Patrick Delany set to make his play

PATRICK Delany tells a good story about the time he almost became a reality-television star.

Patrick Delany, FOX

PATRICK Delany tells a good story about the time he almost became a reality-television star.

It was January 1995 and he was working as a "reasonably frustrated" lawyer at Gilbert + Tobin in Sydney.

At the same time the Nine Network was filming a new consumer affairs show called Fair Go. The pilot episode featured celebrity lawyer Chris Murphy in the role of a white knight who would ride in at the end to save ripped-off punters. There was just one problem: Murphy had pulled out.

"So they rang me up and said, 'Could you do it?' and I did," recalls Delany. "Nobody at Gilbert + Tobin, who were Nine's legal advisers, knew I did it. It was at this caravan park down on the south coast that had somehow been aggrieved."

A few days later, Delany was working late when his phone rang. "It was (then Nine news boss) Peter Meakin, who I assume was in an edit suite with a cigar. And he was saying: 'Mate, mate this has surprised me. It's bloody good. Come on over and do the show'.

"I said: 'Peter, I can't just leave. I've got billable hours to do! Nobody here knows I've done this!' He goes: 'Well come over tomorrow, you've got to see it. It's bloody good. See you. Bye'."

When Delany tells a story he often does the voices. His impersonation of Meakin, who now runs news and current affairs at Seven, is quite good. He does an even better version of radio broadcaster Alan Jones. Best of all is his Peter Rose, the head of Showtime Australia.

Most people in the pay-TV industry Delany has inhabited for the best part of 15 years think his impersonations are excellent.

Foxtel chief executive Kim Williams describes them as "devastatingly good". Austar's director of corporate development, Deanne Weir, says: "They are some of the best -- apparently, so I'm told, he even does a very good Deanne Weir."

There is also much agreement about the other qualities Delany will bring to his new job running Premier Media Group, the producer of the Fox Sports channels. Almost without exception, "energy" is the first word colleagues use to describe him. "Fox Sports won't be a place for the lethargic under Patrick," says veteran sports rights negotiator Ian Frykberg.

Williams says of their decade-long partnership at Foxtel: "One is impressed by his sense of energy, his sense of generosity, his sense of warmth, the fact he is such an easy communicator. He is a very, very likeable person. But there is real substance to go with that."

Delany speaks quickly. His conversations are peppered with so many aphorisms his Foxtel colleagues once presented him with a Wallabies football inscribed with the words "Don't drop the ball".

He adopts an almost evangelical zeal for new challenges. These have ranged from selling muzak cassettes to Just Jeans outlets early in his career to running Foxtel's $600 million digital upgrade in 2004.

Delany has enjoyed success by tempering his natural exuberance with a sense of commercial pragmatism and a good feel for consumers.

One exception was a fireplace application he had loaded into the memory of Foxtel's iQ set-top boxes a few years back. Delany loves fireplaces - there are three in his family home in the Sydney harbourside suburb of Seaforth - and was convinced viewers would enjoy having a log fire crackling away on their flat-screen TVs.

"Unfortunately, nobody shared my enthusiasm. I still have it on in my office in winter, of course," Delany says with a laugh. "I find it can be very good to diffuse a tense meeting, literally having a fireside chat."

Nine never did make Fair Go. It turned out some of the show's targets were advertisers and the concept was binned. Delany practised law for four years. His father, Pat, was a lawyer. Yet escaping the profession is one of the ways he defines himself.

When he began at Premier three weeks ago he gave PowerPoint presentations to staff in Sydney and Melbourne as a way of introducing himself. One of the first things he said was: "If you really want to insult me, call me a lawyer."

Delany's directness in the presentations caught some employees by surprise. By some accounts he pulled no punches about the importance of "taking the business to the next level". At one point during the Melbourne presentation, some of the older journalists interrupted Delany's spiel about the significance of digital to say they didn't own an iPad. "Well, we should get you one," replied Delany. "We'll learn together."

There is no doubt Delany has lots to do. Pay-TV penetration in Australia has stalled at 30 per cent due to tough economic conditions and competition from free-to-air digital channels. Compelling sport is one of the best ways the "platforms", Foxtel and Austar, can attract new subscribers. "If Fox Sports isn't firing we won't be firing as an industry," says Austar boss John Porter.

Under previous chief executive David Malone, Premier became a highly profitable company with a strong set of broadcast rights. But most observers believe the on-air look of Fox Sports is tired.

Delany knows there is no time to lose. He has privately told people that he has six months to make an impact before he is in danger of "becoming part of the furniture". For the first time in almost a decade, the ambitious 48-year-old is no longer working in the considerable shadow cast by Williams.

"I am not here to make people feel completely comfortable. I am here as a change agent. The thing I want to change the most is not to make the business more efficient. It is highly efficient. I want to change the way in which we produce television.

"The staff talks may have been a bit confronting but I can assure you they were packed with energy and packed with enthusiasm and they contained the message: We can do this together."

DELANY began learning about television as a boy in the 1970s. His mother, Maureen Duval, a former Miss Australia and the face of David Jones for 16 years, hosted more than 3000 episodes of the Ten Network's Good Morning Sydney, which the department store sponsored.

Duval had a gift for sales - she moved plenty of dresses as a compere for fashion parades - and was asked to do television ads for the department store. "The first ad was for Dickies towels, which sold out the next day," says Delany. "This is the sort of stuff we talked about around the dinner table - why that ad worked and other ads didn't work."

Delany grew up in Beauty Point, an affluent harbourside pocket on Sydney's north shore. He is the eldest of four boys and describes family life as "massively competitive".

Swimming became the sport of choice after a doctor treating Delany's asthma suggested time in the pool. He represented NSW as a schoolboy and came fifth in the trials for the 1982 Commonwealth Games in Brisbane. His brother Michael came fourth and became part of the Olympic silver-medal winning Mean Machine relay team.

Delany gave up competitive swimming after that. "Let me tell you, there was a bit of distance between fourth and fifth," he says.

"I found in life that results are all that matters. The thing in swimming is that last bit of effort; looking at the wall and saying: 'I don't know how much pain I'm going to feel, I'm going to hit that wall first.' It's amazing life training. Nobody remembers second. They don't. It's an unfortunate fact of life. But it's true."

Competition was not just confined to the pool. Even speeches at birthdays - compulsory in the Delany family - are a chance to prove yourself. "When you come from a Jesuit Catholic background it makes you a good storyteller. It's in the genes. Not only that but Jesuits are good storytellers for a result. I think you could define the Delanys as competitive storytellers."

Delany attended the private Riverview College in Sydney's north and was a late developer academically. He did not get the marks to go straight into law, completing his legal degree through a night course at the University of Technology, Sydney, while working at his dad's firm and, later, pouring beers at the Shakespeare Hotel in inner-city Surry Hills.

"I went from growing up in Mosman wearing Country Road to wearing black at the pub. It exposed me to a different culture."

Armed with a practising certificate, Delany took a job in insurance law at Phillips Fox. Not surprisingly, he was ill-suited to the work and found himself in the pub one Friday evening telling a senior partner, Mark O'Brien, that he wanted to get into advertising.

"Jesus Christ would have found it difficult to parlay a short and crappy career in insurance law into advertising but I still told Mark about it," he says.

O'Brien told him life did not work that way and suggested media law as a stepping stone. Delany accepted the offer and six months later O'Brien moved his team to Gilbert + Tobin.

Delany got into media in 1994 as the head of business development at East Coast TV. A fledgling pay-TV operation run by the Los Angeles-based Tow family, East Coast struggled and was ultimately sold to Austar. But it gave Delany a grounding in the media and won him many admirers.

"He's actually one of the longest-serving pay-TV executives in Australia," says Foxtel director and News Digital boss Richard Freudenstein (News Limited publishes The Australian and owns 50 per cent of Premier). "He's had some tough bosses and he's always done an impressive job."

Delany got a job as head of non-drama at Southern Star, working on shows such as Burgo's Catch Phrase and occupied an office next to the room where veteran producer John Edwards developed The Secret Life of Us. But with no big hit, Delany decided production was not for him. "You've got to be able to walk the walk and I decided my future was in liberating creative people," he says.

His decision to leave Southern Star, according to those who were there at the time, was helped by his different management style to the firm's more acerbic founder, Neil Balnaves.

Austar's Porter lured Delany back into pay-TV by offering him a job running XYZ Networks, the company behind channels such as Lifestyle, V and Max. Delany loved the work, hired people such as Sandra Hook and learned about what makes a good pay-TV channel. "It knows its target audience, it has a personality around the shows and it works with the platforms."

But Williams, who sat on the XYZ board and had recently got the top job at Foxtel, had other ideas. He wanted to transform almost every aspect of the business by making Foxtel digital.

The project was a huge risk and Foxtel's shareholders - Telstra, News and Kerry Packer's PBL - were going to need some convincing about the merits of borrowing more than $500m in non-recourse debt.

Delany was appointed Foxtel's director of digital in 2002. His central role driving the project is regarded by most people within Foxtel - including Williams - as one of his most impressive achievements.

Delany was involved in most aspects of Foxtel during his nine-year stint at the business. As well as the digital transformation, he had the tough job of renegotiating film deals with the major US studios.

"When you are dealing with the major studios there is only about six major companies and all of the people that run those companies, most of them have been in their jobs for many, many years," says Mark Kaner, president of Twentieth Century Fox television distribution. "I would say Patrick did a very good job of doing his homework. He doesn't lose his temper. He had a very measured response. He is absolutely commercial."

Delany, who prides himself on being able to anticipate media trends brought about by new technologies, was also responsible for rolling out new products such as iQ. He remembers pitching the box one day to Kerry Packer.

"I was about five minutes into my spiel when Packer said: 'Son, I can see you are a super salesman, but could you just cut to the bit where this makes money'."

Over time Delany gained more responsibility at Foxtel. In 2008 he took charge of sales at a particularly busy period in his life. He and wife Georgina had just had a son - they have two older daughters. At the same time they were building an ambitious home on their very steep block. One of Delany's favourite films is the 1968 comedy The Party, starring Peter Sellers, and he wanted a similar design to the house in the movie.

"The minute we started to build, the drought broke (making the site very slippery) and the GFC started. It was a tremendously difficult design. What was meant to be an 18-month build became a three-year build.

You think when you build a house it will be pleasurable but that is actually bullshit. This would have been a perfect episode of (ABC1 show) Grand Designs. It was the biggest risk I've taken personally."

For all the stress - Delany caught pneumonia at one point - he says the results were worth it. He describes time at home with his family as the antidote to his high-energy professional life.

"It is very hard to be really up - and my style is to be tearing something out of my heart or my soul for my people - all the time. It takes a lot of energy. You do have to take time to regroup. That's what family is for."

ONE of the great talking points in pay-TV circles is Delany's partnership with Williams. They are very different characters. Williams is intense, relentless and dominant. Delany is a more gregarious spirit. Yet both are very determined. "We've had some massive, ding-dong arguments over the years," says Williams.

"Patrick is not one of those people who says, 'With the greatest respect', which of course is the old cliche that means, 'With maximum disregard'. He'll say, 'No, no, you're wrong'. I'll say, 'F . . k you, I'm not wrong'. And then we'll get on with it and arrive at something. Sometimes we'll agree to go my way. Many times we agree to go his way."

Delany says these debates always took place behind closed doors. "I think as time goes on, people who have worked with Kim Williams will see what an honour it was to work with him because he will be seen as one of the legends of broadcasting. He will be seen up there with people like David Leckie and Sam Chisholm."

The relationship between Delany and Williams is now entering a very different stage. There is a natural tension between pay-TV platforms and channels. Operators such as Foxtel pay large amounts of money to carry channels and expect quality product and marketing in return.

Malone and Williams did not always see eye to eye about Fox Sports. It will be fascinating to see how Delany handles himself.

In his first three weeks at Premier, Delany has made it clear his job is to improve the way Fox Sports appears on television screens. Bigger studios at Premier's new building in St Leonards, in Sydney's inner north, will help. New graphics are on the cards. An expanded set of AFL rights next year will be a key selling point. But the challenge is much broader.

It is tempting to think sports broadcasters have a captive audience but they still want to increase their numbers. "It's a bit like going fishing," says Seven sports head Saul Shtein.

"There are a number of fish that will jump into the boat - these are the sports nuts. But a broadcaster's job is to cast the net wide by entertaining a larger group of people who are not necessarily obsessed with sport."

A good example of this is the US channel ESPN, which combines slick technology, well-produced magazine programs and an irreverent attitude to capture a broad audience. Porter is a big fan of ESPN and argues it is a model Delany should adopt.

"I do think Patrick is the right guy at the right time," he says. "I'm sure he enjoys his sport but he's not sports-mad. One thing we've got wrong - and this pre-dated Malone - was that it was always about the sports and less about the TV. Now having a guy that is looking at it more through the prism of television should serve the channels well."

Delany grew up supporting NRL club Manly. But he is not a tragic. He says his job is to make Fox Sports an iconic brand. It won't be easy in an industry where the free-to-air networks are protected by anti-siphoning rules and new online broadcasters are entering the market.

But he is unfazed. "Occasionally the ball is on the ground," Delany says. "Someone has to pick it up and run with it. Just don't drop it. Complete the play."