Peter Fincham (producer)

Peter Arthur Fincham (born 26 July 1956) is a British television producer and executive. From 2008 until 2016, he was the Director of Television for the ITV network. He was also formerly the Controller of BBC One, the primary television channel of the British Broadcasting Corporation, until his resignation on 5 October 2007, following criticism over the handling of the A Year with the Queen debacle.

Educated at the independent Tonbridge School, Fincham studied at Churchill College, Cambridge. He joined the Cambridge Footlights production team as musical director, alongside a committee which included Griff Rhys Jones, Jimmy Mulville, Rory McGrath and Clive Anderson. After leaving Footlights, Fincham composed songs, none of which were picked up for recording, and then worked on the touring version of Godspell. During a period of increasingly common unemployment, Fincham was walking on Wandsworth Common in the rain and thinking to himself: "Oh my God. What have I done? I have made the wrong decision?" Fincham applied for a job at the BBC in 1984, a position as a researcher on The Late, Late Breakfast Show after his friend Helen Fielding left to concentrate on her writing career. However, he was unsuccessful in this application.

In 1985 he joined the staff of the independent production company TalkBack Productions as a producer. At the time the company, which was founded by comedians Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones, produced radio programming, television advertisements and corporate videos. Fincham became the company's Managing Director in 1986, and in 1989 oversaw the move of TalkBack into fully-fledged television production when it produced its founders' sketch show, Smith and Jones, for BBC One.

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