What is it about Mondays? The
Boomtown Rats wrote a good song in the late 1970s about a youth in
America who cited a dislike of Mondays as a reason for a shooting. Take
the past week in the Australian commercial TV industry: last Monday
Nine CEO, David Gyngell quit the Packer Empire. Yesterday his
counterpart at Ten, John McAlpine, an industry legend, confirmed
industry gossip that he’s going.

McAlpine is 56 and at the end
of eight years as Ten CEO and 18 years at the network. And he’s not
going anywhere – he has a two-year non-compete clause, or as the Ten
Network put it a little less precisely, a “long term consultancy.”
McAlpine’s contract was up at the end of June.

He will be succeeded by Grant Blackley, thereby shutting him out
as a possible Nine CEO. Blackley has followed the same route as
McAlpine (and as David Leckie and Sam Chisholm at Nine), rising to the
top job via the sales route. He’s been head of Ten sales since 1997 and
replaced McAlpine who was head of Ten sales from 1989 to 1997.