Danielle Lux

She is, a senior executive told me, a "truly lovely person – and good, too". "I've never heard anybody bitch about her," said a producer who once worked with her, adding: "I suspect she is a pretty decent human being, which is still a relatively uncommon quality."

I am fully expecting, therefore, to discover a good egg when I meet Danielle Lux, Managing Director of CPL Productions, the game-show company that once was mighty Celador.

I had not been, however, expecting loveliness, decency and good egginess to be at the bleeding heart of our interview. Want to know how All Star Mr and Mrs can change the world or how A League of Their Own enhances family life? Read on.

"It's about," Lux says, with only occasional apologies for sounding like a hippie, "being decent and moral. It is a deeply felt thing for me that, whatever I do and we do, as human beings or professionals or as programme-makers, it is all about making life better."

A striking woman with jet black hair and vivid lipstick, she gets to her garret office at CPL's building in Covent Garden by 8:30am, having dropped off her son at school.

I arrive at 10:00am and she has thoughtfully laid out a second breakfast for me, fruit on one side, pastries on the other. She is, she explains, an observant Jew but also a student of yoga, meditation and eastern philosophies: "I find it positively painful to be something I'm not. So I have to follow my compass."

Although she went on to lead entertainment departments at ITV, BBC and Channel 4, her first jobs in television were working under journalists, including Janet Street-Porter, who promoted her from researcher to a producer of BBC youth programmes in a year.

The 1990s management style was "ball breaking" and she is glad that the world moved on. "I remember somebody on a show I was doing hadn't done something I'd asked. I went to draw up in myself, apply the screaming technique that I had been subjected to – not naming Janet, but by loads of people – and I just couldn't do it.

I turned up to the lawyer's office with a pushchair looking like Waynetta Slob in a tracksuit

"I just thought, 'This is a defining moment for me. My style is not that. I need to find something that I am comfortable with.' And it was based on logic. I said, 'You haven't done this. Look at the effect that this is going to have on the team. Please, consider how you have affected everybody else.'"

We agree that happy offices are productive offices and I can see that the bastard across the commissioning desk is probably a nice guy in a difficult spot.

What I find harder to get my head around is how this love-first rule can be strictly applied to her record as a programme-maker and commissioner.

For instance, she was an earlier champion of Paul Kaye, who, as Dennis Pennis, so traumatised Steve Martin by asking him why he was not funny any more that he stopped giving interviews.

"I know. I know. That is what I mean by the world having moved on. That was 20 years ago. I don't think I have changed, but I am more at one with who I am. I'm not trying to be something I'm not."

Yet CPL is right now working on bringing to British television Denmark's Married at First Sight.

In this formatted reality series, complete strangers marry on the decree of a panel made up of a sexologist, a spiritual adviser, a psychologist and a sociologist.

It has found success abroad but, in the US, The Hollywood Reporter disputed its "loftier purpose" and said its appeal lay in the "train-wreck nature of the proceedings". Lux counters that science underpins the experiment: "The best possible people are trying to find the best possible matches."

But she wouldn't marry at first sight, would she? "Would I marry on first sight? It depends what stage I was at in my life. I think a lot of people are saying to themselves, 'I really want this, but I don't know how in the modern world to find the person that I love.'"

And if the show ends up with divorces, will they be on her conscience? "I don't think we're doing anything wrong. I don't think there's anything morally corrupt about it. These people are viewing marriage as a practical bond, rather than a spiritual bond, which I think is slightly different.

"A religious marriage is slightly different. I think if we get any success out of it, I will be utterly delighted. If, God forbid, we don't, we've tried."

In CPL's efforts to ensure that "100% morality is shot through it", the series is behind its original schedule, but it will be delivered next year to Channel 4.

She left that channel as Head of Entertainment in 2003, after her predecessor, Kevin Lygo, awkwardly returned from Channel 5 to be her boss. Happily, she felt it was time that she experienced commerce.

"For me, Paul Smith [the founder of Celador] absolutely epitomised the balance between creative and business."

Celador had grown exponentially since it launched Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? in 1998, and was looking for another hit before Millionaire's fortunes waned. Lux, now Smith's Joint Managing Director, helped come up with You Are What You Eat, the equally loved and resisted Gillian McKeith show.

Smith, meanwhile, sold the Millionaire rights to the Dutch company 2waytraffic and prepared his exit as a very rich man. It was here that Lux's story became exceptional.

Instead of walking away from a Millionaire-less Celador, Lux, with her old Channel 4 colleague Murray Boland as Creative Director, bought it.

"I'd been there two years, when Paul came to me and he said, 'We're going to announce tomorrow that we're going to sell Millionaire. Would you like to do a management buyout? You need to decide very quickly' And I said, 'Oh, God, I was just about to tell you I'm pregnant.' It was a massive decision."

All Star Mr and Mrs (Credit: ITV)

It was all the more so given that, back then, she did not even know what "MBO" stood for. Pregnant, coping with a two-year-old son, she remortgaged her house and learned. Fast.

Within a week of giving birth to her daughter, she was back in negotiations. Baby Talia and her brother, Zac, playing Thomas the Tank Engine on his computer, accompanied her to lawyers' meetings.

"Breast-feeding was my lethal weapon. Sitting across the table with those lawyers, they'd go, 'I think we'll move on.' I was changing nappies on the boardroom table.

"I turned up to the lawyer's office with a pushchair looking like Waynetta Slob in a tracksuit, not knowing if I had brushed my teeth, my hair or neither. 'Family law?', they'd ask at the desk. 'No, corporate.'"

Buying Celador, however, was one thing, sustaining it with hits another, and, although Red Arrow bought a controlling stake in the company in 2012, the pressure is by no means off.

The company's bankers are All Star Mr & Mrs for ITV and Sky 1's soccer quiz, A League of Their Own, but there have been flops, too, including 2014's translation of the US cooking contest, The Taste.

She wonders now if it was more of an 8:00pm show than a 9:00pm one, if the other judges – Anthony Bourdain and Ludo Lefebvre – were as marketable in the UK as Nigella Lawson. "You soul search as to whether you made any wrong decisions, but we were very proud of the production values and the work we did to make it British."

I ask if she shares the perception that the industry is holding its breath for the next big entertainment format, without a clue as to where it will come from. She says the business is cyclical but, yes, everyone is looking for the next big thing.

But are there enough free-thinking mavericks in the industry to come up with it?

"That is actually what I believe to be the strength of the genuine independent community. It's hard to be a maverick inside a big corporation or inside a big, consolidated indie.

"Murray and I will work very hard to make sure that crazy, maverick person who has great ideas, but who most people can't manage, can find a home here."

CPL's Creative Executive, Dawn Beresford, is, she says, actively looking for talent from new quarters. The so-called diversity "problem" is a "massive opportunity".

Certainly, Lux's own background as the daughter of a London motorcycle- accessories trader may not be typical of the media elite of her generation; her years at Oxford studying modern languages are more so.

Politically engaged in causes such as anti-apartheid and the 1984-85 miners' strike, she watched friends enter current-affairs television hoping to change the world, and followed them with a brief stint as a researcher on Channel 4's Dispatches.

Within a week of giving birth to her daughter, she was back in negotiations
"I was trying to be something that I wasn't. The people who studied PPE and went into current affairs and ended up running Newsnight, that was their world.

"That's right for them. This is the world that's right for me. If I can't expose racism in the police force, I can take the mickey out of it a little bit, and I can make people's lives who work here better. There's so many ways of changing the world."

I glance at the framed Mr and Mrs poster behind her. I don't want to be cynical, but how does Phillip Schofield change the world?

"I defy anybody to watch that and not feel better about life or feel like there's love in the world, that there is partnership and togetherness and life is good. For me, that's brilliant, that's perfect."

Even A League of Their Own passes this test of hers, a show that it is so like a family reunion to make that its compere, James Corden, wants to continue making it despite his schedule as the new host of CBS's The Late Late Show.

"I genuinely believe it also chimes with making life better. I cannot tell you the number of people who say, 'That's the only thing I can watch with my 12-year-old son'."

Talking of which, she realised that she might be working a bit too hard when her son, now 10, invented an imaginary friend and called him BlackBerry. "I thought, 'That wrong. When I'm with him, I need really to be with him.'"

So she turns the BlackBerry off? "Yes, completely."

But has all this work made her rich, I ask. "Not yet, no. Maybe it could have, if I'd been more of a shit. I don't know.

"But I feel love coming into work every day. I love working with the people I work with. I love the broadcasters I work with. I know it sounds new-agey, ­hippie, but there is richness in other ways – and in ways that fundamentally matter to me."

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The life of Lux
Danielle Lux is Managing Director CPL Productions

Born 11 May 1964, brought up in south west London

Father Melvyn Lux, owner of a motorcycle-accessories business and later a financial advisor

Mother Denise

Husband Nick Day, clock designer turned landscape gardener

Children Zac, 10; Talia, eight

Education Putney High School; Oxford University (French and Italian)

'Day husband' Murray Boland, Creative Director, CPL. 'We've known each other longer than we have known our partners. He was my best man. I was his. His son is my godson'

 

1987 Reporter, BBC youth shows

1989 Researcher, TVF Productions (Dispatches)

1992 Producer, Planet 24

1993 Head of Young People's Entertainment and Children's, Granada and LWT

1997 Controller of Entertainment Commissioning, BBC

2001 Head of Entertainment, Channel 4

2003 Joint Managing Director, Celador

2006 Completes management buy-out of Celador with Murray Boland

2012 Red Arrow buys controlling stake in Celador

 

Triumphs Helping to bring Jonathan Ross to BBC One; commissioning Marion and Geoff for BBC Two; signing Jimmy Carr, Derren Brown and Vernon Kay to Channel 4

Disaster The £6m Chris Evans game show for Channel 4, Girls and Boys

CPL hits You Are What You Eat, All Star Mr and Mrs, A League of Their Own, Off Their Rockers

CPL misses The Taste; Wall of Fame

First TV memory Adam West in Batman

Watching now Peaky Blinders

Not watching The Missing – 'I was too worried about being utterly upset'

What's next? CPL is working on feel-good dramas for ITV

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