Kelvin MacKenzie, the Wireless Group’s chief executive, has had a
wonderfully varied career in the UK media industry, giving him a font of
good stories upon which to draw - and they were much in evidence at the
Marketing Society lunch last week.
There’s brown-nosing young MacKenzie trying to protect his editor, who
is lying pissed on his sofa after lunch, from the scary gaze of an
unannounced Rupert Murdoch. ’I can’t find him, Mr Murdoch,’ trembled
Kelvin.
’I suppose he’s lying on the sofa pissed again,’ retorts a resigned
Murdoch.
And how about Live TV: the stammering newscaster won the full support of
the British Stammerers Association, but then Live lost its nerve; what
about when Janet Street-Porter’s penchant for recycled skip furniture
cost Tony Banks his dignity when a spare nail ripped through his
trousers mid-interview; or Street-Porter again, storming into the office
of Mirror Group’s then chief executive, David Montogomery, to demand:
’That c@*!’s got to go!’ to be met with an icy: ’Which c@*!’s that,
Janet?’
Then there’s the Talk Radio host who got MacKenzie’s full blast when he
caught him wittering on about pot plants on the day Peter Mandelson
resigned.
All funny stories, but NOT when you’ve heard them more times than
Somerfield has reviewed agency. Get a new script, Kelvin, please! But
then why should a man who’s turned a pounds 25 million investment in
radio into pounds 200 million in less than two years worry about how
repetitive he sounds?
