Education
On a scholarship, he was educated at Haberdashers" Aske"s Boys" School, before gaining a place to read History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, gaining a double first.
On a scholarship, he was educated at Haberdashers" Aske"s Boys" School, before gaining a place to read History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, gaining a double first.
After graduating at the age of 19, he became a trainee at the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1964. At the British Broadcasting Corporation he worked on Panorama and The Money Programme. His subsequent production credits include The World At War, This Week (of which he became editor), Weekend World, A Week In Politics, Yuri Nosenko, Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) and Concealed Enemies.
After a period as an independent producer working on programmes broadcast by Channel 4, he joined Thames Television as Director of Programmes in 1986.
Blamed in part for Thames losing its franchise to broadcast at the end of 1992, Elstein delivered the previous year"s MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival. In his speech he mocked what was now an auction as Mrs Thatcher"s "National Lottery", criticised the Conservative government for behaving with "spite" towards Independent Television and said that the franchise round had been "a death on the rack to make up for Death on the Rock." Elstein had hoped that a clause in the Broadcasting Acting 1990 would save Thames thanks to its past reputation, since underbidding Carlton, the eventual winners, had been a deliberate choice.
Elstein though, found that "the exceptionality clause wasn"t worth the paper it was written on."
After his time at BSkyB as head of programming, he launched Channel 5 as its Chief Executive in 1997. Elstein has also been Managing Director of Primetime Productions and Managing Director of Brook Productions Limited.
He has been a visiting Professor at the University of Westminster, University of Stirling and University of Oxford, having been the inaugural Visiting Professor in Broadcast Media at Oxford in 1999.
His six lectures there were entitled "The Political Structure of United Kingdom Broadcasting 1949-1999".
The lecture series was published in 2015 as an open access eBook by meson press Elstein was the lead author of the Broadcasting Policy Group"s publication, "Beyond The Charter: The British Broadcasting Corporation After 2006" (2006). He advocates changing the funding model of the British Broadcasting Corporation and replacing the licence fee with voluntary subscription.
He has also chaired Screen Digest Limited, DCD Media plc, Luther Pendragon Holdings, Sparrowhawk Media, the British Screen Advisory Council, the Commercial Radio Companies Association, Really Useful Theatres, XSN plc, Sports Network Group plc, Silicon Media Group, Civilian Content plc and the National Film and Television School.
He was also a director of Virgin Media Incorporated and Marine Track Holdings PLC
Most of his first year at the British Broadcasting Corporation though, was spent on attachment to the new Centre of Cultural Studies at Birmingham University.
In this role in 1988 he signed off the controversial programme "Death on the Rock", an edition of the This Week series about Operation Flavius, the shooting in Gibraltar of three unarmed members of the Ireland Republican Army. He is also a director of Kingsbridge Capital Advisors Limited, and was previously a supervisory board member of two German cable companies.
