The CV

‘Do you know who Rupert Murdoch is?’
    ‘No, who is he?’
    ‘He’s the man who owns the Sun and The Times. He’s the man who had that trouble down in Wapping with the strikes and all that.’
    It suddenly dawned on me that I hadn’t bothered to pick up the phone to speak to one of the world’s biggest media moguls. I was totally cocooned in my own little world – I knew everybody’s names in the electronics business, but I couldn’t tell you the names of any government ministers, pop stars or other celebrities.
    ‘Okay, Frances, get him on the phone straightaway.’
    Rupert told me that my company had been recommended to him and he wanted to come and talk to me about the possibility of launching a satellite TV service in England. He’d heard that at one stage Amstrad had joined Granada and Virgin in a consortium to bid for the right to put up a satellite TV service known as BSB. He was right – we had done that. However, when I got the measure of some of the people in this consortium, and their lack of ideas, I decided I was no longer going to play. Richard Branson followed shortly afterwards.
    Murdoch’s idea was to broadcast sixteen additional TV channels in the UK via a satellite launched by the company Astra. In those days, only four television channels existed: BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Channel 4. When I heardhis idea, I knew immediately it would be a great consumer product – the punters would go bananas for an extra sixteen channels if it could be done cheaply.
    We agreed to meet and Rupert was driven from Wapping all the way to my headquarters in Brentwood. To be fair, he told me straightaway that he had done the rounds – he’d gone to the likes of Sony, Philips and even GEC, but no one was prepared to make any decisions unless he was willing to lay out a lot of money for development.
    Lord Weinstock, the chairman of GEC, told him, ‘Go and see Sugar, he’s the man who can bring a consumer electronics product to the market faster than anyone else. In fact, while Sony and Philips are still thinking about it, he will have them in the market for you.’ Those are the very words Rupert told me he’d heard from Lord Weinstock.
    The proposition I put to him was this: ‘If you, Mr Murdoch, provide sixteen channels of additional television, including movie channels, news and sports, I will find a way of making satellite receiving equipment so that it can be sold in places like Dixons for a hundred and ninety-nine quid.’ It was my opinion that if we could achieve this, the whole thing would work. In fact, I told Rupert I was so confident about this that he didn’t need to underwrite any orders. If he would agree to press the button on renting the space on the satellite and putting up the sixteen channels, I would be prepared to start development and production at my own risk. There was no official agreement, just a handshake. His transmission date was February 1989 – my job was to make sure that we had equipment in the marketplace by then.
    It was now June 1988, so we had eight months to do it. Rupert called a press conference and asked me to attend. It was a massive bash held in the BAFTA auditorium in Piccadilly. After promising to launch Sky Television by February 1989, he turned to the audience and said, ‘And this man here is going to make the equipment to receive the broadcasts – and it’s going to be available for a hundred and ninety-nine quid! The proposition is, ladies and gentlemen, sixteen more channels of television for a hundred and ninety-nine quid.’
    I started to feel a bit nervous, sitting there in front of the world’s media, smiling as if to say, ‘Yes, that’s right.’ Little did Rupert know that we didn’t have a bleedin’ clue how to make them yet – it was just my gut instinct that we could do it. I didn’t realise what I’d let myself in for.
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1990 – 1999:
    The acquisition of Klinsmann, Dumitrescu and Popescu seemed to have kick-started a new revolution of foreign players joining the Premier League. In the past, players came from the local community, trained in the youth academies and had a real allegiance to the club. I reminded the meeting about this and how we were now being flooded by foreigners coming here for the money, simply because we were the richest league around. We were now attracting these Carlos Kickaballs who had no history with our clubs and would go anywhere for money. The Carlos Kickaball remark got more laughter. To