Profile - Elisabeth's time to Shine: Elisabeth Murdoch

• Increase image
• View all images

Profile of Shine chief executive Elisabeth Murdoch

Not so long ago Elisabeth Murdoch was regularly damned with faint praise. Industry insiders liked to describe her as a 'good middle-ranking executive'. But is she - as so often happens to members of the Murdoch clan - about to have the last laugh?

When in May 2000 she quit her job as managing director of Sky Networks following a four-year stint, there was no shortage of people in the British TV industry happy to talk down the eldest of the three Murdoch children to have worked in her father's empire.

'She was not a success at Sky,' says an industry high-flyer. 'Elisabeth couldn't get on with Tony Ball.' Ball, it should be recalled, was given the top job at BSkyB over her head.

Six and a half years later the woman who made such a stir when she helped launch Sky Digital at the 1998 Edinburgh Television Festival is finally gaining the recognition her admirers maintained she deserved all along. Shine's recent deal to acquire Kudos, Princess and Firefly for an estimated £65m has overnight catapulted the company into that select group of super-indies that are challenging the power of the broadcasters.

The betting is that under Elisabeth Murdoch's leadership Shine is likely to look for more acquisitions in 2007 as the sector continues to consolidate. 'Elisabeth is a naturally ambitious person,' says Tiger Aspect chairman Peter Bennett-Jones. 'What motivates her? She likes the business. She's got nothing to prove,' he maintains. 'She has always struck me as an extremely balanced person.'

Quite what a shrink would make of Elisabeth Murdoch - whose personal fortune is reckoned to be north of £50m - making her play literally weeks after kid brother James pounced on ITV is a moot point. 'Elisabeth is desperate to prove herself to Rupert,' reckons a British TV veteran. 'Being part of the Murdoch dynasty makes life very difficult for her and her siblings.'

But Murdoch pushes aside suggestions that being a member of the nearest thing to a media royal family is any big deal. 'You have to laugh it off,' she said in a rare press interview with the Observerin 2004. 'It's a matter of fact, part of life. It doesn't bother me.'

Whatever the truth, there is no doubt that she can take a significant degree of satisfaction in what she has now begun to achieve at Shine. Despite winning an output deal with Sky shortly after being formed, Shine initially found it difficult to get into its stride and has only recently started to make real waves.

'It's hard to know precisely what Elisabeth's actual abilities are but there is no doubt she is good at attracting good people to work for her. Her contacts book is second to none,' says a leading independent producer. 'There is no one that she and her husband, Matthew Freud, don't know.'

'Elisabeth has genuine leadership qualities,' adds Bennett-Jones. 'She is good with talent, which of course is fundamental, and good to deal with. Shine is yet to make the impact of a Talkback or a Tiger Aspect, but the company is producing some fine programmes. I see no reason why it can't produce more hits.'

Arguably, 2006 was Shine's strongest year yet. Sugar Rush, Channel 4's teen drama, won an International Emmy, while Shine's adaptation of Project Runway, produced for Sky One as Project Catwalk, gave the channel a much-needed home-grown hit. Meanwhile, in what could be potentially Shine's biggest terrestrial TV project to date, the BBC has asked the company to develop a version of the Merlin myth for the Saturday night family viewing slot.

Unusually, right from the word go, the indie worked across genres - drama, reality and entertainment - rather than specialising in one. With Kudos's joint managing directors, Stephen Garrett and Jane Featherstone, joining the Shine board, expect the company to further raise its game in drama.

In fact, Murdoch's success in persuading Kudos to be part of her empire rather than selling to other interested parties, such as RDF or All3Media, represents a considerable coup. With Sony a 14% stockholder in Shine, and her own impressive international contacts - before joining Sky Murdoch ran two TV stations in California - Kudos's global ambitions were key to taking the Shine shilling. 'Elisabeth knows the American market and will help the companies she has bought develop their businesses there,' reckons Bennett-Jones.

Born in Sydney in 1968, Murdoch had a nomadic childhood, moving between Britain, Australia and America, but she was educated in the US, attending the upmarket Brearley School in Manhattan's Upper East Side and studying modern European history at Vassar College.

The story is told of how as a child Murdoch was told that her two ponies, her 'pride and joy', had been given away as a prize to readers of the News of the World, owned by her father. True or not, Elisabeth Murdoch starts 2007 as the proud owner of an impressive production entity that no one is going to take from her, not even her father.

What's more, she moulded Shine from scratch. As she told Broadcast two years ago: 'We built something from literally nothing. We started with a piece of paper. We started with nothing, no computers, nothing.' Not bad for a 'good middle-ranking executive'.