Heading Up the European Invasion : As a NATO officer, Bill Roedy knew theoretically how to take over Eastern Europe, but as MTV Europe’s director, he’s actually doing it

When Bill Roedy commanded a NATO nuclear missile base in Northern Italy for 3 1/2 years in the 1970s, he was playing his part to keep the Cold War alive.

In the last 18 months, he thinks he’s done his share to help it end. But Roedy isn’t in uniform these days--he’s chief executive and managing director of MTV Europe, which, like its American parent channel, broadcasts music videos, rock concerts and music information aimed at 16- to 34-year-olds.

MTV Europe reaches 16.4 million households in 26 countries--and the massive changes in the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries in the last year have opened up a market of vast potential. In the wake of perestroika, glasnost and the momentous fall of Communist regimes, the Eastern Bloc nations have been unanimous: They want their MTV.

“Back then, I had a very different perspective toward Eastern Europe than now,” Roedy said. “It was strictly NATO versus Warsaw Pact. Now I think TV’s a much more effective instrument than missiles. My old colleagues at West Point may not love to hear that. But I really do believe it.”

Indeed, when Roedy recently attended a reunion of his West Point class, opinions on his new career were mixed. “Some people were enthusiastic, almost envious,” he said. “Others said, ‘You do what? ‘ They’re so service-oriented.”

Ironically, Roedy has been closer to the historic action in Eastern Europe than many of his old friends who stuck with the military. As the man charged with finalizing deals with Eastern European governments to accept MTV Europe within their borders via cable or satellite, he has assumed a role equivalent to that of a cultural ambassador.

“In Budapest last year, I signed an agreement for Hungary to receive MTV in the presence of 20 government officials,” he said. “The ceremony took place in a beautiful hotel restaurant overlooking the Danube. There were white tablecloths and Champagne. We gave speeches all night. There was an exchange of pens. It was like signing a peace treaty. I had to keep reminding myself this was only music television.”

Roedy was addressing a music industry conference in East Berlin late last year and had succeeded, through labyrinthine negotiations, in hooking up MTV for cable TV in the city for the first time.

An hour into the conference, the East German Politburo resigned. Within 48 hours, the dismantling of the Berlin Wall began. A group of East Germans heading for liberty in the West were stopped and asked how they knew the wall was down. “We saw it on MTV,” they said.

Then last month, MTV, after lengthy talks with government officials, broke through on Soviet TV for the first time. The channel will broadcast for an hour every Friday night on “Vzglyad” (Glance), a popular youth-oriented program. It’s a modest beginning, but because it’s on Gostelradio 1, the most-watched national channel in the U.S.S.R., MTV Europe will be beamed into 88 million homes, from the Baltic states to Siberia.

Roedy has souvenirs of his foreign adventures in his London office--photos of the ceremony in Budapest, pieces of the Berlin Wall. On his own wall, a map with thumbtacks marks those cities conquered by MTV Europe. Roedy now has a Harvard MBA and a successful career in the entertainment industry, but old military habits die hard.

MTV’s successes behind the former Iron Curtain have been attention-grabbers, but its real achievement is the stranglehold it has secured on all of Europe after only three years. Not only is the channel in every major European country, but it acts as a kind of index for pan-European trends and fashions among its target audience.

One is equally likely to see young people wearing MTV sweat shirts in Lisbon or Leningrad, in Barcelona or Bucharest. Additionally, the kinds of products advertised on MTV Europe--Benetton clothes, Swatch watches, Nike or Reebok sneakers--are popular across the Continent.

MTV, then, has become a complex cultural phenomenon with far-reaching influence. Not everyone is thrilled by this: Critics charge that the music it plays and the fashions and trends it espouses all combine to create a bland, Anglo-American flavored “monoculture,” which will erode national youth-culture differences in the various countries it serves.

An article in the current issue of the London-based style magazine Blitz poses the question of whether MTV’s real mission is to stamp out “indigenous creativity.”

MTV Europe initially encountered some resistance, notably from the European record companies that, after all, provide the bulk of the channel’s programming in the form of music videos. “There was a lot of anti-American feeling at the start,” says executive producer Brent Hansen.

Yet Roedy takes pains to point out that MTV Europe is not an American organization. (It is a partnership between Viacom International, which also owns MTV in the United States, and London-based media baron Robert Maxwell.) “We employ 106 people in five countries,” Roedy says, “but only six are Americans.”

Certainly MTV Europe does not look like the typical American corporation. Its head quarters are a converted 1880s warehouse in a narrow, gloomy, cobbled north London thoroughfare, recently renamed Mandela Street by the radical chic ruling group on the local council. “For this I gave up a home on the beach in Santa Monica and a 42nd-floor corner office in Century City with an ocean view,” says Roedy, who was previously a sales and marketing vice president with HBO.

The differences go deeper. On MTV Europe’s payroll are employees from 14 nationalities, according to press director Christine Gorham. She is Austrian; Hansen is a New Zealanders. Maiken Wexo, who is arguably the channel’s best-known veejay, is Danish; her colleague Kristiane Backer is German.

“We encourage people to speak more than one language when they work here,” Gorham says, “even if they don’t speak it perfectly.”

Still, the charge of cultural imperialism has stung Roedy enough for him to address it head-on when he talks to officials from different countries who are considering taking MTV on board.

“I tell them we’re not here to blend or blur cultures, we’re here to enhance cultures,” he says. “When I’m in France, which is the most extreme on this issue, I quote De Gaulle: No one can expect to bring together a country which has 265 different kinds of cheeses.”

But De Gaulle also envisioned a Europe that stretched from the Atlantic to the Urals. MTV’s burgeoning empire stretches 3,000 miles further east, to Vladivostok. How can one playlist encompass music to accommodate the youthful population of such a huge land mass?

“We’re positioning ourselves as a multicultural channel,” says Hansen, 35, whose curly shoulder-length mane contrasts with Roedy’s trim, military bearing. “But what we are looking for are potential artists we can break in an international arena.”

This might seem to confirm the critics’ worst fears of MTV Europe gravitating toward a bland, smooth-edged brand of “Euro-pop” with no discernible geographic roots. Hansen concedes that before he joined the channel, “I regarded MTV as the enemy” for precisely those reasons. Now, he says, he sees things differently.

“We’re not an access channel, and I’m not in favor of playing a video that doesn’t look great,” he says. “That’s patronizing. Just because there’s a group from Czechoslovakia with a video doesn’t mean they’ll get on MTV Europe. If the video isn’t as good as it should be, they’ll embarrass us and they’ll embarrass themselves.

“But, for instance, there is a group from Yugoslavia, called Laibach, who did a good cover of the Stones’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil.’ They might conceivably release something we would put on the playlist.”

Rather than trying to find a bland lowest common denominator in the music offered by the channel, Hansen says his job involves “making sure that something will work in Britain and in Yugoslavia. Or in Finland and in Greece.”

He gives MTV Europe credit for helping break the Creeps, a Swedish band whose “Ooh I Like It” found favor with MTV Europe viewers from many countries. The workers in Mandela Street believe they helped launch the career of the visually arresting Sinead O’Connor. Hansen thinks the channel helped black rock singer Lenny Kravitz: “I think we also encouraged MTV in the States to focus on him,” he says.

The notion that MTV Europe takes its creative cues from its American parent channel makes Hansen bridle. All but three shows on MTV Europe are its own original programming. “I fiercely believe we have a better MTV than they do in the States,” he says. Hansen also points out that MTV Europe had its own rap show, called “Yo!” since its inception three years ago, before the idea caught on for MTV’s “Yo! MTV Raps” in the United States.

For his part, New York-based MTV boss Tom Freston warmly praises MTV Europe as the most flourishing growth area in the channel’s rush toward global domination. Certainly young Europeans have proved enthusiastic about MTV Europe, and in heavily cabled countries like Belgium and Holland, Wexo, Backer and English vee-jay Paul King are capable of stopping traffic. Meanwhile Roedy’s team concentrates on consolidating such key Western European territories as Germany and Britain--with some success. In the month of September alone, MTV Europe added more than 1.1 million households to its empire--the largest growth for any single month to date.

But Roedy, the former Cold Warrior and Vietnam vet, cannot resist returning to the implications of the channel’s ventures in Eastern Europe. “I took the tack that we’re European, not American,” he says, “but in Eastern Europe, they didn’t care at all. They actually wanted more American programming--because they’d had so much Russian programming rammed down their throats for so long.”

Recalling the minutiae of the Soviet deal, Roedy says: “I told them, ‘If you are serious about glasnost and perestroika, and you want to send a signal to Western business and industry leaders, there’s no better sign to say how serious you are than embracing MTV.’ ”

This was well received. Mark Conneely, a network development manager who participated in the lengthy discussions, reports that the Soviet delegation glowingly described MTV as “the Coca-Cola of music television.”

The channel’s entry into the Soviet Union, Roedy reflects, was “more than a cultural breakthrough--it’s an economic breakthrough too. They gave us a nice amount of troubles. But we are selling eight minutes an hour to advertisers, and we are turning around and giving two minutes back to the U.S.S.R. They get hard currency, which they badly need, and we get exposure in 88 million households.

“The advertisers jumped on it--L.A. Gear, Stimorol chewing gum, Benetton, Renault cars, Wrangler jeans. What I find significant is that not all these companies even have distribution in the Soviet Union yet. We have a one-year deal in the Soviet Union, so clearly they’re laying the seeds for the future.”

MTV Europe also takes some credit for encouraging corporations and their advertising agencies to buy air time on a pan-American basis, reflecting the channel’s scope, rather than doing deals country by country.

Its advances continue, apparently unchecked. Israel and Iceland are the latest territories to sign on the dotted line with MTV Europe; Roedy has big hopes for Israel, which is heavily cabled. Talks are now being held with Turkey; the next region for channel to conquer is the North African coast.

If pressed, Roedy will claim that TV has played its part in the astonishing political changes in Eastern Europe in the last 18 months. “I do believe there’s been a hand in the changes caused by TV and satellite telecommunications and deregulation--which mean you simply can’t have the barriers you once had.

“In Russia, you could watch TV and be fooled. You could have all your military and space achievements and heroes and not realize you were living in what’s almost a Third World country. But not any more. Now there’s a free flow of information--and it can’t be blocked out.”