Paul McIntyre: Spanner in Packer’s works

Any New Zealand TV type hoping Prime TV boss Chris Taylor will make a hurried return across the ditch to run Kerry Packer's Nine Network might want to check their antenna.

Taylor is certainly a name being bandied about for the gig after the shock exit of David Gyngell from the post on Monday, but Taylor's an outside chance.

Most figure he's still too young and inexperienced to manage a A$1 billion machiavellian hotbed of big ego personalities and power politics.

But what is most delicious in Gyngell's exit this week from the top spot at Nine is that someone is actually prepared to head-butt the Packers.

What's more, it's come from within the family - David Gyngell, 39, is Packer snr's godson, Packer jnr's (James) best mate and the son of the late and rather eccentric Bruce Gyngell, the first man on Australian TV in the 1950s and longtime Packer family confidant.

There's little doubt the Packers did not want Gyngell to go. Before his announcement on Monday, James Packer and heavies at the listed company PBL, which included the New Zealand-born media power broker Sam Chisholm, had lobbied furiously over the weekend to change Gyngell's mind.

No success. Indeed, Gyngell refused to see Chisholm.

Instead, PBL got this rather blunt statement on Monday from Gyngell: "I reached the determination that I was simply not prepared to allow my position to be rendered untenable by what I regard as increasingly unhelpful and multi-layered management systems developing between Nine and PBL. Without the absolutely and unmistakably clear mandate required by all CEOs to properly run any major business, I believe it was in my best interests to move on. I do so without rancour or bitterness, and express my genuine affection and support for the Packers, Nine, it's great people and its continuing excellent product and ratings dominance."

That's one ferociously independent statement in the world of Australian TV. Gyngell is, however, independently wealthy and ultimately his own man. He's only been in TV for six years. Before that he established his own chain of surfwear stores.

Although Gyngell pointed to the interference of too many PBL executives, his dissatisfaction stems from a multitude of fronts.

For the first time in years, the network has been under siege from the Seven Network for ratings supremacy. Nine, the TV ratings darling for decades, has lost out in the weekly audience battle to Seven for half the year so far.

Kerry Packer is not used to that. And because of it, all sorts of fire has been breathing from PBL's Park St headquarters in Sydney.

Interestingly, one of the moves which rankled Gyngell was the return to Nine of Chris Taylor's father, Lynton, officially to handle negotiations for the TV broadcast rights for the Rugby League and Australian Rules competitions.

After a decade away from Nine, Lynton Taylor was installed by Kerry Packer, not Gyngell.

But there's more. Sam Chisholm has also taken the mantle of executive director of PBL's TV interests, which include Nine, Prime TV, pay TV group Foxtel and the Premier Media Group, a joint venture between PBL and News Ltd for the Fox Sports pay channels.

And finally there's the master of backroom politics, John Alexander, a former newspaper editor and publisher at John Fairfax and PBL's magazine division, ACP. Alexander is now PBL's chief executive.

In the end Gyngell was copping it on all fronts, including at least one phone call every day from Kerry himself on how to address the ratings slide.

Gyngell is now surfing at the hip New South Wales coast holiday town of Byron Bay. He claimed this week he would make a return to the TV business, sparking a flurry of speculation about him taking the chief executive's job at the Ten Network - the current boss, John McAlpine, is expected to depart later in the year.

In the meantime, Sam Chisholm has stepped up temporarily to run Nine until the search for a new boss is done.

Chisholm, of course, turned Rupert Murdoch's British pay TV group, BSkyB, into a profitable enterprise after working for Nine under Packer and Alan Bond.

Amid all the management tap- dancing at PBL and Nine, debate is also raging about whether the Packers really want to stay in the media business, particularly if the federal Government relaxes media ownership laws in the next 12 months.

If the foreign ownership rules are relaxed as expected, the Packers could exit at a premium as the number of potential offshore suitors creates more demand for tightly held Australian media assets.

Moreover, PBL is continuing to expand its casino business, last year striking into the Asian market in Macau with casino king Stanley Ho.

Now's the time for a punt. The tricky bit is which way.

* Paul McIntyre is a Sydney journalist