Mad Men

The 10-part take on the Western genre, written by Rowan Joffe (28 Weeks Later, The American), tells the story of Jim Worth (Roth), a British police officer who moves his family to the rural mountain town of Little Big Bear when he takes a job as the town’s police chief.

Not long after the family’s arrival, the opening of an oil refinery leads to an economic boom in Little Big Bear, which is accompanied by a wave of drugs, prostitution and organised crime.

Josh Sapan was welcomed as “the real deal, one of the greats of American cable and the television industry” by his interviewer, Tim Davie. Not only that, the audience learned that Sapan was cut from a different cloth to most US TV executives because he understood British humour.

That’s germane because Sapan, President and CEO of AMC Networks, landed a 49.9% stake in BBC America (for $200m) in October 2014.

“We are cousins of the BBC, married into the family, a delight for me,” said the donnish-looking, New York-based cable veteran.

Pay-TV platform BT TV is hoping that an unfolding zombie apocalypse will help it bite out a bigger share of a competitive UK market dominated by Sky. Fear the Walking Dead, the much-­anticipated spin-off show of US flesh-­eating drama the Walking Dead, is airing exclusively on BT TV as the flagship drama for the first AMC-branded channel in the UK.

It is part of a wider deal struck in June between US cable operator AMC Networks and BT TV.

Philippe Dauman, Chief Executive of Viacom, the media empire created by nonagenarian Sumner Redstone, has been called many things in his long Viacom career.

One is "dauphin", marking both his succession potential and the fact that he is French-born. Although he has lived almost all of his life in the US, Dauman is a fluent French speaker.

He is "an iron fist in a velvet glove" according to Sir Martin Sorrell, Chief Executive of WPP. The New York Times summed him up as "The man who would be Redstone".

AMC Networks President and CEO Josh Sapan lays claim to having the world’s largest collection of antique lightning rods. "They’re architectural and a form of industrial art. I just got captivated by them," he explains.

One or two of them can be found lying around his office on Penn Plaza, a few blocks from the Empire State Building, alongside examples of another passion. This is his collection of panoramic photographs of people and places from the last century.