Isaacs began his career in television when he joined
Granada Television in
Manchester as a producer in 1958. At Granada he was involved in creating or supervising series such as
World in Action and
What the Papers Say. He worked for the
BBC's
Panorama in the 1960s and was the overall producer for the 26-episode series
The World at War (1973–74) for
Thames Television. He was Director of Programmes for Thames between 1974 and 1978. He produced
Ireland: A Television History (1981) for the BBC and co-produced the twenty-four episode
television documentary series
Cold War (1998) and the ten-part series
Millennium (1999).
Channel 4 Isaacs was the founding chief executive of
Channel 4 between 1981 and 1987, overseeing its launch period and setting the channel's original cultural approach with opera and foreign language film, although programmes with popular appeal such as the game show
Countdown, the pop music series
The Tube, and
soap opera Brookside had a place in the schedule from the beginning. The channel commissioned
Michael Elliott's production of
King Lear (1983) with
Laurence Olivier in the title role and Isaacs recommissioned a number of programmes from his time at Granada including
What the Papers Say. Isaac's launched his concept for Channel 4 during the
James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the
Edinburgh TV Festival in 1979. Isaacs' appointment of
David Rose, previously long with the BBC, as the Commissioning Editor for Fiction led to the channel's involvement with the 1980s revival of the British film industry via the
Film on Four strand. Despite a general liberal atmosphere, a few commissioned programmes, such as
Ken Loach's
A Question of Leadership, were withdrawn from transmission. In 1989, Isaacs named 26 personal favourites from his tenure as Channel 4's chief executive, running from A (the discussion series
After Dark) to Z (a four-hour dramatisation of a Gothic horror novel,
Zastrozzi). When handing over responsibility for running the channel to
Michael Grade, Isaacs threatened to throttle him if he betrayed the trust placed in him to respect the channel's remit. ==Later career==