“People in the media watch something like this totally differently.”O’Sullivan is a glamorous figure. “I thought it was a docusoap and what docusoaps want is caricatures, and I’m a show off,” he says.Despite the determined “no regrets” mantra about the programmes that O’Sullivan now intones, she is furious at some of the media reaction. Well, boobs certainly beat bolsters in most film-makers’ minds, something at least Hernu understands. “How, for instance, do we find a gap in a marketplace like home interest which already has 23 titles to put in a 24th which then goes on to become number six in the marketplace? That’s not dull [TV],” she says. O’Sullivan insists she went into the project with her eyes open. But there is perhaps a touch of naïveté when she says she thought Cabal’s other big launch of last year, The Real Homes Magazine, might have attracted more of Kelly’s interest. But even if we did end up looking silly, by sheer dint of being on the telly we’d have increased awareness of the magazines and so hit our two revenue streams again.”So Kelly stayed for the next 15 months and so liked what she saw that the original idea for a one-off programme was extended to a mini-series Her access to the company was extensive.

Of course some tried to dissuade her, but O’Sullivan, nevertheless, decided to agree “I weighed it up in best and worst-case scenarios. In the best case I thought it would be very positive for us in business terms from both revenue sides, copy and ad sales We would appeal to both readers and advertisers The worst-case scenario was that we ended up looking silly. Rather, the woman who successfully raised £2.2 million of private finance to set up Cabal, claims it was mere business pragmatism. For O’Sullivan, agreeing to allow outsiders in to film the birth pangs and toddler tantrums of Cabal was a simple matter of risk evaluation. Should not these media types know better?O’Sullivan is adamant her motivation was neither vanity nor foolhardiness, much less a determination to realise a “live by the sword, die by the sword”, journalistic philosophy.

Kelvin MacKenzie and Janet Street-Porter when they were at Live! TV, did and were the subject of a particularly hysterical documentary. Other embarrassing vignettes included the advertising team admitting they were “up the proverbial without a paddle”, and Hernu getting into fisticuffs with Loaded editor, Tim Southwell.A former editor of Options, She, Harpers & Queen and Good Housekeeping among other titles, she is not the first media luminary to succumb to the lure of the film-maker’s pitch. They captured such gems as the business development director, Charmian Denison, declaring she would stop at nothing, not even offering oral sex, to sell a page; the editor of Cabal’s flagship lads title Front, Piers Hernu, rollicking with a teenager in a pornography shoot, and O’Sullivan herself lurching in a somewhat tired and emotional state at a Cabal party. There’s more than a frisson of Schadenfreude rippling through the magazine world as Sally O’Sullivan, the glossy magazine supremo, last night endured the indignity of seeing the final episode of Trouble between the Covers, the BBC 2 series that saw the growing pains of her start-up publishing company distilled into four 30-minute offerings. Eighteen months ago, as she swapped her editorial hat for a chief executive’s one, O’Sullivan agreed to let in Karen Kelly, BBC fly-on-the-wall film-maker, to record the early days of Cabal Communications, a magazine house, she said at the time, with a new ethos: one which was editorially driven and boasted a flat management structure, as well as some peculiar pledges such as a free-chocolate-on-Wednesdays policy.
The results made hilarious viewing.