![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
You are in: Entertainment | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
![]() |
|
![]() |
Tuesday, 28 May, 2002, 07:50 GMT 08:50 UK
Evans spectre stalks Virgin's owners
Chris Evans wants Richard Branson's old station back
But there is a third. SMG - or Scottish Media Group - owns Scottish Television and Grampian Television and, though a tiddler by comparison with the Big Two, likes to think of itself as Scotland's very own media conglomerate. It also owns The Herald newspaper in Glasgow, the cinema advertising business Pearl & Dean and a poster company. The Communications Bill, when it eventually becomes law, almost certainly spells the end of SMG as a separate company.
A Scottish-based, Scottish-owned and Scottish-run media company will probably be unsustainable once new rules are in place. And SMG's own plans for expansion will become history. Expansion As well as investments in cinema and outdoor advertising south of the border, SMG has build up a stake of almost 30% in Scottish Radio Holdings, Scotland's dominant commercial radio company, which numbers the Clyde and Forth stations in Glasgow and Edinburgh among its licences. That expansion has not always gone smoothly. Perhaps SMG's biggest misjudgement was paying £225m for Chris Evans's Ginger Media two and a half years ago. Ginger's prime asset was Virgin Radio, where Evans himself presented the breakfast show in his own unique way.
Evans' successor, Steve Penk, walked out. The station was fined £75,000 for the Radio Authority after one of its late night presenters encouraged a child to repeat an obscene phrase on air. And the advertising recession has taken its toll on Virgin Radio's revenue and on revenue at SMG's other subsidiaries. SMG's share price has fallen dramatically as a result. Evans's own four per cent share in the group, worth more than £52m at one point, is now worth around half that. Evans returns Last week Evans came back to haunt Flanagan and his colleagues when the ginger one gave an interview to the Daily Mirror in which he offered to drop a long-running legal action against the group if it would let him have Virgin Radio back.
But SMG responded by saying Virgin wasn't for sale, and the company's shareholders weren't impressed by the Evans suggestion: the share price went down. On the other hand that might have had something to do with Scottish Radio Holdings' announcement that its profits for the six months to March were down from £7.8m to £5.7m thanks to the slump in national advertising, and that there were no obvious signs of a recovery on the horizon. Scottish Radio has had its own problems with diversification - and has just sold its own "underperforming" poster company, Score, though it has continued buying up local newspapers in Scotland and Ireland. It's hard not to conclude that the days of both SMG and Scottish Radio as independent companies are numbered. The only consolation for SMG: its chairman, Don Cruickshank, once head of the telecoms regulator Oftel, is tipped as a possible chairman of the new communications super-regulator Ofcom. A version of this column appears in the BBC magazine Ariel.
|
![]() |
See also:
![]()
07 May 02 | Entertainment
Internet links:
![]() The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites Top Entertainment stories now:
![]() ![]() Links to more Entertainment stories are at the foot of the page.
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Links to more Entertainment stories |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
||
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To BBC Sport>> | To BBC Weather>> | To BBC World Service>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- © MMIII | News Sources | Privacy |