Interview: Nigel Pickard, ITV (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

WHEN the ITV companies merged last winter, the big fear was that programming would suffer in the rush for profits. Now, just as analysts warned, viewers are voting with their remote controls. A fifth of younger viewers, it emerged this week, have abandoned ITV1 over the past 12 months. Cost-cutting and job cuts may have boosted the network's share price - but has the result been to lose touch with the audience?

The main channel's ratings certainly suggest a problem. In the year to March, ITV1 lost 13 per cent of its 16- to 34-year-olds. The drop was not quite as bad as the 23 per cent fall in January and February, but then those months were skewed by the popularity last year of I'm A Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!.

Equally worrying, its audience has moved downmarket, with a drop of around 10 per cent year-onyear among the more affluent ABC1 viewers. With some midevening shows, such as the IVF documentary Precious Babies, attracting fewer than three million viewers, questions are being asked about the network's direction.

But Nigel Pickard, its amiable director of programmes, brushes off the suggestion that he is a man under pressure. "The trouble is," he says with a grin and a headshake, "people take a snapshot of the schedule at one moment, but we can take another snapshot which shows we're heavier on the 16 to 34s and ABC1s. Nobody is dodging the fact that it's bloody competitive out there, and that there was some year-on-year decline. But it's exactly the same drop as for Channel 4 and Five, while BBC2's decline was two-anda-half times as big."

Pickard, who arrived in 2002 after two years running Children's BBC, has the jovial, matey manner you would expect from the man best known for "discovering" Ant and Dec and reinventing Basil Brush. Yet Monday's Evening Standard, which reported the latest "slump" to hit his "ailing channel", has clearly infuriated him, and he wants it known.

"The idea that Robson Green's Wire in the Blood was a 'loser' is just so unfair, so nasty," he says mid-interview, pointing to a photo caption. "It was one of our highest rating shows this year, which we've recommissioned. Why would I recommission a 'loser'?"

FALLING ratings are not just ITV1's problem, he insists. Indeed, seen as "a family" that includes its growing digital portfolio, soon to be joined by a men's channel, the network's overall audience is rising. "ITV2 has outstripped Sky One as the most watched channel in digital homes. ITV3 was the most successful launch of any UK channel. Yet go back three years, and everybody was slagging off our multichannel strategy."

That may be, but Pickard, 52, knows that the main terrestrial channel's performance is what matters. So, in search of the next I'm a Celebrity ... , his new summer schedule is packed with shows such as Celebrity Love Island, Celebrity Shark Bait, Celebrity Wrestling, Celebrities Under Pressure, even one featuring celebrities regressing into their past lives.

Does he really see ITV1's future as the home of the humiliated D-list celeb? "If Channel 4 owns the summer with 10 weeks of Big Brother, you can't just rely on repeats of your tried-and-tested formats like Frost and Midsomer Murders," he says. "In comparison, I'm a Celebrity ... lasts just 14 days. But we're not simply salami-slicing the celebrity genre. Format is everything. Celebrity Wrestling is a wonderful, tongue-in-cheek WWF-meets-Gladiators, which the celebrities absolutely went for - I'm afraid we had broken bones. It's about creating entertainment events that get talked about."

He has also been accused of relying too heavily on soaps at the heart of the schedules, with Emmerdale on six days a week, and two-and-a-half hours of Coronation Street. Doesn't that betray a lack of innovation? "No, they give us a fantastic platform to try other things in the schedule," he replies.

"They've actually helped us take risks. You say we don't take risks, but I don't think many channels would have dedicated 14 days of the schedule to a stripped entertainment programme like Get Me Out of Here. Some opinion formers might say the channel has become a bit crass and tabloid, but that was innovation and heavy risk-taking." He adds that the channel "hasn't yet reached a cap on what we'll do with the soaps".

But if viewing figures have fallen in the past year, profits are up 57 per cent, to £340 million. Could it be that shareholder pressure is affecting ITV1's performance?

"As with any business, your shareholders have a view if you don't run things properly," he says. "But do they influence scheduling? No. There's no undue influence on what we commission. Yes, on a daytoday basis, of course your job is to get as many people as you can to watch. But I've been under that sort of pressure for 15 years as a commissioner. I do not have a weekly meeting with Charles Allen [the chief executive] when he says, 'Nigel, those ratings are terrible, can we do more of that?'" He says he last talked to Allen a month ago.

STILL, ITV1 has been lobbying regulators remarkably successfully to drop many of its obligations regarding religious, children's and regional programming. The network is also urging Ofcom to raise advertising limits from seven to nine minutes an hour, and to allow product placement in shows.

Faced with these new commercial imperatives, isn't Pickard simply doing the shareholders' bidding in streamlining his increasingly profitable channel? "I can absolutely see that that's the way it's taken, but it's not the case," he insists. "It's just that we don't simply want to tick certain boxes [to please the regulators]. You're doing the audience a disservice if you're not making programmes that are attractive to them." His programme budget, more than £800 million, has not been cut, he points out. Only if ITV were taken over by foreign investors would he worry about cost-stripping.

In the meantime, his reforms to public-service parts of the schedule, he insists, are simply about modernisation. "Take religion: last year, BBC1 only made 84 hours of religion, but we were mandated to do 104 hours. There seems to be an anomaly here. I felt that was not a particularly sensible or fair approach to box-ticking."

Now, with Ofcom's blessing, he plans "a more exciting approach", weaving religion into soaps and documentaries. The proposals have angered a number of bishops and Christian groups. "I don't think they found it particularly helpful that we hadn't engaged directly with them," Pickard admits. "But when we did there was a fantastic amount of agreement. They welcome the 52 hours we now do as an improvement."

Nor, he says, is it true that children's programming is being cut. "We won't reduce our output, but we want the freedom to interpret what we make for kids, not be held by some outdated set of regulations. Before, you'd have to make so many hours of pre-school shows, but you weren't allowed to include animation. That's just nuts."

As for the channel's emphasis on original drama, he considers ITV's role in underpinning UK production to be an equally important if under-recognised example of its public-service remit.

In the meantime, Pickard accepts that he faces a challenge in boosting ITV1's ratings. "Looking at this week's coverage, of course there's a story there, I see that," he says. "But this isn't a sprint, it's a marathon. We've got hugely successful shows coming in, and I know that some will work and some won't. I've just got to minimise those that won't."

And if his celebrity summer fails to cut it, he knows there won't be too many second chances.

(Evening Standard, April 6 2005)