ADDRESSING a media industry conference last November, Dawn Airey could not disguise her glee at being back in commercial television.

“I was delighted to get the call from ITV,” she said, adding that “Michael [‘Grade] was grinning more broadly than usual” when she arrived at the broadcaster’s headquarters to start work.

Drafted in to expand ITV’s production arm internationally, with the target of doubling revenues to £1.2 billion by 2012, Airey was conscious of the challenges ahead. ITV, home to Coronation Street and Dancing on Ice, had just been slammed for running premium-rate phone-ins that viewers had no chance of winning.

“Luckily my colleagues have a sense of humour, and the phrase ‘last in, first out’ was mentioned to me on more than one occasion,” she said.

Last Tuesday, ITV was slapped with a record £4m fine by regulator Ofcom for its phone-in transgressions. However, the news that was guaranteed to wipe the grin from the face of Grade, ITV’s executive chairman, was the shock defection of Airey back to Five, her former employer, after little more than seven months in the job.

It was a blow to Grade, who is battling to convince everyone that its revival is on track. He claimed only in March that he was attracting the best people back to ITV. “The creative community is responding,” he insisted. “It is many years since that was the case. We were the last shop in town that anyone wanted to work for.”

Even worse, Airey’s exit came only nine weeks after her elevation to the ITV board. Insiders are fuming. “She had only just hired lots of expensive Americans to run her division for her,” said one.

Friends say she thought the grass was greener elsewhere after Grade extended his tenure until 2010, putting her hoped-for promotion to the hot seat on the back burner. Airey was also saddled with an unattainable target of producing in-house 75% of ITV’s programming output.

“I think there was some frustration there,” said one broadcasting executive who knows Airey well. “When Michael decided to do another year it put back the decision on his successor to 2009 or after. I wouldn’t say there was an understanding that the job was Dawn’s, but I think an early decision was a condition of her willingness to join.”

Headhunters say her latest move means they may think twice before cold-calling her in the future. “It makes her look a little flighty,” said one recruiter. “I would say that we wouldn’t approach Dawn for a No 2 role. She wants to run her own ship where she can’t fall out with the boss.”

Lancashire-born Airey, 47, has built up a sharpshooting reputation during a career that has taken her from Central TV, to Channel 4, Five, ITV and Sky and seen her build a solid fanbase in the industry. At lunchtime, she is a fixture at the Soho media haunt The Ivy, which she calls “the canteen”.

“She’s a terrific team leader who inspires a lot of loyalty in the people round her,” said David Elstein, chief executive of Five, when Airey arrived in 1996 as director of programmes. Never shy of a soundbite, she vowed to make the channel about more than “films, football and f*****g”.

Success at Five made Airey one of the highest-profile women in broadcasting, but with so much chopping and changing, her record of late has been difficult to measure.

At BSkyB — 39% owned by News Corp, owner of The Sunday Times — she rose to become head of channels. There was disappointment, however, when viewing share for her flagship channel, Sky One, tumbled from 3.9% in September 2002 to 1.6% four years later. Her tenure coincided with competition from a proliferation of new channels, but Airey admitted in 2004: “There’s no two ways about it — viewing figures have been lemmings off the top of a cliff.”

Doubts began to creep in when she quit Sky in 2006 to join Iostar, a start-up media venture with grand plans to buy everything from a modelling agency to Stephen Fry’s TV production business.

The only problem was it had no money. Fundraising was left to Tim Carron-Brown, best known for running the dotcom disaster Efdex, a short-lived online food and drink trading exchange for restaurants and hotels that burnt through £41m before crashing in 2000. Airey lasted eight days, later jokily labelling the firm IOU-star after it stung her bank balance as well as her pride.

By the time the programming job came along at ITV, it was difficult to tell who was more pleased to see the other, Airey or Grade.

When she eventually arrives at Five, after an enforced 12 months of “gardening leave”, there is the added piquancy that RTL, Five’s owner, is tipped as a future owner of ITV. Despite this, pundits expecting an outright bid may be waiting a long time. Its parent group, Bertelsmann, is indebted to the tune of £6 billion — the legacy of buying out a minority shareholder. While that burden could be cut if it persuades Sony to buy out its recorded-music venture, new chief executive Hartmut Ostrowski has earmarked just £3.9 billion for acquisitions in the next five years.

While viewing ITV as expensive, he is keen on online assets and diversifying outside Europe, on which Bertelsmann already relies for 76% of sales.

For Airey, Five will be enough for now. That is, until the next time she has second thoughts.

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