gaining ground. "There are too many programmes which I call bear-pit TV - taking the superficial premise of Wife Swap, the argument potential, but without its intelligence. In fact, Wife Swap is quite life-affirming. That's not the case for ITV shows such as Holiday Showdown or Take My Mother-in-Law - I don't want to have people shouting at each other. I'm into feelgood programming."
Vulnerability in a presenter will help. This is what convinced him that Nigella Lawson, whose husband was dying, would make a star cookery presenter. "Nigella was well spoken, beautiful and talented, but it was her personal circumstances that enabled the viewer to feel sympathy," he says. "Without that fragility, nobody would watch this posh woman with a cut-glass accent." He also helped Jamie Oliver reinvent his television career, initially against his better instincts.
"He was a bit of a self-parody after the Naked Chef and the Sainsbury's ads, and I sent Tim Gardam, [the programme director], a 10-point memo on why we shouldn't do Jamie's Kitchen." The project was inherited from BBC2. Frow agreed to take it on only if Oliver would allow the camera into his personal life. "I told him, 'I need to know that you're real - to be there if you have a row with the wife, to see the gritty reality'. And he laid himself on the line." This week the series won the Grierson Documentary of the Year.
Frow, 42, follows his gut instincts when commissioning. "The last time I got that little chemical reaction in my stomach that tells me something's going to work was at a funeral," he says. "One of the mourners turned to me and said of another guest, 'You know her problem? She's too posh to wash.' And I said, 'Stop - that's the title of a show about personal hygiene.' We've just done the pilot." How did he decide, four years ago, that property would be the next trend?
"I don't work like that," he says. "I just commission on the basis of what I'd watch. I'd just bought my first flat, and was so obsessed by decorating that I used to paint walls before going to work. I guess I just tapped into that boom." He has had his failures: The Dinner-Party Inspectors, he admits, did not deliver. Sir Jeremy Isaacs, meanwhile, has lambasted the number of sex-based shows on the channel he founded - and Frow is responsible for Sex Tips for Girls and Designer Vaginas.
He is guarded about his personal life - all he will say about his partner is that he is a costume designer - but he is more forthcoming about his current domestic "nightmare": "I'm hopeless at property. I've got a small terraced house in Clapham which I paid too much for and that's still not finished. I go cold at night thinking how much the building work is costing me. I fell for the classic trick - they'd painted everything white. I only discovered later that the whole house had been built out of MDF." When talking about his ideal television format, Frow, dressed entirely in black, and with a clipped greying beard, lapses slightly camply into TV jargon. You need "a gottasee title that punches above the schedules", a "jaw-droppingly must-see opening sequence", a middle section "that rewards the viewer for watching".
IT WAS a language he learned late. Born into a London theatrical family - his grandfather, the late actor Bernard Miles, cofounded the Mermaid theatre - Frow studied stage design at school "alongside the embroidery girls", and worked at the National and then the Bristol Old Vic "as a ladies' costume cutter". His TV break came as the dresser to Richard and Judy - "starting off fixing Judy's tights and ironing Richard's shirts".
At one stage, he planned to become a fashion designer, but decided that the business side would impede his creativity. "There was the thought that I'd open a chain called Frowline, which would have a different colour range in each shop - one shop stocking blacks to whites, another yellows to oranges." But he found work producing and reporting on fashion for ITV, followed by jobs at the BBC and eventually at Channel 4.
Frow knows that his reputation will last only as long as he brings in the hit shows. But if things do not work out at Five, he does not appear too bothered. "I got into TV by accident," he says. "I wouldn't be surprised if I walked away in a few years' time to do something completely different - running a flower shop or baking bread. As long as it's something creative and simple where I'm in control …"
(Evening Standard, November 19 2003)
THINK of it as Executive Swap - the dramatic TV reality show where programme chiefs trade jobs amid bitter legal threats. When Kevin Lygo joined Channel 4 from Five as programme director earlier this month, his former bosses furiously accused him of poaching two of their top entertainment controllers.
Until last week, all Five had in return was Dan Chambers, the former Channel 4 executive promoted to take Lygo's old job. But now Chambers has stolen one of his rival's most acclaimed stars - and the talk in Horseferry Road is of a key defection to "the enemy".
Ben Frow has been responsible for some of Channel 4's biggest hits of recent years, including Property Ladder, No Going Back and Location, Location, Location. He turned Nigella Lawson into TV's sexiest cook, took a gamble with Jamie's Kitchen, and turned domestic clutter into peak-time viewing with How Clean Is Your House? Mark Thompson, the station's chief executive, calls him "one of the most imaginative and original commissioners in Britain" - but from January he will be in charge of all Five's features and entertainment.
He is best known for kick-starting the property blitz that has saturated the evening schedules with series such as Grand Designs and Relocation, Relocation. But hasn't a deluge of such formatted shows killed Channel 4's edge? Naturally, Frow sees them as innovative - at least, before the other channels copied them. "People forget how radical Wife Swap or How Clean Is Your House? were when they started," he says. "Channel 4 is very innovative, but everybody else rips it off. I always kept ahead of the curve on property." So what can we expect at Five? The property-programme market, he says, is now ready to bust.
"Everyone's looking for a new variation, and too many property shows now are just homogenised.
But you still need programmes with a good deal of aspiration - we all dream of buying a house in the south of France and growing hazelnuts, so lots of people will watch that kind of show." We can also forget the nastier confrontational documentaries that have been gaining ground. "There are too many programmes which I call bear-pit TV - taking the superficial premise of Wife Swap, the argument potential, but without its intelligence. In fact, Wife Swap is quite life-affirming. That's not the case for ITV shows such as Holiday Showdown or Take My Mother-in-Law - I don't want to have people shouting at each other. I'm into feelgood programming."
Vulnerability in a presenter will help. This is what convinced him that Nigella Lawson, whose husband was dying, would make a star cookery presenter. "Nigella was well spoken, beautiful and talented, but it was her personal circumstances that enabled the viewer to feel sympathy," he says. "Without that fragility, nobody would watch this posh woman with a cut-glass accent." He also helped Jamie Oliver reinvent his television career, initially against his better instincts.
"He was a bit of a self-parody after the Naked Chef and the Sainsbury's ads, and I sent Tim Gardam, [the programme director], a 10-point memo on why we shouldn't do Jamie's Kitchen." The project was inherited from BBC2. Frow agreed to take it on only if Oliver would allow the camera into his personal life. "I told him, 'I need to know that you're real - to be there if you have a row with the wife, to see the gritty reality'. And he laid himself on the line." This week the series won the Grierson Documentary of the Year.
Frow, 42, follows his gut instincts when commissioning. "The last time I got that little chemical reaction in my stomach that tells me something's going to work was at a funeral," he says. "One of the mourners turned to me and said of another guest, 'You know her problem? She's too posh to wash.' And I said, 'Stop - that's the title of a show about personal hygiene.' We've just done the pilot." How did he decide, four years ago, that property would be the next trend?
"I don't work like that," he says. "I just commission on the basis of what I'd watch. I'd just bought my first flat, and was so obsessed by decorating that I used to paint walls before going to work. I guess I just tapped into that boom." He has had his failures: The Dinner-Party Inspectors, he admits, did not deliver. Sir Jeremy Isaacs, meanwhile, has lambasted the number of sex-based shows on the channel he founded - and Frow is responsible for Sex Tips for Girls and Designer Vaginas.
He is guarded about his personal life - all he will say about his partner is that he is a costume designer - but he is more forthcoming about his current domestic "nightmare": "I'm hopeless at property. I've got a small terraced house in Clapham which I paid too much for and that's still not finished. I go cold at night thinking how much the building work is costing me. I fell for the classic trick - they'd painted everything white. I only discovered later that the whole house had been built out of MDF." When talking about his ideal television format, Frow, dressed entirely in black, and with a clipped greying beard, lapses slightly camply into TV jargon. You need "a gottasee title that punches above the schedules", a "jaw-droppingly must-see opening sequence", a middle section "that rewards the viewer for watching".
IT WAS a language he learned late. Born into a London theatrical family - his grandfather, the late actor Bernard Miles, cofounded the Mermaid theatre - Frow studied stage design at school "alongside the embroidery girls", and worked at the National and then the Bristol Old Vic "as a ladies' costume cutter". His TV break came as the dresser to Richard and Judy - "starting off fixing Judy's tights and ironing Richard's shirts".
At one stage, he planned to become a fashion designer, but decided that the business side would impede his creativity. "There was the thought that I'd open a chain called Frowline, which would have a different colour range in each shop - one shop stocking blacks to whites, another yellows to oranges." But he found work producing and reporting on fashion for ITV, followed by jobs at the BBC and eventually at Channel 4.
Frow knows that his reputation will last only as long as he brings in the hit shows. But if things do not work out at Five, he does not appear too bothered. "I got into TV by accident," he says. "I wouldn't be surprised if I walked away in a few years' time to do something completely different - running a flower shop or baking bread. As long as it's something creative and simple where I'm in control …"
(Evening Standard, November 19 2003)
posted by David Rowan at Wednesday, November 19, 2003
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