New BBC Chairman Michael Grade An Early Supporter of EastEnders
By Larry Jaffee
LONDON-Michael Grade, the new chairman of the BBC, comes to the post as a major supporter of EastEnders, which he helped launch in the mid-1980s. In his 1999 autobiography, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, Grade spends several pages recounting how the BBC board of governors in the early 1980s were generally against the BBC's risking its reputation on EastEnders to take on the firmly established Coronation Street. Apparently the governors regarded soap opera as a bit lowbrow and were concerned that EastEnders would "lower the tone of the BBC."
Writes Grade, who at the time was controller of BBC1: "The governors hummed and hawed, doubted whether the goings-on in a London square would interest viewers, tut-tutted at some of the plot lines and grumbled at the cost...
However, once EastEnders hit the top ten, the governors could not have been more proprietorial and self-congratulatory had they dreamed it all up in the boardroom."
He tells of being at the BBC for 15 months when BBC management received an advanced screening of the first episode, in which Den Watts finds Reg Cox's dead body. "Half an hour later I took the cassette out of the video recorder and didn't wait for anyone to express an opinion. I could tell from the pregnant silence that everyone in the room was hooked. We were in business."
He later reminisces about the 1985 Christmas episode, which was watched 29 million people in the U.K. "It was a sweet moment for me and a just reward for a team who had dedicated years of their life to realising the original idea and battling their way through all kinds of discouragement and cynicism, some of it coming from within the upper reaches of the BBC itself."
In his book, Grade tells of fighting "all my life against elitism in every form of entertainment and I have nothing but contempt for the classical intellectual view that television is a medium of mindless entertainment." He cites disdainfully a Nobel Prize winner who admitted to being hooked on EastEnders, in a shameful manner akin to confessing of being a wifebeater.
When EastEnders first launched in the U.S. via public television in late 1987, Grade was among four BBC executives singled out for being responsible for the show's creation. His position at the time was director of programmes of BBC Television, and initiated the development of EastEnders.
Grade began his career as a sports columnist for Britain's Daily Mirror in 1960. In 1966 he became joint managing director of London Management, a talent agency.
In 1973 he joined London Weekend television as head of entertainment, later serving as director of programmes. Grade, who worked in Hollywood as president of Norman Lear's Embassy Television production company for two years, joined the BBC in 1984 as controller of BBC1 and became director of programmes of BBC Television in June 1986.
Now serving as the BBC's chairman, Grade no doubt is currently preoccupied with getting the BBC's charter renewed. This ensures its funding from the British government and licence payers.
But I'm hopeful that by the fall he will have the time to listen to stateside EastEnders fans, who would like the programme to be reinstated on BBC America.
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