There are more questions than answers this morning and most of them begin 'what does this mean for...?' It's not often that a story has quite so many ramifications and quite so many unfathomables because it's not often that something so significant comes out of nowhere.
Oddly enough, probably the most straightforward to answer is what does this mean for the BBC.
Although it appears to be a disaster for the BBC to lose its chairman in the middle of a licence fee negotiation, that work's pretty much done. Grade was about to become an honorific in that organisation and there are plenty who can replace him. For the BBC this is far from being a defining crisis. It's not even the worse thing to happen in the last three years. It's embarrassing, doubtless very annoying and a bit discomfiting, but surprise is making it seem worse than it is.
Over at ITV, Grade will arrive as executive chairman in January, with existing chairman Peter Burt due to retire shortly after. ITV's statement has already suggested that Grade's task over the following three years will be to 'back fill' by appointing a chief executive and shuffling upstairs to non-exec chairman himself. But might there be a more immediate roll to fill?
Most industry eyes this morning will already have turned to Kevin Lygo. Channel 4's director of television has been linked with every possible new regime at ITV so often, it certainly won't be a surprise if he does go. It bears repeating, though. Grade's arrival is not good news for the current network centre team led by Simon Shaps.
Much as it's convenient for commentators to tout Michael Grade's programming skills as the solution for ITV, that really isn't his thing anymore and hasn't been for a while. He's known to admire Lygo and Lygo is known to regard ITV as an interesting and potentially lucrative challenge. Grade's great skill is always to support and give autonomy to talented programming people - they would make a good team.
Grade will have enough to do keeping the city off his back to worry about Saturday nights for a while (ironically, of course, it being November, the one place ITV doesn't have a problem is Saturday night, but we're using Saturday night as a metaphor here). Again, despite the intuitive excellence of this move for ITV, when it boils down, Grade actually doesn't have a great deal of experience with the City. His biggest television jobs have been in Channel 4 and the BBC - both public service broadcasters. His stint at First Leisure was disastrous both for the family fortune and the company.
But he is tough and unafraid to have stand up rows. Those of us who remember Grade stomping off to shout at Elspeth Howe when she ran the Broadcasting Standards Commission, have no doubt that he will be able to appeal to the City for 18 months breathing space to turn ITV round. He will certainly suffer if he can't convince them not to spend each quarterly results looking for further cost savings.
And for Sky? This is probably the most interesting and hardest to answer of this morning's questions. Sky will most likely stick around and sit and talk to Grade, because why wouldn't you? If you're James Murdoch, you're not going to be able to sell your 18% stake for a profit for a while anyway, so why not sit still? Funnily enough, they actually did do ITV a favour by buying that stake. When Sky issued that insincere-sounding statement suggesting it only wanted the best for ITV and was there to help, how we scoffed. Turns out, it came true. Whether that was actually the intention, is another question.
