David Elstein

David Keith Elstein (born 14 November 1944), is Chairman of openDemocracy.net and an executive producer at Portobello Films.

His parents were Polish orphans who were brought to Britain by the Rothschild Foundation, and ran a ladies' outfitters in Golders Green. On a scholarship, he was educated at Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, before gaining a place to read History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, gaining a double first. After graduating at the age of 19, he became a trainee at the BBC in 1964. Most of his first year at the BBC though, was spent on attachment to the new Centre of Cultural Studies at Birmingham University.

At the BBC he worked on Panorama and The Money Programme. His subsequent production credits, include for Thames Television, the The World At War and This Week (of which he became editor) and elsewhere Weekend World, A Week In Politics, Yuri Nosenko, KGB and Concealed Enemies.

After a period as an independent producer working on programmes broadcast by Channel 4, he rejoined Thames Television as Director of Programmes in 1986. In this role in 1988 he signed off the controversial programme "Death on the Rock", an edition of the This Week series about Operation Flavius, the shooting in Gibraltar of three unarmed members of the IRA.

Blamed in part for Thames losing its franchise to broadcast at the end of 1992, Elstein delivered the previous year's MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival. In his speech he mocked what was now an auction as Mrs Thatcher's "National Lottery", criticised the Conservative government for behaving with "spite" towards ITV and said that the franchise round had been "a death on the rack to make up for 'Death on the Rock'." Elstein had hoped that a clause in the Broadcasting Act 1990 would save Thames thanks to its past reputation, since underbidding Carlton, the eventual winners, had been a deliberate choice. Elstein though, found that "the exceptionality clause wasn't worth the paper it was written on."

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