I WAS UNPREPARED for the BBC. From the outside I had held the organisation in awed, if qualified, respect. On the inside it was not what I expected. LWT had been full of contemporary, alert, fun-loving men and women. The centre of the BBC was dominated by sober, careful, grey-suited, middle-aged, middle-class men. I was the first outsider to join the corporation at the very top for decades and I was as welcome as a Protestant made Pope. The BBC had just suffered a nervous breakdown. For the first time in its history, the Director-General had been summarily dismissed, following years of guerrilla warfare between the governors and the management. The BBC had been under ceaseless assault from the outside, following a series of bitter rows over programmes. Wherever I went, I was told that morale was at rock bottom, an observation that would be much repeated in a different context over the years ahead.
The newly appointed Chairman, Duke Hussey (a former managing director of The Times appointed by Margaret Thatcher in 1986 to reform the BBC) led his governors with authority and understanding, playing on the group’s prejudices. His key alliance was with his vice-chairman, Joel Barnett, who had been Chief Secretary to the Treasury in Callaghan’s Cabinet. They were both natural schemers, and generally got what they wanted.
The miracle was that in this paranoid, backbiting environment, the BBC still made good programmes. There was little sign of the strong, involved, creative management of the kind I had experienced at Granada and LWT. I noticed how much less hard everyone worked compared with ITV, how often offices were deserted long before six, and how frequently late-afternoon calls remained unanswered. It was quickly apparent that this bloated monolith was wasting licence-payers’ funds on a massive scale.
The way the BBC was managed was shockingly amateurish. Hussey concluded that the corporation was out of control editorially and that it had poor processes for handling legally sensitive programmes. He relished the prospect of a battle ahead. He would be the field marshal; I would be his general on the first battleground, which was to be news and current affairs.
I had my own views about BBC journalism: that it was just not serious enough, and did not engage the issues that mattered. The journalists were overwhelmingly generalists, few having the authority that comes from long immersion in a specialism. And BBC current affairs was not always impartial; too many journalists were willing to offer their own opinions rather than undertaking rigorous, open-minded exploration of all sides of an issue. Moreover, the BBC had not yet come to terms with Margaret Thatcher. Its journalism was still trapped in the old post-war Butskellite, Keynesian consensus. Many BBC people found it hard to think of Thatcher as democratically legitimate, perceiving her as an aberration. Unaware of the swirl of ideas around them, they may as well have been 400 rather than four miles from the centre of one of the world’s most vibrant cities.
I spent the early months after my appointment listening to all the key players among the BBC’s journalists. I was greeted on my rounds with sullen suspicion. I formed two powerful impressions. One was that there was a huge cohort — chiefly in their forties or fifties — for whom news and current affairs were a process. They were competent and experienced, but they had long since ceased to think inquiringly. They were mostly male and macho, and drink played an important part in many of their lives. The place was awash with Australian chardonnay. The second, and contrary, impression was that among these listless legions were many glorious individual exceptions, generally in their twenties and thirties. Newsnight and Today, in particular, seemed to have produced a corpus of people of energy and confidence who had maintained their originality of thought. But they were not in positions of power. The overall impression I formed of the BBC in my early months was of a vast organisation with no governing brain or nervous system, which had expanded and grown and multiplied organically, with powerful instincts but with no guiding thought. The BBC was unmanaged and undisciplined in a way that I would not, from the outside, have thought possible. I had taken on infinitely more than I had bargained for.
In 1992, Birt moved up to become the Director-General and, together with management consultants McKinsey, set out to restructure the BBC.
I FASHIONED A PLAN. The BBC would not only remain the most creative broadcaster in the world, we would become the best-managed public sector organisation.
I launched a programme strategy review to be led by two of our brightest creative lights, Liz Forgan and Alan Yentob. One of his first acts as the Controller of BBC1 was to abandon Eldorado (a failed soap opera set in Spain), a decision I greeted with deep relief. He and his successors went on to redefine BBC1 in the 1990s. They touched a national nerve with makeover series such as Changing Rooms and Ground Force. Alan brought the docusoap to the main channel, with entertaining series such as Driving School. They identified how key audiences — such as children — had changed. They pointed to audience needs — such as leisure — that the BBC had served patchily. They brought about a major cultural shift in the corporation.
The modernisation drive was a great shock to BBC staff, who had existed in a steady state for decades. My senior team and I would explain the big picture, listen to their complaints and try to address those that were justified. We became inured to adverse criticism, never responding with the wicked thought that sometimes crossed our minds — that these were the whinges of the precious and protected. Over the years our surveys told us that staff were gaining a deeper understanding of the reasons for change and that morale was beginning to improve. For many BBC staff, though, and especially the persistent complainers, I would be seen for ever as the person who had blasted their world apart — some would for ever treat me with trepidation, fear or hostility.
My daughter Eliza once went clubbing with a girlfriend. Her friend found herself dancing with a dishy young man who turned out to be a BBC stagehand. The two girls wound him up and encouraged him to talk, not revealing Eliza’s identity. “Yeah, the BBC used to be a right cushy number until that bloke John Birt took over!” he revealed.
As Birt prepared to leave the BBC after negotiating a new charter, his old colleague Greg Dyke was named as his successor and the Government announced a new funding settlement for the corporation.
FOR AN UNPRECEDENTED seven-year term, the BBC would receive a 1.5 per cent real increase each year in the licence fee, increasing revenues by £340 million a year by 2006. I could have had no better parting gift. After 15 years of depressed revenue, the corporation would once again be financially strong and healthy. At my leaving party, I experienced a profound sense of personal peace about my time at the BBC.
