Lee Bartlett, ITV global content

Lee Bartlett sneaks up behind the window to the waiting room and gradually rises up from behind the frosted section as if playing peek-a-boo. I jump when I see him, and he breaks into a delighted grin.

“I got you! I’m so sorry I’m running so late,” he says, ushering me into his office with a double-cheeked kiss.

The reason for the hour-long delay was a meeting with his number two, Remy Blumenfeld, about a deal that “had to be sorted out”. With MipTV around the corner and upheaval across ITV, I am not surprised things are a bit hectic.

It’s been a steep learning curve for the enthusiastic Los Angeles native, who first joined ITV in April 2008 as chief operating officer of global content, becoming managing director of the division in June, following Dawn Airey’s shock departure.

Bartlett admits he still struggles with British ways, names and phrases - his PR person reminds him several times that ITV’s flagship breakfast show is This Morning, not Good Morning. “It’s funny,” he says. “I’ll use expressions, and the people I am talking to have no idea what I just said and vice versa.”

Bartlett entered entertainment at the relatively late age of 39 after years as a tax and international finance lawyer based in Geneva: “I woke up one morning completely disoriented because I couldn’t remember what city I was in - after a while all hotel rooms look alike.”

After quitting, he returned to LA and decided to get a job in the “only business there is there” [entertainment] as a bottom-of-the-rung production counsel at MGM under Mark Pedowitz, now senior adviser to the office of the co-chairman at Disney.

Bartlett quickly became hot property and was first poached by Fox to run its Six Feet Under production company Greenblatt Janollari. He was fast-tracked to executive vice-president of business affairs for Fox Group, where he launched four digital cable channels and sold the first FX-branded programmes internationally while managing production and business affairs departments and programming budgets. It was through Fox that he met Dawn Airey, who enticed him to ITV, trumping the other businesses that were headhunting him.

“What was interesting about ITV is that it was a well-known commercial broadcaster, and the job combined all my experience. I thought it would be intellectually and emotionally challenging.”

When Airey left to head Five, Bartlett found himself at the top of a company very different from any other he had worked for, overseeing ITV UK and international production and distribution business, encompassing ITV Studios and ITV Global.

“I was completely thrown in,” he exclaims. “The culture that I come from takes more risks; we operate more on instinct and we’ll make decisions with less ‘what-if’ financial analysis. ITV has been around for a long time, and because it is an amalgamation of various companies I think that the culture has been kind of fragmented. Fox, on the other hand, has a very single-minded culture of taking risks and making money.”

The past 12 months have not been easy. On the plus side, ITV Global figures were one of the few highlights of ITV plc’s results earlier this month, with global content revenues up 10% to £622m. The past few months have also seen no-cost partnership deals with indies Shine and 19 Entertainment to develop new programmes, allowing Bartlett to keep his £150m indie-buying war chest intact while increasing his access to talent.

Elsewhere, insiders say Bartlett has been facing mutiny of late, with most of the unease stemming from his decision not to step in when the roleof Jim Allen, the creative head of ITV Studios, was placed “under consultation” as part of 600 cost-cutting redundancies across ITV. A petition signed by all 35 heads of factual, factual entertainment and entertainment has urged chief operating officer John Cresswell and executive chairman Michael Grade to reverse the decision.

The consultations are ongoing, so it is not surprising that when asked about the protests and restructuring Bartlett says: “You are getting into an area where you are not going to get anything out of me.”

He does say, however, that ITV Studios is positioned “pretty well”, ruling out more cuts. “People need to feel there’s stability so they can concentrate on work, not on worrying whether they’re going to have a job. Uncertainty isn’t good for creativity.”

Following the restructuring and rebranding of ITV Productions as ITV Studios to emulate the scale of US studios such as Fox, Bartlett is implementing a three-pronged strategy for the division. First, attracting top comedy and drama talent via partnerships and deals; second, using newly established focus groups in ITV Studios and outside the UK to develop format ideas that will work locally but travel globally; and third, taking existing brands such as Coronation Street and This Morning, and monetising them through merchandising and licensing deals, as well as developing spin-off formats.

“We need to be able to make our big brands more relevant to today to extract that value for money. We also need to become more user-friendly so you can access all our programmes through your PC or theoretically your phone.”

This year’s MipTV will be the first with Bartlett at ITV Global’s helm. In terms of the mood at Mip, he believes that the economic downturn will encourage buyers to stick with what they know will work rather than gamble on a format. The Colour of Money, I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! and The Krypton Factor are some of the key ITV programmes that “take you out of your ordinary day-to-day life”, he says, and which he will be pushing to overseas broadcasters.

“We will not be selling paper formats because I don’t believe that’s the way to go. We have high-quality British programming that is not as expensive to buy as American programming, and a lot of it is just as compelling.”

Despite the problems he’s faced internally, Bartlett believes he is the right person to be steering ITV Global. “I think globally, I am rapidly learning my local market and I put my heart and my soul into what I do. I hope I am able to inspire the people that work here to be as creative as they possibly can and I can take the best of what I’ve learned and mould that into something that is really successful.”