It’s all getting rather exciting at Five
That’s Five the broadcaster, not five o’clock when I shall - as tradition and budgetary limitations dictate - be serving jacket potatoes to the kids for tea.
No, over at Five the broadcaster all my favourite TV execs of all time are gathering. Dawn Airey, aka scary Airey or Zulu Dawn, rejoined the broadcaster at the end of October from another long period of gardening leave. She’s immediately set about changing things and promising to make lots of noise, as she did when she was first there from before Five’s launch in 1997 until 2002 when she moved to Sky.
No sooner had Dawn rejoined Five as chief executive than she announced she’d poached former Five colleague and friend Jeff Ford back from Channel 4 to head acquisitions and become her managing director. Today we hear that Dawn has hired Richard Woolfe, who she worked with at Sky where he’s been running Sky One (and Two and however many other Sky numbered channels they have there now).
This makes me happy for two reasons. One: Woolfe is a lovely man with a canny touch when it comes to making unwatchable digital channels suddenly quite watchable (he did it with Living where he pioneered paranormal programming such as Most Haunted which still does incredibly well for them and a line in so-called “pink” programming such as Queer Eye For the Straight Guy and Will & Grace (above); and he’s done it at Sky with Lost and Gladiators. Even if we don’t actually watch Gladiators, we’ve certainly read about its return in the papers).
Two: I suggested Woolfe would go to Five blinking yonks ago (in 2003) when he managed to convince me he was the frontrunner for the job Kevin Lygo had just vacated. I’m sure he won’t mind me sharing that, now that he’s finally got a major channel to run.
Huzzah. Let’s all watch more of Five. Oh - there’s only Paul Merton on that I like. Still, the only way is up.