A View from the Top with David Frank, the TV exec who upset the Queen

Back in 2007, Queen Elizabeth II was shown, in a short clip, seemingly stomping out of a photoshoot with Annie Leibovitz, muttering under her breath, clearly bad-tempered, having taken offence at the suggestion she should take her crown off.

Not scandalous, surely? No, but it was an early example of fake news. In fact, the Queen had arrived in a bit of a mood but had also enjoyed the shoot, and only unfortunate editing turned it around and made more of a drama out of it. The tabloids then piled in and talked of betrayal or treason, calling for heads to roll.

One of the heads belonged to David Frank, then chief executive of RDF Television, now cofounder and executive chairman of TRX (or The RightsXchange), an online marketplace for television.

His head is still on his shoulders. He didn’t end up in the Tower of London. “It was a perfect storm of misfortune,” he recalls, sitting in a boardroom in Somerset House, a stone’s throw from the Thames. “Just an amazing cockup.”

There was an out-of-the-blue phone call from the BBC asking if they had any material that could be included in a showreel for their forthcoming documentary series, The Royal Family at Work. An editor noticed they had a tape – thrown together by way of a pitch to other TV companies elsewhere in Europe. It wasn’t supposed to be shown on television at all. But the helpful editor, unbeknownst to higher powers, had it couriered over to the BBC and the offending item duly appeared on the Nine O’clock News.

Then, as Frank recalls: “The shit really hit the fan.” Apologies and resignations (including the controller of the BBC and RDF’s creative director) all round. “The BBC and ITV suspended operations with us, pending inquiries. Our share price collapsed. It went from something like 270 pence to 60 pence in a couple of months.” It was the worst crisis Frank had ever experienced. “We became the story.” The royal to do became known as Queengate, or Crowngate.

The ironic twist in the tale is that he still had complete faith in the company, despite everything, and he and his senior management bought back all the shares at a rock-bottom price, turned the company around in two years and sold it off again at a massive profit.

David Frank is the first CEO I’ve interviewed who once worked for The Independent. He offered me this encouragement: “The barriers to entering TV are incredibly low. It’s not that complicated, telly – no more than journalism.” He was born in Kenya in 1958, studied law at Oxford and was employed as a lawyer for a grand total of 6 weeks until his exam results came through. Which is when he was fired. “I didn’t really fancy being a lawyer anyway,” Frank says.

He went into investment banking but soon dropped out and started writing a column for The Independent about capital markets instead. He had a notion he could do something similar for television and applied for 20 jobs at the BBC but didn’t even get interviewed. Then, through a friendly contact, he fluked a job as a presenter/interviewer doing news and current affairs segments for a number of news programmes. “I loved all that,” he says. “But the BBC was anything but a meritocracy. You had to wait till somebody died before you could get a better job. There was a feeling of Groundhog Day.”

So, begging, borrowing and not quite stealing the finance, he set himself up as an independent producer, RDF. He sold his first programme, to Channel 4 in 1993, about industrial espionage. “It wasn’t a very good programme, to be honest,” he says. “We had a small amount of footage and a lot of conspiracy theorists.”

His younger brother Matthew, then a radio journalist, joined him on the sales side. They ended up making some classic series, such as Scrapheap Challenge (guys racing to put weird machines together out of junk). Their “human interest” stories (“mainly royals or mad eccentric Brits”) sold around the world, notably anything to do with Princess Diana, pre- or post-car crash.

But it was the Communications Act of 2003 that was the real gamechanger. The new legislation meant terrestrial broadcasters would no longer own the programmes they commissioned, and the independents were free to sell their wares again and again. RDF already had its own sales house and became the outlet for 40 or so other independent programme-makers, selling rights on their behalf. They floated in 2005, with a turnover of some £40m, then hit the royal buffers in 2007.

When RDF was sold to Zodiac, Frank moved over to become CEO of Zodiac. But he eventually resigned to set up TRX with his brother, a “next generation” company, in 2015. They have only a small and select staff. Their mantra is “More Deals, Less Hassle”.

David Frank radiates an almost zen-like calm and confidence and can laugh about past dramas. He and his brother Matthew are still best friends and go to watch Arsenal games together. They live within a few hundred yards of one another in Putney and avoid traffic jams by taking the Thames river bus every day to the Embankment and walking to Somerset House. TRX aims to make global TV transactions just as smooth and relaxing.

“The way programmes are sold at present is incredibly old-fashioned. Say you’re a small buyer in Indonesia interested in buying from Endemol [who make Big Brother]. You have to send an email to someone you don’t know. You won’t get an answer. And even if you do somehow manage to engage in dialogue it’s still hugely timeconsuming, going around the houses, passing information to and fro.”

The number of broadcasters has increased exponentially in the last 20 years. So has the number of programme-makers. TRX offers to put them all together, online, to provide a cloud-based platform for buying and selling rights. “If we’re successful, this could be worth billions,” says Frank. “I’m not that motivated by money, but the valuation of a company is a validation of what you do.”

Frank doesn’t miss making programmes. “The nature of ‘creatives’ is that they’re difficult people to work with,” he says. “They’re short on compromise. That’s their strength. But managing them is hard work. I don’t have to do that here. Now we’re making technology, not programmes. It’s different, but I’m having more fun than ever. And it’s a lot better than Queengate.”