8 1GT Wednesday October 14 2020 | the times

arts

CHRIS MCANDREW FOR THE TIMES; IAN WEST/PA; CHARLES FEARN/PLAYGROUND TELEVISION/CHANNEL 5

Left:

Nicholas

Ralph in

All Creatures

Great and

Small. Right:

Ben Frow

The boss who

made it safe

to turn on

Channel 5

Programmes director Ben Frow took on

All Creatures from a dithering BBC and

it became a huge hit, he tells Ben Dowell

A

fter he started as

Channel 5’s director

of programmes Ben

Frow used to walk

past his opposite

number’s house

every day. He

admits that the

large, well-appointed home of Jay

Hunt, the Channel 4 boss at the time,

made him feel a stab of envy.

Despite commissioning an array of

property shows, Frow, 59, has never

played the housing market well (he is

too impetuous and doesn’t back out of

purchases when he should, he says)

and still occupies a small flat in

Clapham with his civil partner, Nigel,

a retired costume designer. The

splendour of Casa Hunt was “a knife

in my heart every time”, he says.

His covetousness feels emblematic.

At the start of his tenure in 2012,

Channel 5 often looked resentfully at

the bigger guns and still had a tacky

reputation, partly owing to its 1990s

mantra: “films, f****g and football”.

No more. It still has a lot of populist

programmes, yet is being taken

seriously with Michael Portillo,

Michael Palin and the historian

Bettany Hughes on its roster. And it

has just scored a hit with a remake of

the BBC’s veterinary favourite, All

Creatures Great and Small. It pulled in

a consolidated audience of 5 million

viewers for episode one, unheard-of

numbers for this channel.

All Creatures Great and Small was

reportedly first offered to the BBC,

which planned a 90-minute pilot.

The producers are understood to have

then approached Channel 5, which

committed immediately to a full series.

Speculation (denied by BBC insiders)

is that rural Yorkshire in the 1930s

wasn’t racially diverse enough for the

BBC, which also worried that it

wouldn’t attract a youth audience.

“I certainly couldn’t speak for the

BBC,” Frow says via Zoom from his

office shed in his small garden. “I don’t

target any specific kind of viewer. I

don’t just target a young audience

because a young audience is very hard

to find. And trying to second-guess

very clever young people is a fool’s

game. But if you get a big audience

you will get all the demos

[demographics] that you need.”

While BBC sources insist that its

decision was entirely creative, it is easy

to see them anxiously imagining all

the white faces in the publicity shots.

“They may have done, but that was

never a problem that came to my door.

I never discussed it. What I knew was

that I was being offered a chance to

jump into this wholeheartedly for a

full series. My anxiety was that it was

such a well-known, iconic series and if

you didn’t match that, or better it, you

could be wasting a lot of money and

look rather bad.

“I thought there was a whole new

generation of people that hadn’t

seen the original. What we did have

was a discussion about going back

much more to the original books.

James Herriot was Scottish; our James

Herriot is Scottish.” A Christmas

special is coming, as is a second series.

Will there be a regular non-white face

in the Dales for series two? “I hope so,

yes,” he says. “I would like every

programme to be representative.”

Frow is one of the few people at

the top of television who went to

a comprehensive and he thinks

education is important in the drive for

diversity, which includes a New Faces,

New Voices “talent trawl” at his

boardroom as a butler brought

Desmond the week’s ratings on

a silver salver.

Yet the pair forged a mutual respect

and had, he claims, only one argument

— when Desmond accused him of not

doing his job properly because he

didn’t watch every Channel 5

programme every day. That would be

impossible even for Frow, who spends

his evenings watching his schedule

and texting commissioners and

marketing people, praising them or

taking them to task. He compares his

channel to a department store and

tinkers with the titles of his shows,

which he sees as shop windows. (“If

Our Yorkshire Farm had been called

The Yorkshire Shepherdess it wouldn’t

be the hit it is.”)

You might expect him to have even

bigger dreams, but he says he has

“never had an ambition” in his life.

He cannot understand BBC people

who “run channels... and go on to

become director-general. Why would

you want to step away from ideas? It

would be like me becoming managing

director, where it would all be about

budgets and strategy. I am obsessed

by content.”

He has been in his post for more

than seven years, which in industry

terms is a long time, but while he

admits that he is “knocking on a bit

now”, he is plotting more successes. All

Creatures Great and Small could go

on “for years and years”, and he is

hoping to revive another old TV

favourite, although he won’t name

it. What keeps him going? “I do

get down and I think creative

people — and I would class

myself as a creative person —

are, inevitably, deeply insecure.

“I am ruled by fear: of failure,

of not being relevant, of being

laughed at, of disappointing

people, of not delivering the

numbers. I use it as a motivator.

If I am going to fail I want to fail

going down in flames doing the

best I can do.”

channel. He is keen to encourage

people like him who don’t have

degrees (“How many artists or writers

or actors have degrees?”) and thinks

diversity shouldn’t feel “enforced” or

“awkward”. “I want it to feel like you

don’t even notice it, that it doesn’t jar

with viewers and they embrace it.”

All Creatures Great and Small

and the channel’s many history

programmes have also tapped into

the anxieties of a nation facing a

pandemic and Brexit, he believes.

“People taking control of their own

lives, moving out of the city, into the

country,” he says. “A simple life. Our

obsession with consumerism became

so big I felt people would want to

maybe turn their back on that a bit

and of course that is what happened.”

He talks a lot about commissioning

with his gut; he missed the office in

lockdown because of the ideas that

spring up from talking to people (he

now goes in two days a week). He is

an advocate of astrology and a

Buddhist who chants every morning.

Colleagues talk of his extraordinary

energy. He admits he can be highly

strung and has to be handled carefully,

but there is deep respect and affection

within his team, not least because

Frow has come up the hard way.

He started as a stylist on This

Morning, where his duties involved

washing Judy Finnigan’s tights. She

and her husband, Richard Madeley,

remain “mentors” and close friends.

He has also survived working with

the colourful mogul Richard

Desmond, who owned Channel 5

when Frow joined (it is now

owned by Viacom). Desmond’s

first words to him were, Frow

assures me, “F*** me, you’re

short, and you’re a poofter.”

That “sent a very clear message

of how the next 14 months was

going to be”, he says, chuckling.

It left him with a “rollercoaster

ride of great stories”, including

weekly meetings when he

would wait tensely in the

Trying

to second-

guess

clever

young

people

is a fool’s

game

L N R A G S B

Judy Finnigan and

Richard Madeley, who

were mentors to Frow