Mad for it

A cash crisis almost brought Lanarkshire Television to its knees, but with the help of a mystery investor, Britain's first local station has survived to see its first birthday. Now all it needs is to shake its image as Loony TV HE journey to Britain's first local terrestrial television station is a bleak one, with lashing rain setting the mood for the last few miles. In the distance looms the Kirk O'Shotts, its grey stone walls standing defiantly against a bare landscape. The instantly recognisable church is the first landmark that tells you Lanarkshire Television's isolated base is nearby.

Shotts prison, surrounded by two impenetrable barbed wire fences, follows soon after. Further down the country road, an impressive gateway beckons the visitor up a long, winding driveway, leading to a rambling old building with turrets and a large, broken clockface. This is the former Hartwood hospital, home to what has been dubbed Loony TV. Once Scotland's biggest psychiatric hospital and now up for sale to potential developers, Hartwood is a suitably grim backdrop for a drama that has fascinated the media and bemused locals.

Since Lanarkshire Television (LTV) was launched last April, the station has been to broadcasting hell and back. Transmission problems, a cash crisis and a staff pay freeze led the press to write the station off. When the LTV team thought things couldn't get much worse, their star presenter Shereen Tulloch left to become a GMTV weather girl. Last month, morale was dented further when The Big Breakfast reporter Richard Bacon visited the beleaguered station and relayed live footage back to the Channel 4 show's less than complimentary anchorman Johnny Vaughan. Then, on the eve of the station's first birthday, the clouds lifted.

Opening the door to his office in the partially refurbished hospital, LTV managing director John MacKenzie admits the station very nearly bit the dust earlier this month, as predicted. But on this miserable grey afternoon, the 64-year-old businessman, who has invested about #400,000 of his own money in the station, insists he has much to smile about. And his sense of glee appears to be catching among his apparently tireless staff of 32.

The station has just been given permission to transmit from the Blackhill mast, which is tantalisingly close to LTV and is already used by Scottish broadcasting's big boys. The transmitter is a crucial 100ft higher than the inadequate mast erected outside LTV's base - and in this business, size matters. Once LTV's transmission panels are safely mounted on their new home next month, the snowy pictures the station has been transmitting to a smattering of local screens should clear, and the catchment area will widen to what MacKenzie hopes will be 250,000 households. With any luck, advertisers nervous about the station's problems and bad publicity will come on board, injecting the station with some desperately needed revenue.

The news comes three weeks after LTV found itself a saviour - an ex-pat Lanarkshire businessman based in England. The communications wiz, who is shying from publicity, returned to his native turf earlier this month to judge for himself whether LTV was worth salvaging. Within an hour of visiting the station, he had promised to match MacKenzie's #400,000 and offered more if it was needed. His vital cash injection meant LTV staff could be paid for the first time since last December. MacKenzie insists the investor has given LTV more than just a stay of execution. With Hartwood up for sale, LTV's chief can now consider moving to more modern premises later this year - possibly the Eurocentral development park, heartland of Lanarkshire's new industry.

"The guy wasn't in through that door three quarters of an hour and he gave me a cheque," says MacKenzie of LTV's newest financial player, alongside himself and motor trade businessman Jim Robertson. "He was taken on by the enthusiasm of the staff and quality of the programmes. He's a gem - he's very wealthy in his own right and wants to put something back into Lanarkshire. He said, if it takes #400,000 or #500,000, the money's there.

"If you'd have said to me four weeks ago that it was all going to end tomorrow, I'd have said very likely. But we've got our backer on board, we're going to be moving to new premises, we're going to be going on to Blackhill and broadcasting to a much wider area. The whole thing is positive. It is all good news now."

As if the prospect of a healthy pay cheque wasn't enough to refuel his staff's enthusiasm, MacKenzie wants LTV to broadcast its teatime show Live@Six on the internet later this year. He has the technology, among the impressive array of up-to-the-minute studio equipment which stands in professional-looking production suite in the heart of the old hospital. But while he and his team are rich on energy and ambition, the bottom line has to be viewers - and LTV needs many more of them.

MacKenzie, who came out of retirement to build LTV, has an impressive track record. The son of a Glasgow bus driver and raised in the city's Possilpark, he launched own company, which manufactured ink for food packaging. When he sold it in 1992, its annual turnover was #14million. But even he admits he was worried about the prospect of taking on LTV when his accountant first suggested the idea to him. "Hartwood was an empty building, we had no equipment, nothing," he says. "I didn't like what I saw. I could just see problems, you know?" Since then, MacKenzie has made LTV his crusade and you only have to visit the station to see why.

Moving past LTV's friendly reception area and into its echoey corridors, it is easy to forget the outside world. The former hospital still reeks of human tragedy, even though its patients are long gone. LTV producer Roz Barrett, a 28-year-old university graduate from Uddingston, is making a documentary charting the hospital's history. She tells of how Hartwood was once closeted off from society, with its own market garden and graveyard. It was literally possible to find yourself locked up in this place for the rest of your days - and not even leave it in a wooden box.

"There's a Polish princess buried in the tiny graveyard, where there are meant to be about 1000 bodies," she says. "She came over from Poland at the turn of the century and fell in love with a musician. Because he was poor, she was disinherited and after he died, she ended up here. It's so sad."

MacKenzie speaks of how years ago, Scotland's old psychiatric system threw society's great unwanted together, from the truly mentally ill to pregnant girls. He jokes that the hospital even seems to have its own climate: "The temperature drops five degrees when you arrive here."

On the way to LTV's main studio, you pass corridors which have long been bricked off. A glass-roofed hallway lends a particularly creepy atmosphere to the building at night, especially when the rain is battering off it. Some of the crew insist the hospital has its own ghost. That claim only adds to the growing LTV legend threatening to eclipse the station's programme output. Before MacKenzie was forced to axe LTV's morning show last February to save money, its presenter Shereen Tulloch was among staff who braved the hospital's eerie atmosphere after a long shift, staying overnight in its former staff quarters. "People were always working through the night on their shows," she says, having finished her new, early-morning GMTV shift. "That's not uncommon in this industry."

What was uncommon was doing it for nothing while MacKenzie worked hard to secure his rescue package. Everyone working at LTV had something to lose by foregoing their pay packets, but those who have stuck with the station unanimously insist they had much more to gain. Senior cameraman John Millar had to dip into his personal savings to fund his mortgage and support his family. He gave up his own video business to work at LTV, swapping the dubious pleasure of recording local weddings for long hours within Hartwood's walls. Now he is in charge of eight cameras, shooting LTV's shows and giving staff technical training.

Preparing for the 2Nite Show, LTV's anarchic early afternoon programme, he explains why he believed in MacKenzie's dream. "We've all hung in here because we had faith that something would happen," he says. "We're getting experience here that money can't buy. A lot of the guys are single here and haven't got commitments and family like I have, but I had some money put by and we're being paid now anyway. If I didn't have confidence in LTV, I wouldn't be here."

Some of the staff admit that while they are dedicated to LTV, they see it as a stepping stone to other things. There is an acceptance that Tulloch had to go to ITV's early morning show GMTV, although it comes with a feeling she abandoned them just when they needed to stick together. Nicola Paterson, a 27-year-old former dancing teacher from Bellshill, was hired as a researcher, but went on to produce Tulloch's defunct Good Morning Lanarkshire show. She explains there were mixed feelings about the presenter's departure.

"Because Shereen left suddenly, people didn't know what to do and it took a few weeks before it sank in," she says, standing in the production room outside the main recording studio. "But good luck to her, she's got the ambition and the drive. Some of us thought maybe she was jumping ship, but if she gets an offer like that, good on her. This place is like a stepping stone for people to go elsewhere."

MacKenzie stresses LTV was never a one-star operation and name- checks the station's other presenters, including 2Nite's Pauline Boyle. LTV's twentysomething answer to legendary Scottish tabloid agony aunt Joan Burnie, Boyle's gimmick is to dish out advice to viewers that often cuts dangerously close to the bone. She takes particular pleasure this afternoon in calling one troubled viewer a "mad slapper" for taking back her unfaithful husband.

The 26-year-old single mother from Wishaw, hired by LTV after guesting on a show, has an infectious laugh, a broad accent and a tendency to give her co-presenters a hard time. During her show, she easily gets the better of 23-year-old Frankie Dirillo, a Strathclyde University psychology student classed as an unpaid volunteer. "People in Lanarkshire want to hear my accent," she says. "I feel as if too many presenters put on airs and graces. I like people to be themselves and respect them for what they are - people like Sara Cox and Davina McColl."

While 2Nite is geared for 16 to 23-year-old viewers with its gaudy set and pub-style chat, the jewel in LTV's crown is Live@Six, presented by double act Stuart Webster and Lesley Lovat. Incredibly, the pair are working for nothing, although both have full time jobs to fund their fledgling television careers. Their on-screen chemistry might not match that of married daytime television gods Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan, but they are determined to make their show work.

Looking slightly tired after filming the show, Webster confesses he isn't doing LTV simply for the love of local television. The Dunfermline-based DJ gets up at 4.30am every day to present a breakfast show on Fife radio station Kingdom FM, before travelling by train to Lanarkshire to present Live@Six and finally making his way home at about 9pm.

"Myself and Lesley are still being classed as volunteers and I've got to pay for my own travel," he says, the effects of his long hours beginning to show through his make-up. "I want to break in to television and I count this as a commitment I have to make if I want to get any further." There is no doubt where Webster would like to end up. Asked who his role models are, he responds: "I've been told I look like Jamie Theakston."

Lovat harbours her own ambitions, admitting she would like to present a Kilroy-style talk show. The mother of three was a nurse and counsellor before working in local radio and now runs Radio Forth's Help A Child Appeal. She's as honest as Webster about why she is investing time, energy and faith in LTV. "I'm doing it for the experience, to get a good showreel," she says. Her inspiration is closer to home than her co-presenter's. "There aren't many 42-year- old mothers that come into TV for the first time, but there's a new breed coming up, the Kirsty Warks and the likes, who have their children and work on."

Once the cameras stop rolling for another night, most of the staff will hang around LTV's production suite, writing scripts and brainstorming for the next day's shows. With LTV safely off air, MacKenzie packs his briefcase and remarks that he can't wait for the day when he can watch the channel from the comfort of his own living room. That will only happen when he is satisfied the station is financially secure, the snow finally clears from Lanarkshire's television sets - and LTV reaches his suburban home of Newton Mearns

Copyright 2000
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