TV's revolving doors: new bosses, familiar names

Monday May 12 will go down in media history. For the first time, the programme supremos for three main channels, ITV, BBC1 and Five, start their jobs at the same time. To recap (as the graphic shows), Peter Fincham is ITV's new director of television, replacing Simon Shaps; Jay Hunt takes over from Fincham as the new controller of BBC1; and Ben Gale steps into Hunt's office as the new programme director of Five. Phew!

Collectively they oversee around £2.2bn of programming annually and all are driven by their own agendas. The urbane former BBC1 controller Peter Fincham will arrive at ITV's Network Centre as director of television. He is looking for another big challenge after losing his BBC1 job in the Queengate brouhaha. This blooding hardened him. Though wealthy enough to walk away, he deliberately chose to plunge back into TV's turbulent waters, and will apply lessons from his BBC experience.

But Fincham faces the most immediate challenge. He has already acknowledged that the challenge of restoring ITV1 to its former glories will be more difficult than that of running BBC1. His predecessor Simon Shaps, who insisted he had always intended to step down after three years in the role, launched the biggest shake-up of the schedule in 25 years this year, with mixed results.

Having already introduced more consistency into the schedule and halted its steep ratings decline, his overhaul of the weekend line up was considered a success with hit shows like Harry Hill's TV Burp, Dancing on Ice and Britain's Got Talent. But new dramas designed to reach younger audiences like Echo Beach, The Palace and Rock Rivals were high-profile flops. While the return of News at Ten was considered an editorial success, it has half as many viewers as its BBC1 rival.

Michael Grade's latest trophy signing has instantly become more influential with the exit of Dawn Airey, though Fincham has never run anything on this commercial scale. At BBC1 he embraced entertainment, popular costume and family drama and comedy, and The One Show, his legacy hit. His key challenge is the creaky new ITV schedule introduced in January: whether to axe ailing News at Ten, and what to do about the huge bill for ineffective contemporary dramas. He's likely to favour the big, mainstream hits in the Doc Martin mould, while the comparative commercial (if not critical) success of Flood could make more international co-productions tempting. He badly needs popular factual programmes too, such as BBC1's The Apprentice, as advertising income stagnates.

One of Fincham's strengths at the BBC was considered to be his relationship with onscreen talent. As chief executive of Talkback, the independent production company where he made his name and fortune, he had a reputation for getting the best from comedians like Sacha Baron Cohen and Steve Coogan and writers like Stephen Poliakoff. He will need all his diplomatic skills to build bridges with some of ITV's biggest names and attract new ones. Ant and Dec, the network golden boys who last year signed a £30m golden handcuffs deal, are said to be annoyed at being caught up in the fallout from the premium rate phone line scandals that last week cost ITV a record £5.7m fine from media watchdog Ofcom. Their shows were among the worst offenders and they were splashed all over the front pages again last week when it emerged their 2005 British Comedy Award win was fixed without their knowledge. Their contract is up at the end of next year and renewing Simon Cowell's exclusive deal will also be a priority. Fincham will seek to continue to attempt to reinvent ITV's drama slate but is also likely to champion mainstream successes like Stephen Fry's Kingdom more loudly.

He will also be boosted by new contracts to screen live FA Cup, international and Champions League football, all guaranteed audience pullers.

Fincham, who will deliver this year's MacTaggart lecture at the Media-Guardian Edinburgh International TV Festival, has been a staunch advocate of the enduring power of mainstream channels in the face of the march of technology that has fragmented audiences and expanded choice. City analysts, most of whom think ITV chairman Michael Grade is doing a good job in trying circumstances, say Fincham will be given time. "It was a tremendous coup to get someone of Peter Fincham's stature in, so he will get the benefit of the doubt," said Paul Richards, media analyst at Numis Securities. "We're very well aware of the long lead times in production, so hopefully we'll see the results on screen sometime in autumn 2009. ITV tried be pretty radical in terms of its new programming in the new year. If you called it mixed, that would be about right. But there were some things to build on."

Fincham wants to create a nursery channel on the lines of BBC2, where new shows with mass appeal can be built up. An unresolved issue is whether to give a guarantee of programme commissions to ITV Productions, something that Airey wanted. Don't expect blood to flow at the ITV Network Centre just yet. He's not brutal.

Pitted against him is the prickly, fiercely competitive Jay Hunt, 40, an Australian by birth, who reportedly left the corporation telling friends she felt undervalued as controller of daytime and early evening, after backing Master Chef, The Great British Menu, Eggheads, Doctors and The One Show. Mark Thompson wooed her back from Five in December, recognising her as a natural populist.

The key challenge for Hunt will be to build on Fincham's successes, while also looking to refresh BBC1's contemporary drama output and counter accusations that it has dumbed down. The former BBC daytime chief had only been at Five a matter of months when she was persuaded by Thompson to return, despite initially ruling herself out. Lorraine Heggessey, Fincham's predecessor as BBC1 controller, expects her to bring a more "modern, contemporary edge" to a channel accused of being over-reliant on costume drama. But all BBC1 bosses are hemmed in by powerful genre commissioners. A plus is her background in news, while a potential negative is her famously short fuse. Television is about relationships with stars and programme suppliers. She will need poise.

Then there is Ben Gale, a middle-ranking BBC factual commissioning executive catapulted into running Five's programming. He's in the trickiest position, shorn of his exiting patrons, Lisa Opie and Jane Lighting, at a seemingly rudderless channel. But the good news is that Hunt was a dynamo during her eight months at Five. She hired Natasha Kaplinsky, and ordered about 10 new factual programmes. Most of these shows, such as Rough Guides and I Own Britain's Best House, will return. Gale's problems: a lack of entertainment, and the lowest budget of the terrestrials.

In addition, Gale will be without a boss for several months. Dawn Airey stunned the TV world earlier this month by quitting ITV to return to Five, where she made her name as chief executive in the 1990s. ITV is determined to hold Airey to her 12-month notice period, forcing Gale into a position where he must overhaul Five's schedule without his new chief executive. While he awaits her arrival, Gale's immediate challenge will be to maintain Five's profile in the face of increased competition from digital rivals and reduce its reliance on imported shows.

The executive merry-go-round was sparked last year by Fincham's resignation after he took the blame for the farrago over the clip of the Queen shown at a BBC1 press launch. It has prompted suggestions from some analysts that there is a paucity of top level executive talent in British broadcasting and led others to conclude that broadcasters are too conservative and unwilling to take risks on new names.

Meanwhile, can you spot the oasis of relative calm? A year ago Channel 4 was in a state of turmoil as Julian Bellamy, the head of programmes, took over. His solution, being played out nightly, is to create "events", such as Food Fight, Embarrassing Bodies and Grand Designs Live, with Street Crime coming up. Bellamy says : "This is a very tough time. Every change is an opportunity and potential threat. Big statements and events are what we are doing here, making as much noise as possible, throwing hand grenades." Let battle commence.