For Broadcast March 04, 2009

Airey jumped ship from ITV to Five at the right time... didn't she? What a difference a year makes (well, 11 months anyway).

When Dawn Airey quit ITV last April to take up the top job at Five, it seemed like a canny move: ITV's Michael Grade had set her a difficult, nay impossible, challenge of doubling production revenues and raising the amount of in-house produced content from about 50% to 75%. The former target has since been pushed into the future and the latter de-emphasised.

But the big attraction was the top job – Five was willing to give it to Dawn and the sotto voce was that Five's owner RTL would be gunning to merge with ITV. Now, it may be that Five swallows Channel 4, not ITV. Or – if Grade's "blue-sky thinking" gets some traction – becomes part of a combination of all three. Certainly Airey herself is thinking this way, having told Radio 4's The Media Show: "By merger or acquisition, by hook or crook, Five will get bigger."

Will one big commercial broadcaster really be the right solution? I doubt it. And that is even before the regulatory issues. But the government has certainly got it into its head that to sort out C4 will require some kind of combination with another organisation – the hope being that the mixture will provoke an alchemy that will be more than its individual parts.

But while all this manoeuvring continues, Dawn is gearing up to announce job cuts to nearly a third of the workforce, and facing an advertising outlook that – tracking ITV – is likely to be 15%-20% down year on year this quarter.

Into this parachutes Richard Woolfe, recently Sky 1 controller, to add a bit of va-va-voom to Five's schedule, and Jeff Ford, latterly of Channel 4, to beef up the digital channels and use his well-thumbed Hollywood Rolodex to find some acquisition jewels.

But how much cash they'll have to spend is unclear. Dawn's boss, RTL Group chief executive Gerhard Zeiler, said soon after she re-joined Five that she would have the programming budget to do what needed to be done.

But the world has changed since then – and it would be a brave (should that be foolhardy?) move to increase it from £235m.

Instead, you might bet on Five's budget being cut, making Dawn's job even harder. She may have escaped ITV at just the right time – but is it a case of out of the frying pan, into the fire?