"Lunch at Michael's" with BBC Worldwide America President Garth Ancier

By Lunch at Michael's Archives
Cover image for  article: "Lunch at Michael's" with BBC Worldwide America President Garth Ancier

Garth Ancier has a favorite photo of himself that was taken when he was only 12 years old. In it, he is operating a "gigantic" RCA color camera on a pedestal. The picture was taken at his first gig in television, working as an intern at the local public television station in Trenton, New Jersey. Ancier, who in the decades to follow would oversee programming and other business in senior positions at NBC, Fox, The WB, CNN Networks and several other Turner networks and, at present, BBC America, recalls that he simply walked into the station one day and asked to work there.

What prompted a 12-year-old tyke to do such a thing? "I don't know," Ancier mused over a recent Lunch at Michael's® with Jack Myers and myself (actually at Brassiere 44 in New York City). "I was always fascinated with broadcasting."

That fascination with broadcasting led to his first real job -- at age 14 -- at NBC radio affiliates WBJH-FM and WBUD-AM, also in Trenton. "I was literally the guy on Sunday morning who would come in and turn the station on," Ancier explained. "It was a 100,000 watt FM station and a 5,000 watt AM station, and I would have to come in early and heat the tubes up, because you couldn't just turn them on. I was always a little nervous right before we would go on the air because I'd have to push these buttons that turned on the plate tower that actually activated the tubes. I'd hear these big banging transformer noises and the lights would dim. It was like there was an execution going on."

Ancier remained at the station through high school and during his years as an undergraduate at Princeton and clearly impressed his superiors. "They let me start a public affairs talk show," he said. They also let him syndicate it when he identified a need for such a program in other markets. "There were stations in New York and Philadelphia that were worried they weren't covering New Jersey enough. The first station to pick it up outside of Trenton was WNBC New York." (Eventually it would come to be titled American Focus and be heard on more than 200 stations.) Although he interviewed New Jersey politicians from the governor on down, Ancier noted that the show attracted a number of exciting guests, such as Katharine Graham of The Washington Post, "because she owned the Trenton Times and wanted to support it," author Ayn Rand, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, ABC's Barbara Walters and, during ambitious trips to Los Angeles, screen legends Henry Fonda and James Stewart.

"I was spending all the money I was earning just to make the show," Ancier laughed. Given where he is today it was money well invested. Interestingly, the radio show, which Ancier remained involved with throughout high school and college, would eventually provide him with the materials needed to secure his first job at a broadcast television network: An identification card from WNBC in New York and a story about him in the Lookout section of People magazine, which identified people who were up and coming in their chosen professions.

Still driven to work in television after he graduated from Princeton, Ancier went to Los Angeles for a number of job interviews, one of them with an associates program at NBC. Determined not to be lost in the crowd of job-seekers and armed with that identification card from WNBC, Ancier "got past the gate" at NBC's Burbank headquarters and "walked up to" the office of NBC Entertainment president Brandon Tartikoff, in much the same way as he walked into that public television station in Trenton ten years earlier.

"I stopped at his assistant's desk and said, 'Hello, my name is Garth Ancier and I'm interviewing for the associates program and I wanted to stop by and say hello,'" he recalled, adding that, once he gained entry to Tartikoff's office he realized he did not have a copy of his resume. That's where the issue of People magazine came in. "I gave Brandon that as my resume," Ancier said. "Then he sat me in a room with three pilots and had me watch them and give him my critique of the shows."

The "interview" didn't stop there. "Brandon asked me what I watched on television. My taste in TV was all over the map. I loved The Mary Tyler Moore Show but I also loved Laverne & Shirley. The thing about TV is it's a high-low medium. You've got to appreciate the lowbrow stuff as much as the highbrow stuff. Brandon called me when I got back east and hired me. I started in L.A. in the summer of 79."

Ancier, who along with Fred Silverman is one of only two executives in the history of television to serve as the entertainment president of three broadcast networks (Fox, NBC and The CW), regards Tartikoff as one of his two mentors. "He took a shot with me in the beginning. He was wildly creative. He was as comfortable putting on Mr. Smith (featuring a talking orangutan) as Hill Street Blues. I loved that about him. He totally was a high-low guy. I was the head of current content at NBC, and I handled The Cosby Show, Cheers, Family Ties, Night Court and Golden Girls, the top five shows [among adults 18-49] in television at that point. I kept thinking, 'Shows one thru five. It ain't never gonna get better than this."

That was when Ancier was approached to become part of the start-up team for Fox, where he worked with his other mentor, Barry Diller. "Barry is a creative guy but in a completely different way. He's more of an editor of ideas than a generator of ideas, whereas Brandon was an endless generator of ideas." Diller, Ancier noted, intently focuses on every detail of everything he works on. "You can't work with him and not walk away with that engrained in your brain," he said.

Ancier said that part of the excitement of working for BBC Worldwide America, where he has overall responsibility for building the BBC brand in the United States as well as running BBC America, is taking his accumulated television experience and "applying it to a programming sphere that was completely, utterly unfamiliar to me. What was most interesting about this job was that the rules of the British programming industry are completely different. The order process is different. The actors are different. They don't want to work on a show for seven years. Look at Ricky Gervais and The Office. Who does 12 episodes of a comedy and a Christmas special and then walks away from a hit show?"

The first thing Ancier did upon joining the company last year was start up BBC World News America, a nightly American newscast on BBCA. "You look at the assets you have to play with when you are a moderate sized cable network," he said. "What is the biggest infrastructure to build off of? Taking off my CNN hat from years ago the answer was, [the BBC has] the biggest news infrastructure in the world. Why don't we build on that infrastructure to do a newscast in the United States that's produced out of Washington? We've taken this giant infrastructure and created a tailored broadcast for the U.S. marketplace. It is an international newscast, but it's geared for an American audience."

The addition of entertainment programming from the networks of the BBC (and other British television entities) that does not resemble anything available on other U.S. networks has also been a priority. Top Gear and Torchwood are two recent successful examples.

A growing challenge BBCA faces, Ancier said, is that as British programming becomes more and more popular in the United States, American networks acquire "change format" rights to more and more British shows. (American Idol is a change format of Britain's Pop Idol.) BBCA is blocked from acquiring the original shows if an American version has already been produced. "We can't play the U.K. version of Dancing with the Stars [known as Strictly Come Dancing]," Ancier sighs. "If you want a format you have to buy it before a U.S. network gets its hands on it and hold back the rights to British episodes." (BBCA years ago, for example, bought the rights to the British comedy The Worst Week of My Life and still owns them, even though CBS is producing an American version titled Worst Week for next season.)

BBCA has acquired the format to a British reality series (which is itself based on a program from Pakistan) titled Arrange Me a Marriage, which Ancier hopes to produce as the network's first original series. In each episode a person who has never found a compatible mate is assisted in meeting a promising new person by all of the people in his or her life, including ex-lovers.

When Ancier isn't working in or watching television he enjoys collecting wine, a passion since 1995. "The person who really got me into it was [former WB chairman] Jamie Kellner," he said. "It's his fault because Jamie used to only drink really good wine." Ancier had to be coaxed into revealing that he owns about 10,000 bottles, most of them stored in a refrigerated warehouse favored by wine collectors in Los Angeles. Ancier said he sells a lot of the wine he buys, but he also enjoys serving it to friends. Asked if there are any bottles he can't wait to open, he thoughtfully replied, "No. I don't believe in just looking at bottles of wine. What's the point?" He did admit that he has a couple of bottles from the Forties that are "just so rare" he can't bring himself to open them.

Lunch at Michael's is a registered trademark of Jack Myers, 2008

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