Death on the Rock took a heavy toll on Thames Television. What had started off as a routine report by the ITV London region’s weekday flagship current affairs programme This Week had been turned into a cause célèbre. The shooting down of an IRA gang in Gibraltar in March 1988 had been subjected to detailed journalistic scrutiny by the This Week team, led by editor Roger Bolton – and Margaret Thatcher’s government was incandescent with fury.
As Thames’ Director of Programmes I approved the production, and agreed an extended slot for transmission on Thursday April 28th with my colleagues from the other major ITV companies on the Network Controllers Group – whose weekly meetings were observed by the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA). I previewed and signed off the film, with the support of Thames’ Chief Executive, Richard Dunn, who had also viewed it, and departed for the main television market of the year, in Cannes, little realising what was going on behind the scenes.
Margaret Thatcher, at that point not having even seen the programme, was asked by a group of Japanese journalists whether she was furious about it, and replied ominously that her reaction “went deeper than that” – a tale set out in Roger Bolton’s excellent book about the whole episode, “Death on the Rock”, which I draw on throughout this piece. She encouraged her normally mild-mannered Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, to try to bully the IBA into blocking transmission. The regulator’s chairman, Lord Thomson, firmly and repeatedly rejected Howe’s demand. Thames knew nothing of this until Howe made it all public with a press conference hours before the programme was scheduled for broadcast.
