In the summer Antony Fraser instituted a total screen ban on his three children, the oldest aged 11, at his home near Cambridge. No computers, no TV, no electronic gadgets.

The consequence was immediate domestic harmony. “They stopped squabbling over who had got the TV remote and started talking to each other,” he says. It is a bit rich, coming from someone who has been involved with the excesses of popular culture in recent years. Pop Idol, American Idol, S Club 7, the manufactured pop group, those irritating downloads to mobile phone...

This is probably unfair to Mr Fraser, whose role at several investment vehicles has been to mediate between entertainment, “the talent” and commerce. He is managing partner of Acuity Capital, a specialist media investment firm spun out of Electra Partners.

Like most new media people, he has a fondness for jargon - “cross-collateralise”, anyone? But he is actually putting together a portfolio of businesses that are involved in different stages of the production process, music, TV, film or computer games.

There is Target Entertainment, a TV production company, now working on the first commission from Peter Fincham, the newly arrived director of television at ITV. Collision concerns a group of people coping with an as yet unspecified catastrophe.

Factory Media is an “extreme sports publisher”, producing magazines on skiing, snowboarding, surfing, skating and downhill cycling. Downhill cycling? Isn’t that the easy bit? He laughs. “We can arrange a trial for you.” This connects to an online community of practitioners of such sports, who tend to be male, affluent and not easy for advertisers to target.

There is a computer games producer. A music company has just acquired the rights to a catalogue from artists such as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie. The idea is that they can often feed off each other. The games producer might be able to produce something for a website run by another firm. They might offer content to mobile phones. He is particularly excited at the prospects for mobiles, which unlike other areas of new media offer an obvious return because users who might consume for nothing online elsewhere always have to pay their bills. “That’s the last thing they aren’t going to pay. I’ve seen children in India without any shoes but with internet-enabled mobiles.”

But are people who otherwise watch films on 42-inch plasma screens going to do the same on a mobile phone screen little larger than a matchbox? “There will be people who want to use it for communication. There will be people who want to use it to watch content.” He cites Nokia in Asia, which found that the most popular add-on to mobiles is a torch, because of unreliable power supplies. “Your mobile is flexible enough to do what you want it to. People are prepared to accept degradation of quality for contextual usage.” I’m sorry? “The place where you consume media.”

Some areas of media are no-go. “You might as well flush money down the toilet as invest in film production, unless you get a tax angle,” Mr Fraser says. Distribution of completed and successful films is a different matter.

He says: “My first glimpse of the entertainment industry was while training as a barrister, which I really didn’t enjoy. I began to understand what a gulf there was between the City and entertainment, and how much the entertainment industry contributed.”

A chance meeting with Grant Black, the son of Oscar-winning lyricist Don Black, led him into music and three years with his own management company. There was a minor hit for a forgotten band called Fresh, produced by Stock, Aitken and Waterman. There may have been a terrible song from footballer Ian Wright . . . He pretends to bristle when I claim to remember neither. “Fringe stuff . . . It was my first business and I didn’t know what to do.” But it gave him an entry into investment circles.

He studied for an MBA in the evenings at Cass Business School and was taken on by 3i, the venture capital group, where he spent five years at “VC boot camp” in the Midlands, mainly working in metal-bashing and emerging high-tech businesses.

Returning to London, he joined the private equity division of UBS. This was during the dot-com boom, and Mr Fraser was one of those who realised that the power was shifting away from the old media combines, which traditionally had controlled the entire artistic process from recording or film-mak-ing through to the screen or the CD player, to the owners of the content.

They could use digital means, broad-band or TV, to get around the traditional distribution process and go straight to market. Music is the classic example. “Music companies had had 20 years of excess; they were very ill-disciplined businesses. They didn’t know how to react to digital.”

Needing a partner who could handle the talent side, he linked up with Patrick McKenna, who had been chief executive of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group and had set up Ingenious Media. UBS put £22.5 million into a new fund, Mr McKenna another £2.5 million. Its first investment was in 19 Entertainment, run by Simon Fuller, then exiting messily from the management of the Spice Girls.

Mr Fuller, possibly bruised by that experience, was interested in a venture that would control the rights to the material and any spin-off TV or other merchandising, more lucrative than acting merely as manager. He came up with a band aimed at “tweenagers”. “I think 19 made as much money out of S Club 7 as it did out of the Spice Girls, because it owned all the rights. The performers got salaries.”

This takes us back to the Tin Pan Alley of the 1950s, when the performers were dispensable hired hands who sang what they were told, and the managers were in charge. It is a model, I suggest, that the music industry has been trying to replicate ever since it was blown apart by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, et al, who wrote the songs and held the whip hand.

Mr Fraser agrees. One of the problems the City has always had with music in particular is that investors prefer a smooth profit flow. This is easily disrupted by the vagaries and antics of drug-addled performers whose creative impulses might not fit with the financial year. Quoted labels from Chrysalis in the 1980s to EMI today have found their earnings flow disrupted by the nonarrival of product from a key artist.

Mr Fraser says he is not keen to become involved with the artists directly. “I’m always at least one step away from the talent, if not two.”

Mr Fuller, who has “a great relationship with talent”, then went on to develop other ideas. One was a ballroom dancing competition, Mr Fraser remembers, along the lines of the later and successful Strictly Come Dancing. “It so happens that one of the other early ideas took off. That was Pop Idol and American Idol.” The concept has so far grossed more than £3 billion.

Mr Fraser was recently at Mipcom, the annual TV jamboree at Cannes, chatting to the finance director of an unnamed TV production company owned by private equity. He has been asked by his masters to conduct a detailed analysis of recent successful programmes elsewhere, to produce an automatic winning formula. “He just looked at this guy and said: ‘you can do all that. It’s very complicated, sophisticated analysis and it will get you absolutely nowhere’.” He sighs: “There are a lot of eternal optimists in the entertainment business.”

C.V.

Born: London, February 16, 1965

Educated: Kingshott School, Hertfordshire; Uppingham, Leicestershire; King’s College London

1989-90 Associate, Chemical Bank

1990-91 Bar training

1992-95 EML (Artist Management and Media Finance)

1995-99 3i

2000-02 Partner, private equity division, UBS Capital

2002-06 Managing director, Ingenious Ventures

2007- Managing partner, Acuity Capital

Family: Married, three children

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