How the BBC protected its predators: Lord Grade on Russell Brand and David Walliams

0:02The Telegraph.

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1:11TV, including the BBC, is obsessed with talent and it doesn't know how to control them. That's according to entertainment guru Lord Michael Grade.

1:21Camilla: In the week Russell Brand was jailed for rape and allegations emerge against David Walliams, We speak exclusively to the man who was once at the helm of the BBC, Channel 4 and ITV during his broadcasting career. He tells us how he felt about once being labelled the pornographer in chief, why he wouldn't have tolerated Gary Lineker's behaviour at the BBC and whether TV can ever clean up its act. The structural problem in the industry is that it's a very freelance industry. and people who are working on shows with big stars and if the big stars are misbehaving, they're terrified of calling it out because it's their livelihood, it's their mortgage, they're paying their bills and they're freelance so they've not got a staff job to rely on.

2:09So if the show gets cancelled and somebody gets called out or if they call it out and it's not proven, they're out of a job and they're almost unemployable after that.

2:19Camilla: It's been a week that has rocked the show business industry, TV industry, the media in general, with the imprisonment of Russell Brand for more than 10 years for rape. And now allegations having surfaced against David Walliams. We're joined in the studio by Lord Michael Grade. A quick whistle-stop tour through your CV, Lord Grade. You started out at London Weekend Television back in the 70s. You then became controller of BBC One from 1984 to 1986. You then became the chief executive of Channel 4, 87 to 97. Famously, that was a time where it was being described as the, or you were being described as a pornographer in chief.

2:57I was indeed, yes.

2:59Camilla: For some of the boundaries that were pushed by its programming at the time, which was very edgy. You then became the BBC chairman of the Board of Governors, 2004 to 2006, during the post-Hutton restructuring period. Executive chairman of ITV, 2007 to 2009, and then chairman of Ofcom until very recently, 2022 to 2026. So you know your onions. And Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary in light of recent events, is preparing for a sort of showdown with TV bosses next week. She's threatening new legislation to force broadcasters to protect young women from predatory stars and says the industry needs to clean itself up.

3:41Camilla: Now, having been in very senior positions, during Jimmy Savile's crimes, during periods where other presenters, including more recently Hugh Edwards, now Brand, now Walliams, have come accused of very serious allegations and crimes. Has something gone terribly wrong with this industry? Obviously, yes. And the problem is that many of them are very smart at hiding their activities, particularly the people, Jimmy Savile, I mean, he was on a power trip. He used to occasionally pop into my office, yes, governor, no guy, hello, governor, hello, gaffer, and do all that, and he was on a power trip. He was looking at me thinking, this guy doesn't know what I know about me.

4:35You know, it's all a power trip for some of them. Others, they're just stupid and arrogant. And the structural problem in the industry is that it's a very freelance industry. And people who are working on shows with big stars, and if the big stars are misbehaving, they're terrified of calling it out because it's their livelihood. It's their mortgage. It's their paying their bills. And they're freelance, so they've not got a staff job to rely on. So if the show gets cancelled and somebody gets called out or if they call it out and it's not proven, you know, they're out of a job and they're almost unemployable after that.

5:16That's one of the endemic problems in the industry because it's so freelance today.

5:21Camilla: We will unpick that. Just the statement that they're good at hiding things and they're secretive and they're cunning. I think there is a commonality here when we link up for instance Saville to Brand in that actually their behaviour was an open secret back in the day even when you were controller of the BBC you must have heard things about Saville never heard a thing even that he was deeply creepy and weird I mean people regard him as a very strange man if being creepy and weird is a bar to show business then we wouldn't have much show business all right well I give another example If you used to call Jimmy Savile for a quote from a newspaper, you would phone up his flat in Leeds and he'd invariably answer.

6:07Camilla: He didn't seem to have that many staff. And he would often open the conversation with a sort of joke about she told me her age and she was over 16 and I haven't done anything wrong. And it was like there's a pattern here, isn't there? These predators seemingly creating this aura around them where they're almost taking the public for fools. And just to step in there, Louis Theroux, when he interviewed Jimmy Savile, also almost directly addressed this, didn't he? He was addressing an open secret. He was asking, is there any truth in it? Are there any truth to the pedo readers? The point being that the secret was open enough that he felt he could and should address it.

6:47And Savile had to throw it away. If you're going to close the show down and fire somebody, they've got contracts. You've got to have proof. You've got to have evidence. And that's the hard bit. That's the very difficult bit. Just because somebody makes an accusation, you know, we live in a world now, you read the papers, people are guilty by accusation in many cases. They may turn out to be guilty like Russell Brand, but the assumption is these people are guilty before they're even charged, which is a worry going forward. We're going to overreact and the pendulum's going to swing and somebody with a grievance could accuse somebody wrongly.

7:26and all the hell will break loose and their careers will be finished over a slur. So we've got to be a little bit careful here. That's not to defend. But the difficulty is these people have cast iron contracts and if you're going to fire them and not pay them and get rid of them, you've got to have the evidence that will stand up in court. But when you come to commission someone like that, you might choose not to just on the basis not of rumour but taste. I mean, what a lot of our readers are saying after the revelations about Russell Brand is, I never liked him to begin with. And the nature of the comedy was hyper-sexualized.

8:03I couldn't agree with you more. And people at the time found it distasteful. Taste is everything when you're making decisions about who to employ and what shows to commission. Taste is everything. For me, when I used to employ commissioning editors to make programs and producers, their taste was the uppermost in my mind. And I was taught that by Bill Cotton, who was one of my mentors, who was the head of BBC television and recruited me into the BBC. And he was a stickler. He was absolutely a stickler who was and wasn't a BBC actor. There were certain people he wouldn't employ who were big stars.

8:41He said, they're not for the BBC. see. We have lost that.

8:46Camilla: But then, Lord Grade, when you were described as a pornographer in chief which is actually a title I'm used to because I used to work for Richard Desmond at the Sunday Express. But you were criticised at the time, so that's during the 80s into the 90s. To be fair to you, you'd left Channel 4 by the time they are then giving brand very lucrative contracts to do all sorts of presenting. That was more in the noughties and beyond. Was that over things like Dennis Potter? Well, what was it? I just want to be clear, You were not broadcasting pornography, right? You were broadcasting art. Absolutely not.

9:16The conservative audiences. It would have been illegal. I would never broadcast anything.

9:20Camilla: So was it about you commissioning art house drama and that kind of thing? No, it was mostly about a thing called The Word, which was the sort of late night student ridiculous extreme show. Hosted by Terry Christian and famously including a section where young men and women I'll do anything to get on TV. Were invited to snog grannies and things. Yes, it was fairly. I was avid viewers. Fairly lowbrow stuff. Right. But it appealed to drunk students after they'd come home from the curry house and the pub. Right. But we were just discussing taste. Yes. And you were saying it's very, very important.

9:55Yes. And that is distasteful. And I don't appear like a moral hypocrite. We all, when we could, used to sneak downstairs and watch the telly when the parents had gone to bed and see this sort of stuff. But you made a choice to broadcast that kind of thing. And people would say it added to the environment in which people like Russell Brand arose. I think you could argue that. Looking back, you could argue that. It was a time when Channel 4 was, you know, fighting for its life in a new environment, having to sell its own airtime, which it hadn't had to do before. It had a secure income from ITV and so on.

10:29And we were the channel that was there to cause trouble and, you know, kick over the traces and do naughty things. looking back I wouldn't say it's a program it's a program I defended at the time because I would never have broadcast anything I didn't feel I could defend publicly but looking back you know I'm not that proud of there are many shows I'm much more proud of also I suppose at

10:56Camilla: the time channel 4 and it remains in viewership a fringe channel what it then does is it creates a degree of mainstreamisation of very controversial figures. So you then go, you get Russell Brand going from sort of MTV where he decides it's a good idea to go into the studio dressed as Osama Bin Laden the day after 9-11, gets sacked there, gets commissioned by some Channel 4 people to do some edgy programming there. The next thing we know, because he's then on the public's consciousness, and this is somebody who literally was on the Edinburgh Fringe originally, then ends up being given shows on radio too.

11:35Camilla: Then people are surprised when something like Sax Gates happens, when this guy has a career, he's a career controversialist. Well, we're talking about two different things here. We're talking about booking an artist who's a bit edgy and a bit out there. And that's where the taste comes in. But that's a subjective judgment. and after the horror with that prank with Andrew Sachs. And his granddaughter. And his granddaughter. I mean, you know, his feet wouldn't have touched the ground if I'd been in charge. But there you go. That was a warning sign. The second thing is his behavior towards women, which is a completely separate thing.

12:18Although it comes from the same person, his behavior towards women is...

12:23Camilla: But he literally broadcast his bad behaviour towards women. And the BBC actually didn't react to it going out on air until afterwards. I mean, it's a bit reminiscent more recently of, you know, death, death to the IDF at Glastonbury. I suppose looking back, because we started with Savile, how can the public have any confidence in these reports that are carried out into these horrific incidents where classically the line is lessons will be learned? they can't have been learned from Savile if we then get Brand nothing's been learned has it every 10 years we have to have one of these we have to have this big confrontation and you just think well why didn't you learn from it last time because I think what these terrible terrible scandals do if you want to find some positive in these horror stories is that I think more and more the junior staff working with these people and the victims of these people are beginning to get more confidence in being believed and speaking out.

13:30I think that's hopefully a small plus that will help to eliminate this kind of behaviour.

13:38Camilla: But isn't another problem that broadcasters give a disproportionate amount of power to the talent? Talent's always had power. But talent's got too much power. It can be this easily abused. Does talent actually matter? Oh, God, yes. Because sometimes when one thinks about Gary Lineker, I'm not saying he's in any way associated with this, but I mean the political controversies around Lineker, some people argued, well, actually, Match the Day could be presented by anyone. The point is the institution, not the talent. Or do you disagree with that? In the Gary Lineker case, I agree with you. Right.

14:10And I think, you know, if I'd been around, he wouldn't have lasted as long as he did. Yeah. Because I think he really brought the BBC into disrepute and risked their impartiality in a way that was just, you know, unacceptable from a sports presenter. It was ridiculous. So the BBC was at fault there, very, very definitely.

14:39Camilla: But this idea that talent, I mean, arguably at the BBC, people are just paid too much. It's licence fee payers money. Lots of people kind of incredulous when that list of salaries comes out as to what Zoe Ball is paid and what this person's paid and all the rest of it. Point one. Point two, there seems to be this, you know, complete, I don't know, are there blinkers on this? oh the talent can just do what it likes and nobody can really rein them in because they're the talent, the talent, the talent, the talent and therefore it's a self-fulfilling prophecy the more smoke you blow up the arse of the talent the more out of control the talent's ego will become It's about the executive's career and success and how you judge success you know you judge success at the BBC or you should judge success at the BBC on screen and on the radio in a different way from which you judge success in a very commercial environment where the bottom line is everything between Channel 4, Channel 5, ITV, Sky and so on.

15:41The BBC doesn't have those commercial pressures and it's always conflicted about, you know, if we don't get the ratings, we're, you know, we're not doing our job and what's the purpose of the BBC and if we do get ratings we're being populist they're always fighting that that's a healthy battle but where the bbc needs to go back to is to being a nursery for talent and they're going to lose i lost everybody at channel four i lost so many stars to the bbc that we had nurtured when i was my nine years at channel four and they went off to the bbc bigger audience more money um yeah but the bbc should be a nursery for talent, not a grocery.

16:25I mean, when I ask about does talent matter, I just feel sometimes the BBC falls back upon talent as if that justifies the program itself. For instance, I just don't understand why every reality TV show needs to have a celebrity version of it. And I often find they're not as high quality. I don't think celebrity traitors is as good as ordinary people. They vary. But why does Alan Titchmarsh have to present the proms? why not give me a classic music expert I'm not saying he's a bad person I just feel there is a culture in the BBC if we have to slap a recognisable face on everything because we don't trust the product to sell itself when actually the BBC is something that people would go to because I'm interested in gardening, I'm interested in history You want authorship, you want authority in certain programs most particularly when you see documentaries you know even when you look at world of war which is one of the greatest documentary series ever made uh thames television itv the 26 parts series about world war ii it was voiced by laurence olivier yeah you know it wasn't voiced by anthony beaver or or or andrew roberts or somebody who who's a who's got an authoritative voice that is very important i think we're losing that.

17:46I think that's horrible.

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19:37The other thing that concerns people is the hypocrisy. And I was interested in you saying that Gary Lineker wouldn't have lasted if you'd been in the job, because it feels as if some abuses behind the scenes are tolerated, whereas sometimes differing political opinions are actually cracked down on. We have the example of Lucy Cohn, who we've interviewed on this podcast, who says that she was driven out of the BBC because she was a Jewish producer who supported Israel. Why is that sort of thing able to happen? It shouldn't have. Right. What we haven't heard in the Lucy Cohn case is the BBC side of the story.

20:13And I think it's very regrettable that the custodians of the public interest in the BBC, the board of the BBC, have not issued any commentary on what is. They have issued money. They've paid her off. Yes. But did the board know? Was it signed off by the board? Did the executive come and say, we've got this problem? Why was she paid off? It suggests on the face of it that they were in the wrong. But she describes, for example, people saying to her, you have to give Hamas its side of the story in Israel. Putting the politics of that aside, that shows perhaps an admirable degree of sensitivity towards balance at the BBC that isn't shown apparently in some cases when it comes to sexual harassment.

20:56That's what people find so peculiar, an organization that bends over backwards when it comes to political matters, but apparently has not been showing the same vigilance when it comes to sexual harassment. On the sexual harassment issue, you have to be aware of the accusations. You have to investigate in a forensic and professional way. And I'm not sure that people in HR or lawyers are the right people. You know, you need a detective.

21:25Camilla: Or you just needed, in the case of the BBC, somebody to have read both of Russell Brand's autobiographies. And then it would have all been laid bare. And Jimmy Savills. And Jimmy's that because because say in the case of Lucy Conn, I do find it unbelievable that on one hand we have Brand. Brand reveals he is basically completely disrespectful of women, that he wants to bed 5000, that he's completely indiscriminate sexually and is grotesquely promiscuous. OK, you could say it would be being a prig to suggest he might not be a suitable face for the national broadcaster. Or you could say maybe. In his book, he reveals that he urinated in a cup in a studio.

22:06Camilla: He reveals that he went under a desk and basically tried to sexually interfere with a newsreader while she was doing her job. He confesses that he would set up competition winners to be female for his Radio 2 show, ensure that they could come in and see him and then try and reserve the disabled toilet so he could have sex with them. The list goes on. Apparently that's all fine with the BBC, but Lucy Conn says, actually, I think we should probably do some more balanced coverage of the conflict in the Middle East. And somebody goes, leave now. I mean, it's absolutely ridiculous. It's terrible. As you retail that, it is shocking.

22:47It's a shocking indictment of the executive class at the BBC.

22:52Camilla: They're not led properly. But it also suggests they're beholden to the... This is what I'm trying to say about... Are they just... I mean, there's an unpleasant way to say it, star something. Are some of these people at the BBC just so in awe of the talent that they literally cannot make the right decisions at the right times about the right issues? It's a much more precarious profession than when I first came into television. and your job, your career depends on you delivering, you know, success very quickly. You know, you were allowed to fail. In my day, life was much easier. The whole financial structure of broadcasting was a hell of a lot easier than it is today.

23:30I'm not pretending it wasn't. But you were allowed to fail and you had a job, you know, you had a staff job and you had a pension. And if you got things wrong, you know, if you continue to do things wrong, they'd move you sideways at the BBC rather than get rid of you. Today, you're in or you're out. I mean, it's a revolving door everywhere. And that's the problem. And so you get a bit of success with a star. You'll forgive them for anything because, you know, it means your career will progress.

23:59Camilla: Ah, that is interesting. Because then as well, I was just going to say, the next thing we know, this paragon of virtue, Russell Brand is invited to go and present comic relief. Yeah, yeah. Even though he is a self-confessed monster. I'm reminded of Tom Lehrer's comment when Henry Kissinger got the Nobel Prize. He said, that's the day satire died. Yes, that's right. Some of this has turned into a kind of a litigation of an entire decade of his entertainment output. Yes. Because people have been pointing out that, so to move on to David Walliams, Little Britain itself made a virtue of cruelty. It was about laughing at men dressed as women, laughing at the disabled.

24:45It was, again, as I said, hyper-sexualized in its content. What happened to us in the early 2000s? I don't want to be too puritanical about this. I watched it. I found it very funny. I still do. But what was it about the culture of that time that we wanted to push those boundaries in that way? Well, it's about the boundaries of taste move with every generation. I remember the world fell in on me when we broadcast episode three of The Singing Detective with the bonking scene in the middle of it. And that's art. Which went further than we'd ever gone on the BBC. And I spent days agonizing and going over it with the writers and the producers.

25:31Camilla: Remember the controversy about Sean Bean and Jolie Richardson depicting the famous sex scene in Lady Chatterley's Lover. I mean, that seems Victorian by comparison. The boundaries of taste move on, and we have been through a sort of lad's culture. Yes. You know, I think it probably started with page three in The Sun. Yeah. I think the sort of Rupert Murdoch view of the media has got a lot to answer for. I think it has coarsened the nation's dialogue and reduced. I mean I was on the Daily Mirror In the 1960s under Hugh Cuddley Before the sun emerged And at the Mirror's lunch The Mirror was a very serious paper It was full of fun It had the Jane cartoon Which was a sort of Silly Feminist Anti-feminist cartoon really But the paper had a very serious point to it And we sold five and a quarter million every day But the advent of Rupert I think.

26:32Camilla: Well, the advent of Larry Lamb, I mean, it's immortalised in the film version of the stage play Inc, right? And it does show the mirror in the face of Lamb's assault on the readership and basically saying that people are interested in reading about sex. They're interested in reading about gossip. They're interested in reading about sport. Sex and television. And television, crucially, right? And then the ratings overtake. Now, there is nothing necessarily wrong with people being interested in sex per se. But I suppose to Tim's point, this period seemed to be this sort of an era of a glorification of depravity, for want of a better word.

27:13Yeah, it reveled in it being borderline immoral. Yeah, immoral. I mean, I would perhaps use a different word, you know, with really without any kind of taste or any point. Yes. Really, you know, the best, the best comedies, situation comedies or comedic plays are the plays that have something on their mind. I worked for a genius in Hollywood, Norman Lear, who was one of the great comedy producers of all time in America. And he always said that the more serious a subject, the funnier you can be. Yes. He always said, but you have to do it with taste. Yeah. And we've lost that. And there was a lads culture and people jumped onto it.

27:55And the comedy circuit, you know, to survive on, I haven't been in touch with it of late, but to survive on the comedy circuit, you know, you had to push the boundaries. It's no different from a comedian going out in the old days in vaudeville or wherever and telling a dirty joke. And if you open with a dirty joke, there's only one way to go. The next joke has to be even dirtier and even dirtier and even dirtier. And then you end up, you know, it's just horrible. You've climaxed too early. That's the problem. Absolutely. But that's what's happened. It's just, it just started. There was a moment where the lads' culture.

28:37Camilla: Well, also, yeah, I think comedians became the new rock stars, didn't they? Well, and they were also imbued with philosophical qualities that I don't think they ever really have. But people began to look at them as being sages, that they could give us an insight into human nature. Which is not something I'm sure the older kind of musical community claimed to have. Well, exactly. But it occurs to me, I mean, one problem with this form of cultural production is I think it actually ruins eroticism. I mean, you mentioned things like The Singing Detective, which pushes boundaries about the depictions of sex.

29:09and that's partly because it's about, just to explain, it's about a man who has a profound disability in hospital who's remembering his life and he's confusing it with pulp fiction and so he remembers the rot he encounters. He's confusing, he doesn't know what sex is, the kid in the tree watching his mother having sex in the field and he thinks it's violent. Yes, yes. He doesn't know about sex and he thinks this guy's being violent to his mother and it completely throws his whole life this experience. That is a profound insight, that if you're going to show it honestly and effectively on TV, you have to display sex.

29:47So I would class that in perhaps the erotic category of art. What we're talking about here is a pornography. Gratuitous. Gratuitous pornography. And I wonder if part of the reason why our culture became so gratuitous was actually, paradoxically, because popular entertainment went into decline at the same time. So when you were commissioning telly, millions of people were watching things like The Singing Detective. And so you always had to think about, will questions be asked in Parliament? Will viewers write me angry letters? The question always was, can I justify this? Can I defend this publicly?

30:22Can you justify it to the public? Whereas post-2000, when telly goes into decline and fewer and fewer people are watching it or they're watching different things. It's more competitive. It's more competitive and you no longer have to care so much about alienating the mass audience because you're speaking to a niche. I think you're absolutely right, Tim. I think that's spot on.

30:41Camilla: Also, isn't it? And we've lost a lot. But it's also TV, perhaps. OK, TV now, linear TV is competing with streaming giants that have bigger budgets to present bigger, more glossy programs. And that's one problem. But isn't there also a sense to which standards have slipped because you're also competing now with social media, which basically publishes with impunity and you can find all sorts of things on there. And if you're particularly chasing a younger audience that itself is chasing people like originally pranksters, like the sidemen and then kind of ever more elaborate stunts. And by the way, there is a drip feed of, well, not even a drip feed, a torrent of pornography to access while you're at it.

31:27Camilla: Television has got to, you know, do hysterical things and take more risks just to keep the audience happy. I think you're right. I think that one of the problems is this obsession with the youth. Yes. And not just with the youth audience, but with youth in your own building. You know, if you're the BBC or whatever, you know, where are the grey hairs? Where are the people who've lived through this? Where are the people, you know, the real wise old heads that you could always rely on to control the kids? You want the kids. But there's so many, the lads, let's call it the lads' culture as a sort of generic for what we're discussing.

32:12The people who control television and control what gets made and what doesn't get, are people of that generation. They're all so young.

32:20Camilla: But that's the point as well, isn't it? I mean, it's been endemic at the BBC, idiotic decisions like getting rid of Ken Bruce. And then he goes and creates. Because he's old. Because he's old. because we're trying to attract a younger audience. Not forgetting that the main audience... Well, first of all, not forgetting... First of all, forgetting how fickle the young are. I mean, you can't rely on them. They've never watched television. No, you can't rely on them for anything. In my day, when there were only three channels or four channels, they never watched television. Once they get married and have kids and a mortgage, they're on the sofa watching these tenders.

32:52So you take decisions to appeal to the kids

32:54Camilla: who aren't going to come with you anyway and at the same time completely disenfranchise your older, more loyal audience because you've got rid of the people. Mind you, then I'm being, I'm slightly contradicting myself because I'm saying a talent like Ken Bruce is worth preserving. But then he's a man of great broadcasting quality. The BBC at its best is when it's doing things like Strictly, you know, which is a show that appeals to all ages, all classes. You know, in the old days, Morecambe Wise, you know, everybody, everybody from the road sweeper to Buckingham Palace watch Morecambe and Wise.

33:32And the BBC at its best provides a benchmark and the gold standard of entertainment, journalism and all the rest of it. Is it doing that today?

33:44Camilla: Also, haven't we had it up to here with Strickley? In the 1980s, didn't you cancel Come Dancing? I may have done. I can't remember. Angela Rippon I did cancel beauty competitions You also suspended and I have friends who will never forgive me if I don't ask this and you know what I'm going to say you suspended Doctor Who for 18 months Do you regret that now? No Why did you do that? I remember the meeting, the producer came in we were talking about next year and he said how many Doctor Whos do you want? I said none and the blood drained from his body and said why? I said have you been to the movies lately?

34:24he said yes i said have you seen star wars have you seen close encounters have you seen et yes he said yes i said i've got news we show the audience and this show doesn't cut it anymore but that's because you wouldn't give it the budget you wouldn't give it the money well they weren't digital effects and all the things right that they've revived it today yeah i mean the sorts of things they can do today in with ai and digital effects lifts it into a cinematic so you want your objection was the production quality not the program itself yeah right it wasn't that you hated science fiction i do hate science there you go i do hate science i must never you must never the trap when you're when you're running a network the trap is to is to rely on your own taste yes uh you have to understand every day you come to work you don't have a monopoly of taste classic example there was a my head of comedy at channel 4 showed me a pilot of a show which i hated and i wrote him a handwritten memo which i very rarely ever did and i said this is a silly show it's got nothing on its mind it's vacuous and i went through it i said but if you really believe in it you know go with god good luck yeah you know and that was father ted oh no it went straight over my head there you go but i knew enough to know that i you know you you don't have a monopoly at taste and given the success that knew who had do you in retrospect think I could have done that I could have made that kind of program You didn't have the budgets and you didn't have the technical effects the special effects, your green screen and all that stuff that wasn't available

36:00Camilla: They were making Daleks out of cardboard boxes at that point Tim They couldn't go uphill It went up the stairs in remembrance of the Daleks If you knew you were who you would know that Do you think they were I mean it's current status is unsettled but do you think it's time for knew who to take a break. Well, this clip is going to get hundreds of thousands of views, believe me. Some shows can reinvent themselves, which Doctor Who has done. It will need the next Russell T. Davis to take it on. I'll tell you who else it needs. Go on. Tim Stanley in the title role. It's either that or Tim Stanley presenting the next Crufts.

36:40Why not?

36:40Camilla: We could do a whole monkey. With canine. We could do a monkey tennis session with Lord Grade now where we do have some ideas. I do have some ideas. A final question to you because it's been quite serious-minded for obvious reasons because of everything that's gone on in recent days and weeks at Lord Grade. Can you give us the best TV decision you've ever made and the worst? Best TV decision I ever made, I think, was to agree to run the Live Aid Christmas video. Yes. And the Bob Geldof, a Mr. Geldof, I didn't know who the hell he was in those days, rang and wanted to get it on top of the pops. You couldn't get it on top of the pops unless you were in the charts.

37:25I said, I'm not breaking that rule. Send me the video and let me look at it just to get him off the phone. I looked at the video and thought, this is extraordinary. So I rang him back. I said, well, good news and bad. You're not going on top of the pops, but I'll delay top of the pops for five minutes and run the video at seven o 'clock.

37:40Camilla: Love it. Wow. And that was one of the best, from that day to Live Aid and the rest of it is just legend. And that's my little part. I mean, the energy of Midge and Bob Goldoff to make that all happen. You cannot believe what went on. I became a trustee after that. I'm still a trustee. We're still sending money. And it is the season to be reminded of that song. Worst decision, sitting in a screening room in Hollywood. We used to go every year and look at all the pilots of all the new shows and obviously which ones we wanted to buy for our networks. And we're watching that one-hour drama and I'm with some senior editorial colleagues from Channel 4.

38:21We watch the show. The lights go up and we all look at each other and that's the biggest lot of rubbish we've ever seen. Oh, no. Forget it. And that was X-Files.

38:31Camilla: Oh, my goodness me. It only ran for 400 scenes. Science fiction again. But I wasn't the only one in the room. We all said it was rubbish. Tim, let me guess. Did you quite like Mulder and Scully back in the day? Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. Lord Michael Gray, thank you very much indeed for joining us on today's Daily Tea. I'll be back tomorrow for a weekend tea with the lovely Michael Deacon.

39:37We'll be right back. help keep budgets balanced and lines moving. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click grainger.com, or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done.