Sky Views: Remembering a colourful businessman

Adam Boulton, presenter

"The trouble with you poms is that as soon as you make a bit of money you want to retire."

I certainly didn't want to retire, or be retired.

It was unnerving enough to be negotiating my first contract renewal at Sky directly with the CEO Sam Chisholm, a media tycoon whose name seldom appeared in print without the epithet "pugnacious" next to it. I've left out the swear words from any of his remarks recalled here.

Without Sam Chisholm, who died in Australia earlier this month at the age of 78, there would be no Sky today. He was truly the boss who saved the company, for its viewers, subscribers and workers.

Sam had a plaque on his desk reading "To err is human. To forgive is not my policy." But he was also a generous man who worked hard and played hard.

Sam was brought into Sky shortly after its launch in 1989, at a time when it and its rival BSB were cutting each other's throats. Sky alone was losing some £14m a week.

He oversaw the shotgun wedding between the two companies which set British Sky Broadcasting on course for three decades of success.

When I first joined Sky the view was that movies would be the battering ram to win subscriptions.

"We're going to put Blockbuster out of business" was a stated ambition. (For the benefit of younger readers: Blockbuster was a chain of shops hiring out videos).

Sam noticed that the sporting rights he took over from BSB had more appeal to viewers. He flew to Hollywood to cut fees to the film studios and struck the first deals for cricket test matches abroad and the new Premier League.

The £320m he paid for football is a bargain compared to today's multibillion-dollar Premier League deals. But it was still a lot of money, which among other things, enabled clubs to pay for the all-seater stadiums ordered by Lord Woolf following Hillsborough and other disasters.

Sam stood 5ft 3ins and looked like James Cagney. He relished comparisons to the tough guy actor who specialised in playing gangsters and gave the phrase "you dirty rat" to the book of quotations. Sam was famous for driving a hard bargain and trying to catch his opponent off guard.

Simultaneously with my humble salary negotiation, he also conducted a deal to sell off the unwanted BSB satellite - on speakerphone so my editor and I could hear. The satellite went to a religious broadcaster over in Latin America. "Did you notice Sam allowed the middleman a $7m sweetener?" my boss remarked later.

Terror by speakerphone was one of Sam's techniques. He was rumoured to be able to dial and listen in undetected to the conversations going on in any of the director's galleries out putting Sky programmes.

He certainly used to dial in regularly to the customer hotlines and woe betide the call centre which didn't answer within 20 seconds.

Sam had a plaque on his desk reading: "To err is human. To forgive is not my policy."

But he was also a generous man who worked hard and played hard. He frequently gave to charities often anonymously on the grounds that "everyone thinks I'm a p**** and I plan on keeping it that way."

He was a New Zealander by birth from an affluent land-owning family. He was an unruly pupil and left boarding school at 15. He emigrated to Australia where he worked as a clerk and a door-to-door polish salesman. A brother became a travelling Christian evangelist.

Before joining Rupert Murdoch's Sky, Sam was a TV executive for Alan Bond and Kerry Packer's Channel 9. He had a reputation for raising the roof - sometimes literally.

In Australia, a crane was needed to deliver his 50th birthday gift of a Harley Davidson motorcycle into his office. In this country he had to bore a hole through the floor above to accommodate a giant chandelier he bought on a whim for his dining room.

Sam had a hereditary lung condition similar to emphysema. On long-distance flights he needed two first-class seats, one for him and one for his oxygen cylinder. After Sky, he underwent a double lung transplant and became chairman of the Australian Organ and Tissue Donation and Transplant Authority.

Having left his first wife Rhonda behind in Australia, he was looked after devotedly by Sue Ward in England. Sue became his second wife. She also organised Sky's one and only charity exhibition garden at the Chelsea Flower Show, which won an award.

Sam was blunt with an instinctive dislike of the phony. While I was political editor some of my rivals had a habit of hyping up the story, claiming it was the product on exclusive insider information and likely to bring down the government.

He told me to stick to the facts. But he would ring with scathing comments "you failed" if he didn't like one of my interviews.

Reports of greed and dishonesty by business leaders threw Sam into a rage. Delivering to shareholders was his first priority. This sometimes brought him into conflict with Rupert Murdoch, who has broader horizons.

When the fledgling Sky was losing money Sam would have shut Paste BN, but Murdoch persuaded him not to. Similarly, they parted when Sam wanted to distribute the fruits of the company he had created and Murdoch, rightly, demanded investment for the next generation of digital TV.

Friendship and loyalty mattered fiercely as well. Against advice Sam hired Kelvin McKenzie for Sky when his time was up editing - largely because McKenzie really made him laugh. It didn't work out.

"Losers have meetings, winners have parties," was another Sam saying. Typically he chose Annabel's, the legendary Mayfair nightclub, for his leaving do after seven years at Sky. I've still got somewhere the commemorative silver dish he gave each of his guests. The late Bob Monkhouse did the cabaret.

The last time I saw Sam was at the memorial service for David Frost in Westminster Abbey. In spite of his severe ill health, he thought nothing of flying around the world to pay tribute quietly to a friend and colleague.

We won't see the likes of Sam or his times again in this business. He was a true little big man.

Sky Views is a series of comment pieces by Paste BN editors and correspondents, published every morning.

Previously on Sky Views: Ian King - Brace yourselves, tax rises are coming