Michael Jackson (TV)

Michael Richard Jackson (born 11 February 1958) is a British television producer and executive. He is notable for being one of only three people to have been Controller of both BBC One and BBC Two, the main television channels of the British Broadcasting Corporation, and for being the first media studies graduate to reach a senior level in the British media. He was also the Chief Executive of another major British television station, Channel 4, between 1997 and 2001.

Born in Macclesfield, Jackson was the son of Ernest Jackson, a baker, and his wife Margaret. He was educated at The King's School, at the time a direct-grant grammar school, and now an independent school in Macclesfield, Cheshire and his sister, Hilary, later claimed in a newspaper feature that he was already focused on a media career by the age of twelve. Following school, Jackson studied at the Polytechnic of Central London (renamed the University of Westminster in 1992), from which he graduated with a First Class Honours BA in Media Studies in 1979. The media studies degree at the Polytechnic of Central London had been launched by David Cardiff in 1969, when the institution was still known by its former title of Regent Street Polytechnic, and was the first such degree course ever to have been established in the United Kingdom.

Immediately after graduating, Jackson became the organiser of "The Channel Four Group", having written his final year dissertation at college on the prospect of a fourth national television channel in Britain. The Channel Four Group was a collective of television producers lobbying the British Government to establish a new independent television channel outside of the BBC / ITV duopoly, to act as a "publisher" of programmes produced by independent production companies rather than using the almost exclusively in-house production methods the existing channels then employed. This channel, named Channel 4, was eventually launched in 1982, and Jackson was the producer of one of its first major documentary series, The Sixties, screened that year.

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