So now I’m able to be there for other people

So now I’m able to be there for other people.”Only a prolonged set-to with Nicola Howson, ITV’s director of communications, who pleaded the case of the absent executives he was badmouthing, briefly shut him up. “If I’m being arrogant, if people tell me I’ll try not to be.”He was adamant that the time he had spent out of the limelight had been constructive. It’s just that God said, ‘Barrymore, you’ve had some good times, now I’m going to give you some problems’.”When someone asked him if he didn’t think he should show less arrogance and more humility if he was going to persuade TV companies to take him back on, he looked confused “I’m not aware I’m being arrogant,” he said. I never got up one morning and said, ‘I’m going to be bad today’.

Did people realise that he had been abandoned by his former paymasters at ITV and Granada after a nine-year association, that they had never called him since cancelling his contract to see how he was? They even paid for the rehab they sent him on before dumping him.”I’m an alcoholic I’ve got a disease and there’s a misunderstanding of that. Barrymore bit his fingernails pensively and looked away as a series of tabloid headlines flashed up behind him. His voice lapsing immediately into the telltale slur of the recovering alcoholic, the entertainer went on the defensive. In December, an inquest recorded an open verdict, but the performer’s reputation remains tarnished in many people’s eyes, not least because of his perceived refusal to accept responsibility for his part in the circumstances leading up to the tragedy.Behind their cultivated airs of cool reserve you sensed that the ratings-hungry executives really wanted to see if the man who once held audiences rapt with his bounding energy had finally earned himself another chance.It wasn’t to be. The TV producers and executives who lined the stuffy conference room looked harmless enough, but behind every pair of colourful glasses, every apparently receptive smile, lay one common thought: could he prove to them that, after his long months in the wilderness, Britain’s erstwhile favourite entertainer was once more worth their respect?Nine months ago, Barrymore was still a taboo name in media circles. Stuart Lubbock, a 31-year-old married father-of-two, drowned in a swimming pool at the presenter’s multi-million-pound home after being invited back from a club to a late-night party in September 2001.

When Michael Barrymore strode on to the stage at the Edinburgh Television Festival yesterday he must have known he was about to deliver the most important performance of his career.
Facing an audience of television executives at a question-and-answer session – his first major attempt to step back into the limelight – Barrymore veered through a range of moods from businesslike to nervy, verging on the manic.It couldn’t have been a more influential audience. The series, with the working title A Very British Invention, is written and presented by The South Bank Show host and will be screened late next year as a prelude to the network’s 50th anniversary in 2005. He said revenue from the sale of these shows should be used to finance more public service programming.* Melvyn Bragg is to examine the highs and lows of half a century of ITV in a new series, it was announced today. So: ‘Jowell calls for repeats’? Well, in a way I do, actually: not lazy scheduling and not TV on the cheap, but I’d applaud the mining of the archive for golden nuggets of the past.”On the issue of regulation of the BBC – a much-debated subject because of the David Kelly affair and Downing Street’s row with the corporation – Ms Jowell said: “However wide-ranging, however radical, there’s one thing I am certain of: that at the end of the process the independence of the BBC from the Government will remain.”Her call for more repeats contrasted with the view of Tony Ball, chief executive of BSkyB, who argued in his MacTaggart Lecture on Friday that the BBC should be forced to sell its past successes to other broadcasters.