Television's populist supreme finally wins his kingdom

A puppet rat and 'Blind Date' have been the highs of Greg Dyke's colourful career

REBECCA FOWLER

He is the man most famous for the common touch, who brought Blind Date, the Gladiators, and Roland Rat to Britain's homes. But Greg Dyke was cracking open the champagne with characteristic flamboyance yesterday after finally winning his own television kingdom.

Mr Dyke, 48, celebrating his victorious bid for Channel 5 as chief executive of Pearson Television, is known as one of the largest personalities in the media world. He has been lauded by colleagues as the "rudest", "loveliest", "most ambitious" and "human" executives they have worked with.

In a career spanning almost two decades, Mr Dyke led a populist revolution. He first rose to national fame in 1983 when he transformed a failing TV- am by by-passing highbrow presenters with a cockney puppet rat and Anne Diamond. Ratings went from 200,000 to 1.6 million in a year.

His latest victory was welcomed by former colleagues and competitors. Nick Elliot, the head of drama at ITV Network Centre, praised Mr Dyke as a businessman and also as a "character" who is famous for his humour and socialist sympathies.

"He's enormous fun, a bit of a show-off who is driven by the business but never forgets the people side of things," Mr Elliot said.

Mr Dyke's background did not obviously lend itself to a career as one of the richest and most powerful men in television. He grew up in Hayes, Middlesex, left school at 16 and became a Sixties hippie and social campaigner, and later a Labour candidate. When he was 24 he read politics at York University, but has never lost his distrust of intellectualism.

He worked as a newspaper reporter but at 30 he found himself unemployed before joining London Weekend Television as a researcher, rising to producer of The Six O'clock Show.

After leading TV-am to success, he completed a course at Harvard Business School and returned to head up LWT. "One of them had signed my farewell card 'F*** off Dyke', so he was glad to see me back," he said.

Mr Dyke slashed the staff by more than half, and removed the lavish system of perks. He reconciled it with his principles on the basis that LWT paid out generous redundancies.

Mr Dyke acknowledges the trappings of success are sometimes uneasy with socialism. After a trip to Glyndebourne, he turned to Sue, his partner, in the back of a chauffeured limousine, champagne glass in hand, and said: "You know what Sue? We've become the people we used to want to throw bombs at."

But Mr Dyke has built his career on being a so-called man of the people. He recognised the mass appeal of television personalities such as Cilla Black and Michael Barrymore, and had an instinct for scheduling.

When he left his pounds 134,000-job at LWT after Granada took over, he was pounds 10m the richer alongside fellow directors under a share option scheme.

After a year in the wilderness he joined Pearson, regarded as a blue- blooded establishment stuffed with Old Etonians. According to his friends, Mr Dyke will continue popular programming, but will also use Channel 5 to secure his own reputation.

"He's already proved he's got a very successful popular touch, but he cares about British programming, and he wants to leave his mark," said Roger Bolton, an independent producer. "He may have left [LWT] with a lot of money but he felt very bruised seeing it taken over by other people. He still has something to prove."