PAT Robertson is famous in this part of the world for his political activities. He is one of the leading lights in the US religious right who are to the Republican Party what the eurosceptics are to the Tories. Robertson and his cohorts were among those responsible for electing Bill Clinton to a second term as president.
However, Robertson is also the head of a multimedia empire which runs the Family Channel and Mary Tyler Moore Productions among others. He is a serious player in the lucrative and intensely competitive US cable market.
Alec Foege's The Empire God Built - inside Pat Robertson's media machine (John Wiley and Sons £19.99) details how Robertson built his network of companies and also looks at the day to day operation and his religious commitments.
Robertson's background makes him an unlikely candidate for the religious right, his lack of flamboyance and fastidious dress would mark him as a banker rather than a preacher. A Jim Bakker (adultery), Jimmy Swaggart (pleas for funds to avoid death) or an Oral Roberts (visited prostitutes) he is not.
In fact Robertson is a scion of the establishment. His father served three terms as a US senator. He progressed through life as any other privileged American boy would until he failed the New York Bar exam and a subsequent business collapsed.
In the aftermath of those traumatic events Robertson met evangelist Corneilius Vanderbeggen and his life was forever altered. He became a fully fledged evangelist and spoke in tongues - the mark of the true believer.
However, despite his commitment to God, Robertson was quite adept at handling Mammon.
In 1957, Pat Robertson - with help from his parents - bought an ailing television station in Portsmouth, Virginia and the Christian Broadcasting Network was born. Robertson took to the fledgling religious broadcasting industry like a duck to water. He used the traditional method of TV preachers, the appeal for donations, to good effect and his empire was off to a flying start.
His famous 700 Club, a chat and preach show was his first innovation and now has one million viewers. This was followed by the Family Channel and the Game Channel among others, under the umbrella of International Family Entertainment with $295 million (£195 million) dollars in revenue in 1995.
But Robertson didn't stop with the media. In 1977, he founded Regent University which has 1,400 students enrolled in journalism, communication studies, law, divinity, counselling and education. He also runs American Centre for Law and Justice which has an annual budget of $12 million. And in 1988 he founded the organisation which most irritates liberals, the Christian Coalition, which, with 1.7 million members, gives him enormous political clout.
What Foege attempts to unravel is what makes Robertson tick in the business sense and his thesis is that, in the great American tradition, he gives the people what they want. Robertson quickly divined that a lot of Americans were uneasy about the fare being offered up by the national networks. They felt it was anti God, anti religious, anti family and anti American.
Robertson sandwiched his evangelical offering in between reruns of The Virginian, The Waltons and other such wholesome fair, and his audience lapped it up.
Roberstson has carefully juggled his dual role - mogul and messiah - and Foege attempts to come to grips with this dichotomy of the savvy businessman and the speaker in tongues in this well written book. Unfortunately, he falls just short of the mark.
