Most of us remember Julia Child as the leading edge of how-to-cook TV on what was once the only venue for such programs: PBS. Now, years into a virtual North American culinary renaissance, our love affair with all things food is now attributed to cable television’s Food Network.
The Wandererrecently sat down with one Mattapoisett resident who was there at the dawn of the Food Network and who may have been the reason why the unique concept of 24-7 broadcasting of single-theme programming ever got off the kitchen counter and into the oven.
Paul Silva is a Mattapoisett Selectman who just so happens to know a thing or two about the cable TV industry, having been an executive in the local corporate machine from 1973 until his retirement in 2000. Listening to him talk about those early days is like a history lesson in how cable television came to be the entertainment delivery giant it is today.
Silva’s first job at Rhode Island-based Colony Cablevision, once owned by The Providence Journal and acquired by Continental Cable in the mid 90s, was in sales – door-to-door sales, that is.
“I was trying to build the cable market up in the Boston area so I went door-to-door,” he said with something between a smile and a grimace. In one home, he was literally pushed out the door and down a flight of stairs by an angry wife who refused to pay for her unemployed husband to watch TV all day. “I took a tumble,” he said with a hearty laugh at the memory.
Surviving that trial by fire, Silva rose through the ranks, becoming the vice president and director of operations in 1988 when he met and collaborated with Joe Langhan. Langhan reported directly to Silva and needed a steady hand. While he was a creative, hard-working employee, Langhan could drift from project to project a bit unfocused, Silva remembered.
During that time, there was a television concept that Silva believed merited further development. The theme was to provide real-time feed from courtrooms where high profile cases were being tried. The inspiration for that concept was the infamous 1984 Big Dan’s rape trial in Fall River.
Silva and Langhan urged the cable company executives to allow them to pursue that concept, which it did, and Silva was successful in getting the judge in the case to allow the unedited feed from the courtroom to be aired on Colony’s network station. Before long, CNN was airing parts of the trial as well. Court TV was born.
That moment in cable TV’s evolution helped to bring in viewers and heightened the profile of cable as not just a source for entertainment, but a viable news source to a public who so far was only familiar with network programming via TV antennas and rabbit-ears wrapped in aluminum foil.
Colony, along with other cable companies, searched for programming that would bring in the viewers and the advertising dollars.
Then came food. The idea of doing what PBS was doing so well – airing instructional cooking programs – started to simmer with Silva, now a true believer. The problem was how to get Langhan to focus.
“Joe was like an absent-minded professor. If you could get him to focus, he’d run with it, but convincing him took some work,” Silva said.
In the book by author Allen Sulkin, From Scratch: The History of the Food Network, Silva is credited with being the driving force behind Langhan. In Sulkin’s book, Langhan is quoted as saying, “If I hadn’t had the meeting with Paul, if Paul hadn’t told me to go down and write the (concept) out, I mean, who knows, I may have dragged it out for months … may have gotten distracted with another idea.”
While the idea of a channel dedicated solely to cooking had been suggested to Colony’s parent company, it hadn’t captured the interest Silva felt it deserved. And Langhan wasn’t overwhelmed, either. But at Silva’s insistence, Langhan outlined the program on paper. It was presented to the higher-ups, given the financing it needed, and eventually gelled into something even these gentlemen couldn’t have imagined at the time.
Silva recalled how the concept of a food channel was a hard sell to other cable providers. It was a slow roast versus a quick sauté. But Colony needed partners to make the channel financially viable.
Silva said that during an annual conference of cable companies held in New Orleans, Colony Cablevision invited executives to attend a cocktail party at Emeril Lagasse’s NOLA Restaurant.
Yes, the Emeril Lagasse.
A little wine, a little food, and a heaping cup of promoting was the plan.
“Emeril cooked all this food, no one showed up!” said Silva. “No one knew who Emeril was,” So while this recipe failed, Silva and the team kept stirring the pot.
It took years in the test kitchen, that is, corporate marketing, before the Food Network was out of the oven and onto the tables of millions of people around the continent.
“I told Joe, I do this at least three times a day,” said Silva, pantomiming eating a sandwich. “Why wouldn’t this work? It was very difficult in the beginning, tough to make people see, tough to get partners.” But Silva persevered and since he enjoyed watching cooking programs on PBS, he knew there was an audience who would tune in.
“The stars did eventually line up,” Silva said. He said that it took cable partners a while to understand the new type of programming that was coming, but what sports programing did for football players, the Food Network did for chefs.
“They became rock stars,” Silva said.
By 1993, the Food Network was on its way, seven years after Colony first pitched it to investors.
Today, Silva enjoys thinking about the ups and downs of a career he enjoyed for decades, but downplays his role in the creation of the Food Network. Instead he credits Langhan and executives at the Colony Cablevision’s parent company, The Providence Journal, for taking a tiny seed of an idea and nurturing it into the bean stock giant it has become.
Food, however, is a pleasant pastime Silva relishes – he does most of the cooking at home.
When asked who taught him how to cook, Silva didn’t hesitate. “My mother. She was a good cook…. She made hearty Sunday roasts.”
“I enjoy cooking and entertaining our friends,” Silva said. One could almost smell the glorious aromas of the recipes he described wafting from his kitchen. “I like to take scallops and float them in maple syrup with a little ginger.…”
As for the Food Network, it has created millionaires and international celebrities out of unknown chefs and is now owned by Scripps Networks Interactive, Discovery, Inc., and Tribune Media. And that’s no small potatoes.
By Marilou Newell