Bob Geldof: the millionaire media player
He's best known for his charity work and early pop career, but Bob Geldof has proved himself a shrewd media player. He tells Raymond Snoddy about his new plans to break into online television production
Published: 10 April 2006

There are a great many Bob Geldofs, as one of the most loquacious and instantly recognisable people on the planet, happily acknowledges.

There is "Boomtown Bob" from his continuing pop career launched with the Boomtown Rats. There is "Saint Bob" from the millions he raised for Africa through Live Aid and last year's Live 8. "Sir Bob Bob", grew out of the honorary knighthood he picked up as a result. There is also "Bob and Paula" after the tragic tabloid soap opera that saw him first lose his wife Paula Yates to the pop star Michael Hutchence, before both of them died prematurely.

At the age of 54, "Bob the pop star" is still going strong and he is now on a tour of the Middle East and Australia with his band, which has a name change every time Bob thinks it would be a good idea. In recent years they have been the Vegetarians of Sex and The Indifferents.

But right now it is "Bob the millionaire media player" who is in the ascendant as the independent production company he co-founded, Ten Alps, has acquired a well-established contract publisher, McMillan-Scott, in a £12.25m deal.

It will turn Ten Alps, in which Bob has an 8.4 per cent stake, into a top 10 indie in the UK with an annual turnover of £70m and 450 staff. Bob is beside himself with excitement at the deal landed by his partners, the Ten Alps chief executive Alex Connock and finance director Nitil Patel. Or, as he puts it, "I'm ****ing thrilled."

Geldof is speaking at a corner table in Picasso, a traditional Italian café in the King's Road in Chelsea, which is the nearest the talkative Dubliner comes to having an office. He conducts business meetings there, has coffee with passing aristocrats of pop, thinks deep thoughts about the future of television and even receives mail at the café.

"What those two [his partners] have done is drive a ****ing amazing deal with people no one has ever heard of in ****ing Macclesfield," says Geldof, almost rubbing his eyes in disbelief at the wonder of it all.

Immediately before switching over to Bob the businessman he had been Saint Bob for half an hour - discussing, from his table in the Picasso, the problems of Africa, poverty and globalisation with an unnamed foreign statesman.

Of all the Bobs it is probably the media businessman who is least well known but which is significant all the same.

Ten Alps - Planet spelt backwards (almost) - evolved out of Planet 24, the company behind The Word, Channel 4's Big Breakfast and Survivor. The company, founded by Charlie Parsons, Lord Waheed Alli and Geldof, was sold for £15m to Michael Green's Carlton Communications.

Then Geldof joined up with Connock and Patel, both former Planet 24 executives, and together they raised more than £3m on the stock market to buy independent production companies. "All my life, for whatever reason, I have latched on to people to make ideas work. There was the Rats. There was Charlie and Waheed, then Nitil and Alex, whatever. I have been very lucky that this dynamic between three people or more is very like a group, very like a band," muses Geldof.

Ten Alps may not be top of the television charts yet but it owns the rights to Survivor, still playing according to Geldof in 18 countries. Planet 24 radio was bought out of the Carlton deal for £1. But the main insight was to concentrate on high-end factual programme production companies, and Ten Alps owns well-known names such as Brook Lapping, 3BM and Blakeway Productions.

The output has included Catherine the Great and The Improbable Mr Attlee for the BBC, Tsunami: Where Was God? and The Long War for Channel 4 and The Bali Bombing for Sky One.

The company also broke into the US market with The Flight That Fought Back on the 9/11 disaster and Hurricane Katrina for the US Discovery Channel.

"When I meet politicians and they say 'did you see that programme?', and I say 'Yes we made it'," says Geldof with a grin, gesticulating with an emphatic finger at the same time for emphasis.

"When you get involved with journalists at this level, like Norma Percy and Brian Lapping, it is a total pleasure. The research is brilliant and everyone will appear for them. They are benchmark journalists," says Geldof.

Ten Alps' most important contract so far has been the four-year deal to run Teacher's TV for the Department of Education and Skills with a budget of around £15m a year. Apart from the channel broadcast on Sky there is now a database of nearly 1,000 programmes.

The independent board of governors on the project found that the average cost to the DfES per viewer per programme for Teacher's TV was £2.70. This compares with £300 a day to take a teacher out of the classroom for formal training.

"We didn't really get the implications of Teacher's TV until it was up and running," Geldof admits.

It started out, Connock explains, as a television station with a website and has rapidly turned into "a website and a television station that work together". Teachers have been downloading the programmes of their choice and then watching them at convenient moments on their laptops or iPods.

It got Geldof thinking over his coffee about the impact of an online technology that allowed people to create thousands of channels. "I am behind the loop. I am not a visionary at all. I need to be shown it to go, 'OK now, what does that actually mean? What can you do with it?'"

It was a short step to wondering whether the Teacher's TV model could not be extended for other specialist purposes such as the National Health Service, the police or even to create an online television channel for caravan enthusiasts. The Nobel Prize committee, he says, has already been in touch with Ten Alps over the possibility of creating a Peace Channel.

As Geldof pondered on what he regards as the emergence of yet another new world of television, Connock and Patel came across McMillan-Scott which either owns or publishes titles for more than 300 organisations. Most are government agencies, local authorities, trade associations and professional bodies. The company's clients include the Nursing and Midwifery Council, British Waterways, the British Veterinary Association, The Caravan Club, the CBI and the Royal Aeronautical Society.

McMillan-Scott also sells advertising for the publications and last year placed around 47,000 advertisements.

What has got Geldof and his colleagues excited is that they believe McMillan-Scott is a good business as it stands now. But what if you could use the television expertise of Ten Alps and create a multitude of online television channels for the major titles?

"It's pretty Marxist. We control the means of production and now we command the economic heights of the advertising revenue. This takes us into a whole new thing altogether because it comes with the advertising intact. That's the amazing thing," says Bob the capitalist.

Geldof says music has been the key to his career as a television executive and businessman because musicians easily take on board the latest technology in a very practical way, if it is useful. In his Boomtown Bob days he once went to a small video company in Muswell Hill to get a pop promo made for the Rats. It was called Carlton and the boss was Michael Green. He was interviewed on the second day of MTV and spotted the opportunity in the arrival of cable with its generic channels dedicated to sport, entertainment and music. "We bought very cheap ****e from around the world and sold it to Bravo," he says with relish.

Mrs Thatcher's decision to create Channel 4 as an outlet for the work of independent production companies had made Geldof realise that he had to get bigger as quickly as possible and joined with Planet 24.

"All of Britain came to a juddering halt and went spiralling downward because of that appalling programme The Word. Yep, that was us. I am glad to say that was us," says Geldof.

The rise of factual channels such as Arts & Entertainment, National Geographic and Discovery got him thinking about the potential of documentaries.

Now it's online TV that he can hardly stop talking about. "I personally have been involved in each separate change in the television business," he notes.

But as Alex Connock explains, Geldof's contribution has been of a particular kind. "He's Bob. He comes in with great ideas, great plans. He produces some shows and appears in others. He doesn't do the VAT return."

Back at Planet 24, Waheed Alli had a way of dealing with Geldof when his mouth started to run away with him. Waheed simply used to tell Bob it was time for him to shut up now.

If music led to television in Geldof's career then music and television directed him towards Live Aid 20 years ago.

First there was Michael Buerk's report on famine in Ethiopia - "one of the great pieces of post-war journalism". There then followed a classic piece of almost naive Geldof thinking, along the lines that "virtually everyone in the developed world has a television set and there must be satellites that could put Live Aid everywhere".

"I just assumed that would be the case," Geldof reminisces. It was just a bit more complicated than that. In fact the Smithsonian Institution has a model of the Live Aid satellite planning system as an example of one of the first truly global television events.

When Live 8 came along 20 years later it was the age of internet television. Last week, speaking at the Mip television market in Cannes, Jonathan Miller, the chairman and chief executive of AOL, said last summer's concert had showed the full potential of the internet as a mass entertainment medium.

A 14,000-strong blog was generated by the event and more than 500,000 people signed an online petition.

"If you watched on AOL you saw the world. You saw 1,000 artists simultaneously and you could go to all of them, plus, you could communicate with someone in the crowd. We tracked it and we saw them talking to each other over the screens live and I just thought ****ing superb," says Geldof.

He was particularly moved by the re-appearance of 23-year-old Ethiopian agricultural student Birhan Woldu, last seen 20 years ago during Live Aid as a terrible image of a three-year-old, apparently near death. The Sun "found" her, although for the past decade the Canadian journalist who first filmed her plight, Brian Stewart, had been in regular touch and supported her and her siblings through a children's charity. However she survived, Birhan as an iconic image of Live Aid was still powerful.

"The Canadian TV crew who filmed the girl found her and The Sun picked up on the story and got the girl and brought her to London to meet Blair and me and the Commission for Africa. Blair was freaked out," says Geldof. If the last 20 years were just for Birhan "that's fine by me". Geldof says it was The Sun journalist who "found" Birhan, Oliver Harvey (recently named as Reporter of the Year at the British Press Awards), who first suggested to him that he should do another Band Aid.

It was Geldof's desire to thank The Sun for their role that led to mayhem at the 2005 press awards. Executives from the Daily Mirror jeered and called him a "wanker".

"Are we in for a Clarkson moment? Seriously I'm up for it you twats," replied the honorary knight of the realm.

And then Geldof was off - clearly missing a restraining hand on his shoulder from Waheed Alli, or indeed anyone else. His next step was to denounce the Daily Mail's coverage of Comic Relief as "a disgrace".

A year or so later, sipping an espresso, he elaborates in considerable detail, making it absolutely clear that he is no fan of Mail editor-in-chief Paul Dacre, even though his brother, Nigel Dacre, is going to be running Ten Alps internet and digital television division in future.

"Eighty per cent of Mail readers contribute to Comic Relief. Is it not suicidal, then, to have not one word to say about something that has raised £360m from people in this country for people in this country and for people outside? What an amazing compliment to this country and yet you found nothing of worth to say about it," Geldof explains.

His next target at the press awards was The Independent, which he complained had reneged on an agreement to give a front-page splash to covering a report from the Commission for Africa. From the floor of the London Hilton, The Independent's editor-in-chief, Simon Kelner, said he was lucky to have made page five.

The Geldof performance was blamed for almost torpedoing the British newspaper industry's Oscars. But despite the two-way abuse, Geldof believes that "the poverty agenda" is really well covered now by the UK media. Saint Bob will continue to work for the poor of the world through DATA, a group of lobbyists interested in aid and development. But he hopes that Live Aid will never be required again.

"I'd frankly be too old to do it again," says Geldof, who has no plans to hang up his guitar, even if it means appearing in Battersea Church Hall "plinking out a few tunes in my dotage".

Earlier this month he was back in his native Dublin to accept a lifetime achievement award from the local music industry. Bono was the MC for the event and there were tributes on film from the likes of Mick Jagger, Elton John and Pete Townsend.

Geldof keeps going at the music because that is what he does. "After 31 years I'll sell out all those gigs (in the Middle East and Australia) which is amazing and the thing I like doing absolutely best in the world is playing live with that band on stage. I don't have to think. It's totally effortless and I feel completely at home."

Prodded as to how he manages to reconcile all the different Bobs, he comes up with the following.

"How it works if you must know is that I do politics for my head, I do business for my pocket, I do music for my soul and I do my family for my heart."

Then the gangly figure in trainers, striped trousers and jacket which don't quite match, and cricket sweater, walks obligingly down a picturesque Chelsea side street for pictures.

He is forced to become Saint Bob again as a middle-aged Irish woman pushing a bicycle stops him to say she just wants to thank him "for all the good you have done". Geldof accepts the compliment with good nature and without cynicism.

ON LIVE 8 ONLINE

'If you watched on AOL you saw 1,000 artists simultaneously and you could go to all of them'

ON HIS MUSIC

'The thing I like doing absolutely best in the world is playing live'

ON TECHNOLOGY

'I am behind the loop. I need to be shown it to go "OK, what does that actually mean?" '

There are a great many Bob Geldofs, as one of the most loquacious and instantly recognisable people on the planet, happily acknowledges.

There is "Boomtown Bob" from his continuing pop career launched with the Boomtown Rats. There is "Saint Bob" from the millions he raised for Africa through Live Aid and last year's Live 8. "Sir Bob Bob", grew out of the honorary knighthood he picked up as a result. There is also "Bob and Paula" after the tragic tabloid soap opera that saw him first lose his wife Paula Yates to the pop star Michael Hutchence, before both of them died prematurely.

At the age of 54, "Bob the pop star" is still going strong and he is now on a tour of the Middle East and Australia with his band, which has a name change every time Bob thinks it would be a good idea. In recent years they have been the Vegetarians of Sex and The Indifferents.

But right now it is "Bob the millionaire media player" who is in the ascendant as the independent production company he co-founded, Ten Alps, has acquired a well-established contract publisher, McMillan-Scott, in a £12.25m deal.

It will turn Ten Alps, in which Bob has an 8.4 per cent stake, into a top 10 indie in the UK with an annual turnover of £70m and 450 staff. Bob is beside himself with excitement at the deal landed by his partners, the Ten Alps chief executive Alex Connock and finance director Nitil Patel. Or, as he puts it, "I'm ****ing thrilled."

Geldof is speaking at a corner table in Picasso, a traditional Italian café in the King's Road in Chelsea, which is the nearest the talkative Dubliner comes to having an office. He conducts business meetings there, has coffee with passing aristocrats of pop, thinks deep thoughts about the future of television and even receives mail at the café.

"What those two [his partners] have done is drive a ****ing amazing deal with people no one has ever heard of in ****ing Macclesfield," says Geldof, almost rubbing his eyes in disbelief at the wonder of it all.

Immediately before switching over to Bob the businessman he had been Saint Bob for half an hour - discussing, from his table in the Picasso, the problems of Africa, poverty and globalisation with an unnamed foreign statesman.

Of all the Bobs it is probably the media businessman who is least well known but which is significant all the same.

Ten Alps - Planet spelt backwards (almost) - evolved out of Planet 24, the company behind The Word, Channel 4's Big Breakfast and Survivor. The company, founded by Charlie Parsons, Lord Waheed Alli and Geldof, was sold for £15m to Michael Green's Carlton Communications.

Then Geldof joined up with Connock and Patel, both former Planet 24 executives, and together they raised more than £3m on the stock market to buy independent production companies. "All my life, for whatever reason, I have latched on to people to make ideas work. There was the Rats. There was Charlie and Waheed, then Nitil and Alex, whatever. I have been very lucky that this dynamic between three people or more is very like a group, very like a band," muses Geldof.

Ten Alps may not be top of the television charts yet but it owns the rights to Survivor, still playing according to Geldof in 18 countries. Planet 24 radio was bought out of the Carlton deal for £1. But the main insight was to concentrate on high-end factual programme production companies, and Ten Alps owns well-known names such as Brook Lapping, 3BM and Blakeway Productions.

The output has included Catherine the Great and The Improbable Mr Attlee for the BBC, Tsunami: Where Was God? and The Long War for Channel 4 and The Bali Bombing for Sky One.

The company also broke into the US market with The Flight That Fought Back on the 9/11 disaster and Hurricane Katrina for the US Discovery Channel.

"When I meet politicians and they say 'did you see that programme?', and I say 'Yes we made it'," says Geldof with a grin, gesticulating with an emphatic finger at the same time for emphasis.

"When you get involved with journalists at this level, like Norma Percy and Brian Lapping, it is a total pleasure. The research is brilliant and everyone will appear for them. They are benchmark journalists," says Geldof.

Ten Alps' most important contract so far has been the four-year deal to run Teacher's TV for the Department of Education and Skills with a budget of around £15m a year. Apart from the channel broadcast on Sky there is now a database of nearly 1,000 programmes.

The independent board of governors on the project found that the average cost to the DfES per viewer per programme for Teacher's TV was £2.70. This compares with £300 a day to take a teacher out of the classroom for formal training.

"We didn't really get the implications of Teacher's TV until it was up and running," Geldof admits.

It started out, Connock explains, as a television station with a website and has rapidly turned into "a website and a television station that work together". Teachers have been downloading the programmes of their choice and then watching them at convenient moments on their laptops or iPods.

It got Geldof thinking over his coffee about the impact of an online technology that allowed people to create thousands of channels. "I am behind the loop. I am not a visionary at all. I need to be shown it to go, 'OK now, what does that actually mean? What can you do with it?'"

It was a short step to wondering whether the Teacher's TV model could not be extended for other specialist purposes such as the National Health Service, the police or even to create an online television channel for caravan enthusiasts. The Nobel Prize committee, he says, has already been in touch with Ten Alps over the possibility of creating a Peace Channel.

As Geldof pondered on what he regards as the emergence of yet another new world of television, Connock and Patel came across McMillan-Scott which either owns or publishes titles for more than 300 organisations. Most are government agencies, local authorities, trade associations and professional bodies. The company's clients include the Nursing and Midwifery Council, British Waterways, the British Veterinary Association, The Caravan Club, the CBI and the Royal Aeronautical Society.

McMillan-Scott also sells advertising for the publications and last year placed around 47,000 advertisements.

What has got Geldof and his colleagues excited is that they believe McMillan-Scott is a good business as it stands now. But what if you could use the television expertise of Ten Alps and create a multitude of online television channels for the major titles?

"It's pretty Marxist. We control the means of production and now we command the economic heights of the advertising revenue. This takes us into a whole new thing altogether because it comes with the advertising intact. That's the amazing thing," says Bob the capitalist.

Geldof says music has been the key to his career as a television executive and businessman because musicians easily take on board the latest technology in a very practical way, if it is useful. In his Boomtown Bob days he once went to a small video company in Muswell Hill to get a pop promo made for the Rats. It was called Carlton and the boss was Michael Green. He was interviewed on the second day of MTV and spotted the opportunity in the arrival of cable with its generic channels dedicated to sport, entertainment and music. "We bought very cheap ****e from around the world and sold it to Bravo," he says with relish.

Mrs Thatcher's decision to create Channel 4 as an outlet for the work of independent production companies had made Geldof realise that he had to get bigger as quickly as possible and joined with Planet 24.

"All of Britain came to a juddering halt and went spiralling downward because of that appalling programme The Word. Yep, that was us. I am glad to say that was us," says Geldof.

The rise of factual channels such as Arts & Entertainment, National Geographic and Discovery got him thinking about the potential of documentaries.

Now it's online TV that he can hardly stop talking about. "I personally have been involved in each separate change in the television business," he notes.

But as Alex Connock explains, Geldof's contribution has been of a particular kind. "He's Bob. He comes in with great ideas, great plans. He produces some shows and appears in others. He doesn't do the VAT return."

Back at Planet 24, Waheed Alli had a way of dealing with Geldof when his mouth started to run away with him. Waheed simply used to tell Bob it was time for him to shut up now.

If music led to television in Geldof's career then music and television directed him towards Live Aid 20 years ago.

First there was Michael Buerk's report on famine in Ethiopia - "one of the great pieces of post-war journalism". There then followed a classic piece of almost naive Geldof thinking, along the lines that "virtually everyone in the developed world has a television set and there must be satellites that could put Live Aid everywhere".

"I just assumed that would be the case," Geldof reminisces. It was just a bit more complicated than that. In fact the Smithsonian Institution has a model of the Live Aid satellite planning system as an example of one of the first truly global television events.

When Live 8 came along 20 years later it was the age of internet television. Last week, speaking at the Mip television market in Cannes, Jonathan Miller, the chairman and chief executive of AOL, said last summer's concert had showed the full potential of the internet as a mass entertainment medium.

A 14,000-strong blog was generated by the event and more than 500,000 people signed an online petition.

"If you watched on AOL you saw the world. You saw 1,000 artists simultaneously and you could go to all of them, plus, you could communicate with someone in the crowd. We tracked it and we saw them talking to each other over the screens live and I just thought ****ing superb," says Geldof.

He was particularly moved by the re-appearance of 23-year-old Ethiopian agricultural student Birhan Woldu, last seen 20 years ago during Live Aid as a terrible image of a three-year-old, apparently near death. The Sun "found" her, although for the past decade the Canadian journalist who first filmed her plight, Brian Stewart, had been in regular touch and supported her and her siblings through a children's charity. However she survived, Birhan as an iconic image of Live Aid was still powerful.

"The Canadian TV crew who filmed the girl found her and The Sun picked up on the story and got the girl and brought her to London to meet Blair and me and the Commission for Africa. Blair was freaked out," says Geldof. If the last 20 years were just for Birhan "that's fine by me". Geldof says it was The Sun journalist who "found" Birhan, Oliver Harvey (recently named as Reporter of the Year at the British Press Awards), who first suggested to him that he should do another Band Aid.

It was Geldof's desire to thank The Sun for their role that led to mayhem at the 2005 press awards. Executives from the Daily Mirror jeered and called him a "wanker".

"Are we in for a Clarkson moment? Seriously I'm up for it you twats," replied the honorary knight of the realm.

And then Geldof was off - clearly missing a restraining hand on his shoulder from Waheed Alli, or indeed anyone else. His next step was to denounce the Daily Mail's coverage of Comic Relief as "a disgrace".

A year or so later, sipping an espresso, he elaborates in considerable detail, making it absolutely clear that he is no fan of Mail editor-in-chief Paul Dacre, even though his brother, Nigel Dacre, is going to be running Ten Alps internet and digital television division in future.

"Eighty per cent of Mail readers contribute to Comic Relief. Is it not suicidal, then, to have not one word to say about something that has raised £360m from people in this country for people in this country and for people outside? What an amazing compliment to this country and yet you found nothing of worth to say about it," Geldof explains.

His next target at the press awards was The Independent, which he complained had reneged on an agreement to give a front-page splash to covering a report from the Commission for Africa. From the floor of the London Hilton, The Independent's editor-in-chief, Simon Kelner, said he was lucky to have made page five.

The Geldof performance was blamed for almost torpedoing the British newspaper industry's Oscars. But despite the two-way abuse, Geldof believes that "the poverty agenda" is really well covered now by the UK media. Saint Bob will continue to work for the poor of the world through DATA, a group of lobbyists interested in aid and development. But he hopes that Live Aid will never be required again.

"I'd frankly be too old to do it again," says Geldof, who has no plans to hang up his guitar, even if it means appearing in Battersea Church Hall "plinking out a few tunes in my dotage".

Earlier this month he was back in his native Dublin to accept a lifetime achievement award from the local music industry. Bono was the MC for the event and there were tributes on film from the likes of Mick Jagger, Elton John and Pete Townsend.

Geldof keeps going at the music because that is what he does. "After 31 years I'll sell out all those gigs (in the Middle East and Australia) which is amazing and the thing I like doing absolutely best in the world is playing live with that band on stage. I don't have to think. It's totally effortless and I feel completely at home."

Prodded as to how he manages to reconcile all the different Bobs, he comes up with the following.

"How it works if you must know is that I do politics for my head, I do business for my pocket, I do music for my soul and I do my family for my heart."

Then the gangly figure in trainers, striped trousers and jacket which don't quite match, and cricket sweater, walks obligingly down a picturesque Chelsea side street for pictures.

He is forced to become Saint Bob again as a middle-aged Irish woman pushing a bicycle stops him to say she just wants to thank him "for all the good you have done". Geldof accepts the compliment with good nature and without cynicism.

ON LIVE 8 ONLINE

'If you watched on AOL you saw 1,000 artists simultaneously and you could go to all of them'

ON HIS MUSIC

'The thing I like doing absolutely best in the world is playing live'

ON TECHNOLOGY

'I am behind the loop. I need to be shown it to go "OK, what does that actually mean?" '