MEDIA: SPOTLIGHT ON ITV - An ambitious Elstein sizes up his opportunity to change ITV.

Will David Elstein engineer his way to taking charge of a merged ITV?

During his time as the director of programmes at Thames Television, David Elstein was responsible for showing the Death on the Rock documentary following the 1988 shooting of three IRA terrorists by the SAS in Gibraltar.

The airing of the controversial programme is widely believed to have contributed to the Government's decision to strip Thames of the London weekday franchise and award it to Michael Green's more biddable Carlton.

As if to prove that revenge is a dish best served cold, a decade later, reports suggest that Elstein is planning to take out Green, the Carlton chief executive, and Charles Allen, his counterpart at Granada, with plans for a restructured post-merger ITV. Green and Allen had proposed that they become the chief executive and chairman respectively of a merged ITV, but shareholders may have other options.

Among Elstein's suggestions are outsourcing more programme commissions, the disposal of the two companies' disparate foreign TV interests and a move to a national rather than a regional sales model with two separate divested sales houses.

So is Elstein throwing his own hat into the ring? No-one, other than Elstein himself, really seems to know and he refuses to talk until he returns from a brief holiday.

Some say that he is planning a wholesale regime change and will lead a cabal of usurpers; others that he is merely acting in his capacity as a broadcast adviser making recommendations to investors on how savings could be achieved.