Media Headliner: GMTV's ego-free zone has credibility at his core.(Paul Corley boss of GMTV takes up the blame)

Industry figures say it was no surprise to see Paul Corley apologise on air for GMTV's phone-in scandal.

A television boss appears on his own channel to hold up his hands and take the blame. Surely a classic real-life example of the sort of scenario you would expect to come across in the 'Scenes You Seldom See' series of cartoons in Private Eye.

Perhaps not quite, though. In the latest phone-in scandal to hit television, although Paul Corley, the managing director of GMTV, was more than willing to admit that the buck tended to stop with him, he also pointed out that he had been as much in the dark as anyone - he had no knowledge of the fact that viewers responding to a phone-in quiz were being cheated. He was as shocked and surprised as anyone when he discovered what was going on.

There he was, last Tuesday morning, wearing a hair shirt, on screen for all to see. He apologised, that was the main thing. And he promised to reimburse all the GMTV phone contestants who'd been defrauded. It was a gesture that impressed many in the media industry, not least the ad community.

Mick Desmond, the chairman of Channel Television and a former colleague, says he was not the least bit surprised to see Corley reacting so quickly and positively.

'With Paul, what you see is what you get. He is very direct, he's open and always helpful. The rare thing ***(for a senior television executive) is that he genuinely hasn't got an ego. It's not about the big 'I am' all the time. He's well-liked in the business,' Desmond says.

He's also a rarity in another way. Those who reach the top in broadcasting, on the commercial side, at least, tend to be renegade caterers, accountants from state-owned steelworks or marketers of margarine. Corley is a man with a genuine programme-making background.