Heggessey, Lorraine

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Lorraine Heggessey

When she became the controller of the BBC1 television channel in 2000, Lorraine Heggessey (born 1956) became the first woman to hold that executive position at the flagship television station of the venerable British Broadcasting Corporation. She remained in that position until 2005, when she resigned to become chief executive of TalkbackThames, one of Britain's leading independent production studios.

Heggessey's tenure at the BBC was controversial. Some credited her with revitalization of programming that even in the opinions of older viewers had become staid, and BBC1 viewership rose sharply under her administration. On the other hand, it was often charged that Heggessey had dumbed down BBC1's programming—a charge she vigorously contested. Well educated but not a product of the English university programs that stocked many of the country's top management ranks, she sometimes quoted a maxim of media theorist Marshall McLuhan in support of her programming philosophy: "Anybody who thinks education and entertainment are two separate things doesn't understand either."

Produced Family Newspaper

Heggessey was born on November 16, 1956. When she was young, she told Lennox Morrison of Scotland on Sunday, she was "a pretty conscientious girl; I always did my homework." Her media career began with a newspaper she produced at the age of eight, chronicling the goings-on in her family household. Her parents were the only customers. Heggessey attended Durham University and graduated with an honors degree in English. She hoped to join the BBC after graduating but was turned down when she first applied. Instead, in 1978, she got a job as a junior reporter with the Acton Gazette newspaper. One of her first assignments was to follow trash collectors as they made their daily rounds. She was accepted by the BBC the following year as a news trainee.

She rose through the ranks at the BBC, cutting her teeth at positions in the network's prestigious hard-news divisions. After two years as a news subeditor in 1981 and 1982, she was promoted to assistant producer and then producer (in 1983) in the Current Affairs department, with responsibility for the 60 Minutes and Panorama news programs. Though the Soviet Union was mostly closed to Western media at the time, Heggessey sneaked in by posing as a tourist and put together a Panorama story. In 1986 she left the BBC for a producer position at Thames TV, a predeces-sor to the company she joined in 2005. From there she moved to an independent network, Channel 4, where she was a deputy editor on a program called Hard News and a producer for another news program, As It Happens. She also worked briefly for a news program on the independent ITV network and was arrested by troops in Zaire as she tried to film a story about the growing threat of AIDS.

It was during this period that Heggessey first made waves on British television. She produced a feature that dealt with the treatment of British union leader Arthur Scargill by an aggressive investigative reporter, Roger Cook, but Cook refused to be interviewed. Turning the tables on the stocky reporter, the five-feet-tall Heggessey pursued him down a street, peppering him with questions. As she captured the chase with a rolling camera, she hit Cook with a demand to "answer the question …" (according to the Daily Mail). The fast-moving world of independent television news gave Heggessey a thick skin and a demeanor often described as feisty or fearless.

When she returned to the BBC in 1991, she broadened her work beyond news. She created and edited a viewer-feedback show called Biteback, and she served as series producer for a show about organized crime, The Underworld. Married to Dutch-born musician and composer Ron de Jong—who worked at home and usually kept an eye on the couple's two daughters as the demands of Heggessey's career grew—she was caring for her one-month-old baby daughter when the chance came to interview "Mad Frankie" Fraser, one of Britain's most notorious gangsters. "She woke up and wanted feeding and I thought, 'What am I going to do?'" Heggessey recalled to Charlie Catchpole of the Mirror tabloid. "I decided not to ask Frankie's permission because it might embarrass him. So I just got on with it in front of him. He wasn't the least bit fazed." The interview made both Fraser and Heggessey better known, and Heggessey moved up to the level of executive producer for various programs in 1994.

Resuscitated Eccentric Figure's Career

One of those programs was Animal Hospital, a traveling animal-welfare show that won National Television Awards for Most Popular Factual Entertainment Show in 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999, and 2000. Heggessey went a long way toward insuring the show's success when she chose as its host Rolf Harris, an eccentric, Australian-born musical figure who had first come to prominence as the vocalist who sang the international hit "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport" in the 1960s and had more recently issued a bizarre cover version of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." Heggessey asked an assistant for a list of celebrities who had contributed to animal-welfare charities. When she came to Harris's name on a list of donors to the Cats Protection League, she told Catchpole, "I said, 'That's it!' and everybody looked at me as if I was mad." But Heggessey's judgment was vindicated as Harris's career took off in renewed full flower.

Heggessey helmed a science show, The Human Body, in 1996 and 1997, and during this period she was once again wooed by independent television organizations. Part of what persuaded her to stay at the BBC was the offer of a job as head of the network's children's programming, an attractive post inasmuch as her daughters had reached the ages of four and eight. Heggessey made headlines during this period when she personally went on the air to explain to youthful viewers why a popular host had been fired after being charged with cocaine use. Heggessey remained head of children's programs at the BBC until 1999, and in 1999 and 2000 she rounded out her resumé further as joint director of the network's Factual and Learning division and as director of programs for the BBC Productions unit.

With a wide range of experience and a demonstrated capacity for toughness, Heggessey was a logical choice when the position of BBC1 controller—the channel's chief operating officer—came open in 2000. Her hiring was announced in September of that year, and she became the first woman to hold the position. BBC Director of Television Mark Thompson praised her to the Birmingham Post as "a program maker through and through, [with] a great knack of recognizing the original idea and making it work." Heggessey for her part said that she had always wanted the job.

It came with serious challenges, however. Once the unchallenged leader of the international broadcast world, the government-owned BBC—funded through license fees levied on everyone in Britain who watched television—had suffered under competition from privately run broadcasters. Ratings were on the decline, and the BBC had been bested in audience measurements by the privately owned ITV (Independent Television) for several years in a row. The BBC had acquired the affectionate but hardly hip nickname of "Auntie," and even senior citizens polled in surveys opined that the network's programming was old-fashioned. Some in Britain even talked of privatizing the legendary broadcaster.

Took Steps to Raise Ratings

Heggessey, with a team of four immediate subordinates, now had full responsibility for all of BBC1's programming. After making obligatory remarks about high-quality programming, Heggessey stated her aims as controller in no uncertain terms. "My job will clearly be to arrest the ratings decline, if not reverse it," she told Matt Wells of the Guardian. She was aided by a decision to move the BBC's evening news program from nine to ten o'clock, a decision made before she was hired but that she executed smoothly. Her first move was to drop a popular symbol of the network, a red-and-yellow balloon that had cost 500,000 pounds. "The balloon to me feels very slow," Heggessey told Thomas Quinn of the Mirror. "It goes across this majestic landscape but doesn't feel in touch with viewers."

She also quickly made program changes. Some of them, such as a move of the Survivor-style quiz-show The Weakest Link to prime time, alarmed traditionalists who felt that she was taking the network in a down-market direction. Panorama, which had once been one of Heggessey's prize responsibilities, was moved to a late-night slot. But Heggessey's programming was not, as one critique had it, entirely made up of makeover and do-it-yourself shows. Several new high-quality dramas were introduced and competed successfully against reality-television programs on independent networks. Heggessey created a show called The Nation's Favorite Proms, a viewer-friendly introduction to Britain's famed Proms classical music concerts. And she turned once again to Rolf Harris, selecting him to host an art program, Rolf on Art.

The results were quick and dramatic: by early 2002 the BBC was topping archrival ITV in peak-time viewership. Lists of the most powerful women in British entertainment routinely began to feature Heggessey's name, and the crucial under-35 demographic, never the BBC's strong suit, began to break in the network's favor. Heggessey could point to a variety of new nonfiction shows, including history series on the Greek city of Pompeii and Rome's Coliseum, and a science show that dealt with the history of the number one. Heggessey told Tom Leonard of the Daily Telegraph that she felt that BBC's job was to "serve all the viewers some of the time," and she seemed to be making headway toward that goal. As for the reality shows—Heggessey created a show called Fame Academy to compete with ITV's Pop Idol, comparable to American Idol in the United States—she told Leonard that "Very few people want to watch one kind of programming—they want a variety."

By 2004, Heggessey was speculating that she might become BBC1's longest-serving controller in history. She had several new successes under her belt, including the consumer-advocacy show Watchdog and Strictly Come Dancing, a unique ballroom-dancing program that paired celebrities with amateur dancers. Well-received arts programs had blunted some of the criticism that she had moved too far in a populist direction, and although the BBC's government overlords spoke of reviews evaluating BBC1's adherence to the network's overall goals, Heggessey had strong support from her immediate supervisor and seemed unlikely to encounter any level of criticism beyond what she had experienced before. Her appetite for pugnacity showed in a dust-up between the BBC and media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, whom she termed a capitalist imperialist who worked against everything the BBC stood for.

So it was something of a surprise when she departed for TalkbackThames in 2005. A hefty increase in salary was one motivation. "Obviously it's good to get to a stage where you feel you can capitalize on your experience and you can start to make a bit of money," she told Raymond Snoddy of the Independent. "But money is not my main motivating factor. Happiness in my job and whether the job challenges and stimulates me is the main thing." The new job made her head of a company of her own, albeit one owned by a German multinational corporation, and it put her in a position to deliver programming to the BBC as well as its rivals. Budget cuts at the BBC also seemed to herald an era of austerity. In any event, Heggessey's status as one of the most powerful figures in British entertainment seemed likely to continue for some time to come.