Paramount UK’s Ben Frow secretly resigned last year due to burnout

Ben Frow

Paramount UK and Channel 5 content chief Ben Frow has revealed that he secretly resigned from his role for a short period last year due to burnout as a result of the pandemic.

Frow made the revelation during a panel titled ‘never too big to fail’ at the Edinburgh TV Festival.

He told the audience that he quit his role in April 2022 due to the mounting pressures of isolating at home, while also struggling to balance responsibility to his team members as well as producers facing the potential end of their businesses due to the lack of any new commissions.

“I felt like I was being pecked alive, eaten alive. There was nothing left of me inside,” said Frow, who cautioned: “I do think that there is an incredible bomb waiting to go off, which is the sort of COVID trauma that has not manifested itself in people.”

Frow explained that the pressure hit him “like a brick” and he “just had to stop”. The exec said that quitting was an “enormous relief” due to the knowledge that he was “liberated and free”, but by Christmas he felt he had reached “quite a good place” and reversed his decision.

“The lesson I learned was that I shouldn’t have let it go that far,” said Frow, who added that nobody on his team knew about his resignation.