Almost all of us who work in newspapers believe that, given the chance, we would make much better programmes than the people who work in television.
Because of the competitive nature of newspapers and the speed at which we turn stories around, we are convinced it is we who are truly connected to the pulse of the people, not the mandarins at ITV and the BBC. So we are best qualified to know what the public really want.
So, how would the masters of print fare if given a roster of stars, a top scriptwriter, a �1 million-plus budget and access to the the airwaves? I am the executive producer of How Do You Want Me?, Simon Nye's award-winning comedy. I am also the deputy editor of The Mail on Sunday.
BBC2 is repeating How Do You Want Me? in what it describes as its "cult, late-night slot". For three nights every week the scarring experiences of young London newlyweds, played by Dylan Moran and Charlotte Coleman, who have fled the city in search of a rural idyll that they never quite find, are being transmitted, enabling me to become reacquainted with my own scarring experiences, the horrors of film-making.
Let me tell you about the defining moment in my career as a television executive, when I realised it wasn't ever going to be the life of stretch limos and favoured tables at The Ivy that I had fondly envisaged. I had been summoned by Richard Needham, a Government minister, to be dressed down for having the temerity to make a two-hour ITV film, Beyond Reason, about Duncan McAllister, one of his constituents.
McAllister was a captain in the Royal Corps of Signals, based in Northern Ireland, who had an affair with a private, Susan Christie. When the affair ended she was so distraught that she lured his wife, Penny, to a lonely wood on the pretext of walking their dogs, and stabbed her to death.
The Daily Mail was serialising Captain McAllister's memoirs and the late Sir David English, Editor-in-chief of Associated Newspapers, envisaged a booming movie business in newspaper stories such as this, seemingly undisturbed by the fact we hadn't the slightest idea how to make films.
On the basis that I had once been a showbusiness reporter and therefore must know about this kind of thing, I was charged with making it happen. With Sir David, you never said that something couldn't be done. It was just a matter of will.
Initially all went remarkably smoothly. The distinguished television writer Lucy Gannon agreed to write the script. Simon Shepherd, Jennifer Ehle and Kate Hardie were cast as the principal actors.
Within a month, ITV had given the go-ahead for the film to be made for �1.2 million. Suddenly we were in the movie business.
Locations were found, a studio selected, production teams hired and a name given to our company - Kensington Films, with its glorious echoes of the Fifties, heyday of British movies. A shooting date was fixed and I was given a director's chair with my name on the back.
There was only one concern. The family of Penny McAllister didn't want the film to be made. ITV and Sir David took the view that the script would only draw from what had already been in the public arena through trial documents and the like, and that a great deal had been published and broadcast about the case, including interviews with McAllister. Nevertheless it was agreed that other newspapers, for cynical commercial reasons, might want to rubbish our film ahead of its broadcast if they found out that a rival newspaper group was making it. So a news blackout was ordered.
All went well until a junior press officer at Carlton Television blurted out the story to a reporter from Today newspaper. I woke up the next morning to a front-page headline that screamed, in war-is-declared typesize, "STOP THIS TV OBSCENITY". There followed three pages of savage condemnation, alongside topless photographs of Ehle taken from her previous role in The Camomile Lawn.
The actors were horrified. They could see careers blighted, and their long-held and often-stated belief that this was a morality story of our times that needed to be told began to evaporate.
The article appeared on the day that Kate and Simon were due to film a nude scene, never easy for any actor but made even more difficult by the fear that paparazzi lenses might be peeping at them. I flew to the set and was greeted frostily. For the moment, all love had left the luvvies. There had to be somebody to blame and it was going to be me.
It was a story the Mail's rivals seized on. The Daily Express did its best to get the ITC to ban the film. The House of Commons debated the morality of making the film, so did Channel 4's Right to Reply. Then Penny's mother and father appeared on the sofa on GMTV to denounce us.
There were endless arguments with Carlton about how many cuts to make in the murder scene, and Needham haughtily raged at me that he was a Privy Counsellor and not to be debated with when I had the temerity to disagree with him.
Also present at this meeting was Michael Marshall, the MP for Arundel, who was also cranking up the "this film must be stopped" campaign after Penny's mother and father asked him to intervene. He told me that it was disgraceful to cause pain to those who had loved a dead relative or friend. He should know. In 1980, Scottish Television broadcast Remembering Jack Buchanan, a play about the latter years of the legendary musical star. Buchanan's co-star and lover, Elsie Randolph, was distraught. She said: "The show is utterly untrue. Everybody is badly portrayed. It is surprising how little attention was paid to the people who really mattered in his life. It was another person. It wasn't Johnnie B."
The author of Remembering Jack Buchanan was Michael Marshall. He told the Daily Mirror at the time: "I imagine it's difficult to see a close friend's life on screen and find it perfect; recreating it can never be the same as the original."
At the height of Marshall and Needham's onslaught, I reminded Marshall of this. He was struck dumb. This enraged Needham and he launched another hysterical verbal assault. The meeting broke up in uproar.
After the scarring experience of getting Beyond Reason to air, I thought I would be on much safer ground with How Do You Want Me?, a comedy written by the author of Men Behaving Badly.
The BBC, rarely a corporation to move quickly in the pre-Dyke era, after four years gave us the money to make the show and, along with the stars, we all decamped to Berkshire to make a series about Sussex village life. This incongruity was seized on by the Brighton Evening Argus, which, in a full-page article, rubbished us for deceiving the viewers by not making How Do You Want Me? in the county in which it is set. They even dragged poor old Dame Vera Lynn, a local, into the story by persuading her to join the chorus of disapproval. Our leading man, Dylan, an Irish stand-up comedian, made it clear that he didn't want to do any interviews. He said he hated newspapers, but he was prevailed on to give one brief, disastrous press conference in which he was asked such dangerous questions as: "Where do you think your talent comes from?" Tartly, he replied: "On a milk float every Thursday." The showbusiness writer for the Daily Star re-christened Moran "Yob Dylan" and wrote that coming face-to-face with the BBC's new sitcom star was "a bit like getting toothache, without the laughs".
By now even Dylan had caught assassination fever. In an article he wrote for The Sunday Times about his initiation into television acting, he revealed that like everyone else he never understood the credits at the end of programmes. "Executive producers, associate producers and producers: I have no idea what these people do. They tend to be well-dressed," he sniffed.
I was rather hurt by this. It implied that I minced about in Armani suits, air-kissing actresses before fleeing back to the Groucho to count the profits while everybody else was grafting under hot lights. If only, darling . . .
It was Dawn Steel, a former boss of Columbia Pictures, who said that producers had much in common with plumbers; nobody knew what they did until the toilet backed up and then suddenly everybody remembered. I now know exactly what she means.
Roderick Gilchrist is the deputy editor of The Mail on Sunday and executive producer of Kensington Films and Television.
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