He trained to become a Catholic priest at St. Mary's Seminary of the Holy Ghost Fathers at Castlehead, Grange-over-Sands, Lancashire, and he later began a career in accounting in 1965 as a clerk with the Matchbox Toys company.
This caused outcry within the television industry (John Cleese sent Robinson a fax with the message "Fuck off out of it, you ignorant upstart caterer"),[2] and in a mark of solidarity to Plowright, all Granada programmes transmitted on the evening of 3 February 1992 contained amended end credits listing Plowright as producer.
Robinson retained the company through mergers and hostile takeovers including those of London Weekend Television (1993) and Forte Group (1996).
In 2005, he made an unsuccessful attempt to both oust Doug Flynn as CEO of Rentokil Initial and install himself as executive chairman for a 5% stake in the company, then valued at £56M.
[citation needed] Robinson's first foray into broadcasting was I'll Show Them Who's Boss, co-produced by the BBC and the Open University in 2003.
[5] In June 2009, he presented a special edition of The Money Programme entitled Gerry Robinson's Car Crash investigating the history and future of the British motor industry.
In July 2009, he started a TV series called Gerry's Big Decision, in which he reviewed struggling companies to decide whether it was worth investing his own money to save them.