The media is like medieval Italy, claims Alex Connock, chief executive of Ten Alps. What, riddled with vicious, internecine squabbling, pestilence and corruption? No. “There are princes, knights and serfs. You join the court of a prince. As your prince moves around, you move with the prince and you upgrade your job.”

Since 1992, Mr Connock's prince has been Bob Geldof. His first break was joining Planet 24, which made the keynote youth programmes The Word and The Big Breakfast. In 1999, after Planet 24 was sold for a reported £15 million to Carlton, he and Mr Geldof founded their second media venture, Ten Alps.

This makes quality documentaries such as Andrew Rawnsley's account of the disintegration of the Brown Government for Dispatches last Monday and next Monday's self-explanatory From Jail to Jihad.

It is one of the country's largest specialist publishers with 740 titles each year, and produces online videos and dedicated broadband television services, such as a recently renewed contract to run a government-funded channel for teachers, at a reported £50 million for five years - one of the biggest jobs of its kind.

We meet in the Groucho Club in Soho, Mr Connock's London home from home since he sold his place in the capital last year. He now lives in Cheshire with his wife, Sumi, a BBC commissioning editor, and their five-year-old daughter, deep in footballer-and-Wag territory. “I went into our local Co-Op a couple of months ago for some Magners cider. I couldn't have it because Coleen, as in Coleen, had bought the stock out.”

Now aged 42, he was raised in Manchester and reveres the Granada of Brideshead Revisited, Coronation Street and World In Action. “What I would like to do is build the next Granada, combining the values of great content and also being a financial success.” He is duly dismissive of the complaining from inside the BBC about shifting large chunks of the staff to the North West. “Contrary to popular BBC belief, White City is not 15th century Florence. In fact, Cheshire is very like California, only quite cold and wet, and with no porn industry.”

Educated at Manchester Grammar School, he was a church organist and supported himself in his gap year by playing piano in bars around Europe. “I can play Elton John's Your Song in a coma.” He studied politics and economics at Oxford, dropping the philosophy part, a decision he now greatly regrets.

From there, he trained in photo-journalism at Columbia University School of Journalism in New York, taking pictures on the streets of South Bronx, but decided he was never going to excel in a career that also offered few prospects of independence. After an MBA at Insead, Paris - “I took one course in currency valuation models. I barely understood a word of it” - he went to work as a researcher for his first love, Granada.

The early days at Planet 24 were a bit like boot camp, he says. “Like the first reel of a Vietnam war movie - they broke you down and built you up.” An extraordinary roster of talent was there, most of whom went on to become serious players in the media. “There were the incredibly long hours, the silly ideas, the very talented and highly strung individuals.” A typical working week would start at 6am Monday, run solidly to 10am Tuesday, with a brief break for sleep and then back to work on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. “You couldn't get away with it today.” The Big Breakfast was almost a microcosm of British society in the 1990s, he says, and a series based on events there would provide the perfect narrative for the decade.

It was also pretty debauched, I suggest. “I was never remotely interested in that,” he says. “It was the white heat of showbusiness, but it was a Puritan lifestyle, because you were working 70, 80 hours a week.”

Then there was the famously mercurial Geldof. “We have had some lively debates,” he admits of his 16 years with the man. “If there's a concept to be sold, I can barely think of anyone on the planet better at selling it than him. I remember walking into a meeting. We were supposed to be paying them a million pounds. We walked out and they were paying us a million pounds.”

Fast-talking, voluble and hyperactive, he comes across as the typical media operator. “I'm not a TV producer. I'm not pretending to be a TV producer. I'm a media businessman.” Ten Alps emerged out of Planet 24 with one product, a BBC Radio 5 Live chatshow featuring Charlie Whelan and Andrew Pierce, formerly of this newspaper. It has since made 18 acquisitions and grown turnover from £2 million in 2001, when it listed on AIM, to £80 million and staff from seven on start-up to 650.

“We literally did start in somebody's photocopying room. In Battersea, but not in a good bit of Battersea.” The company raised just £3 million when it came to AIM and another £4 million two years ago. A quarter of the equity is still with the board and management; Mr Connock, in company with other AIM bosses, is frustrated at the low rating placed on his shares, about four times' earnings, which has dissuaded him from expanding by raising fresh equity. He also thinks AIM investors fail to make the effort to understand what he does because Ten Alps does not fit into an obvious niche. “It is supposed to be the Alternative Investment Market, isn't it?” he says witheringly.

At present, the interest is in building or acquiring business-to-business, or B2B, ventures. “The value put on B2B is much lower than that of business-to-consumer media. Plus, it's not a bad place to be in a recession.”

He singles out two areas that, were the whole group to implode tomorrow, he would want to take with him. One creates content on corporate responsibility for companies such as BMW, Transport for London and BP. This is “multiplatform” which means it might be on the web, in video form, or printed, or even actors going around schools teaching road safety.

Another huge, related growth area is putting corporate or other videos online. This might involve providing local businesses with the web-based equivalent of Yellow Pages, possibly feeding off the 63,000 advertisers Ten Alps has in its specialist magazines. The cost of setting up an internet-only TV channel devoted to, say, freight, nursing or even more arcane areas of business is minimal.

“Niche multiplatform media is suddenly very fashionable. There is a whole new economy coming into the media that wasn't there before. It's a lot easier explaining my business than it was six months ago.”

It is, it must be said, still not that easy to understand. This new media world has evolved so recently that one senses that not even experienced practitioners have any clear idea where it is going or where future opportunities may lie.

Mr Connock quotes Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian military theoretician. “The point about the ‘fog of war' is that it's a good thing. I'm not bemoaning the chaos that bedevils the media sector. I'm celebrating it.”

So where does he see himself in ten years? “The same place as I am now, sitting here in the Groucho Club,” he laughs. “I just want to be doing something a bit further down the railway line. I wake up every morning truly convinced I'm doing the right thing that day.”

CV

Born
June 1965, in London

Educated
Manchester Grammar School; St John's College, Oxford; Columbia University School of Journalism in New York.
MBA at Insead

Career
1989 TV researcher for Granada, then journalist in New York
1992 Planet 24, producer, The Word, The Big Breakfast
1999 Chief executive, Ten Alps

Family
Married, one daughter

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