Janet Street-Porter's career in television has been in two roles; one in front of the camera. as a magazine and talk show presenter, and the other behind the camera, as a producer and television executive. With her punk appearance and streetwise approach, her work as a presenter was focused on young audiences where she gained a reputation as a trend spotter. Behind the camera, her career evolved from innovative youth and music program making to innovative programming.

     Leaving midway through a course at the Architectural Association, Street-Porter took up work in journalism with Petticoat magazine and the Daily Mail newspaper. She followed this with radio presentations on London radio station LBC before being approached by John Birt at London Weekend Television (LWT) to work as a television presenter. During her time at LWT, she worked on various magazine programs, such as The London Weekend Show and The Six O'Clock Show, and worked alongside television veterans Clive James and Russell Harty on Saturday Night People and with Auberon Waugh on Around Midnight.

     By the early 1980s, Street-Porter had gained celebrity status not only for her directness and skill as a presenter but also for her colorful appearance (especially her brightly colored glasses and hair) and her London accent (referred to as a "strangled" or "exaggerated" cockney accent). She became a regular target for the tabloids. On one occasion, shortly after her appointment to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), The Sun published a picture of her on the front page opposite the head of a horse. Much caricatured, she also became easy target for impersonators, featuring regularly on the popular satirical shows Not the Nine O'clock News and Spitting Image.

     In 1980, Street-Porter moved behind the camera into production. As a producer, she continued in her specialty of music, style, and fashion programs aimed at young audiences. Programs included: 20th Century Box, a topical show for and about young Londoners; The C(h)at Show, an all-female talk show; Bliss, a music, fashion, and style program; Paintbox, a ten-minute experimental music series; and Get Fresh!, a Saturday morning entertainment show.

     In 1987, along with former LWT colleague Jane Hewland, Street-Porter created Network 7 for Channel 4. A two-hour program for Sunday lunchtime, describing itself as "TV's first electronic tabloid,"  again aimed at young audiences, Network 7 offered news, gossip, fashion, and celebrity interviews. Network 7 had a high-tech look, using music video techniques: a combination of varied camera angles; strong graphics; young, good-looking presenters; and "infobars" (a stream of information running along the bottom of the screen). Winner of a BAFTA Award for Originality in 1988, Network 7 proved to be a prototype for many youth programs to follow.

     Her success led to her appointment as head of youth programs and entertainment features at the BBC in 1988. With her reputation as a trend spotter, Street­ Porter was brought in to address the problem of the BBC's lack of policy toward the much-coveted youth audience. After six months, Street-Porter launched DEF II (described as a channel within a channel) on BBC 2 from 6:00 P.M. to 7:30 P.M. Mondays and Wednesdays ("Def' was supposedly a slang term for "happening" or "cool"). The DEF II slots would usually include nostalgic cult programs (e.g., Mission Im­ possible and Battlestar Galactica) and commissioning innovative youth programs, such as The Rough Guides, Reportage, Behind the Beat, and Rapido.

     In 1991, Street-Porter's role was extended to include commissioning entertainment shows as head of youth programs and entertainment features. This period included success as a producer with Ruby Wax in The Full Wax and the award-winning The Vampyr: A Soap Opera. (The Vampyr, a modern version of Heinrich Maschner's 19th-century romantic opera, won the Prix Italia in 1993.) In 1994, Street-Porter moved to a new post as head of independent productions for BBC's entertainment group. This would not prove as successful, and she decided to leave the BBC for a new project.

     In September 1994, Street-Porter was appointed managing director of L!ve TV, the Mirror Newspaper Group's venture into cable television. Based in Lon­ don's Canary Wharf, L!ve TV was to be Britain's first live, 24-hour cable channel. Street-Porter's vision for the channel was high tech, colorful, fast, and trendy. L!ve TV launched in June 1995 amid press reports of differences of opinion on the channel's content. A BBC team captured the behind-the-scenes tensions in a fly-on-the-wall documentary, Nightmare on Canary Wharf (shown on BBC in December 1995). Three months after the launch, Street-Porter left L!ve TV.

     In August 1995, Street-Porter was invited to deliver the MacTaggart Memorial Lecture, the opening speech of the Edinburgh International Television Festival. She was only the third woman in the festival's 20-year history to do so (the others were Christine Ockrent in 1988 and Verity Lambert in 1990). She chose the occasion to launch an attack on what she saw as the domination of the television industry by what she described as the "four Ms" (male, middle class, middle aged, and mediocre) and the lack of investment in talent. The speech was widely reported in the press.

     After her earlier departure from presentation, Street­ Porter has made occasional appearances in front of the camera, in discussion programs, as a cultural commentator, and presenting shows involving one of her favorite pastimes, walking. (She was president of the Ramblers' Association from 1994 to 1997.) In 1998, Coast to Coast, a seven-part series following Street­ Porter on a 516-mile walk from Dungeness, Kent, to North Wales to discover the state of Britain, was aired. In 1999, As the Crow Flies was a seven-part series tracking her attempt to walk the 350-mile journey from Edinburgh to London in a straight line.

     In 1999, Street-Porter returned to journalism as editor of The Independent on Sunday. Although she left the post in 2001, she still writes features and articles for both The Independent on Sunday and its sister paper, The Independent.