Greg Dyke on Lord Reith, BBC Four

Tourette’s on the Job, Five

According to the lamentations on laminated postcards, “You don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps.” But what if it really did help? Churchill battled depression and kept the black dog at bay with booze; he was the saviour of his country. Joshua Wolf Shenk in a book on Lincoln last year concluded that the American president’s clinical depression was “the fuel for the fire of his great work”. And then there was John Reith, not, perhaps, in the Churchill or Lincoln class of leader, but the creator of the BBC, who, when push came to picket in the General Strike maintained its independence from government.

Last night’s fascinating BBC Four documentary, presented by Greg Dyke, left you in little doubt that Reith, at various points in his life, went mad. As a teenager he would stand in Kelvingrove Park in Scotland sniffing out messianic messages from God outlining his future greatness.

During the First World War he preferred to walk above rather than in trenches, insane bravery that resulted in half his face being shot away. He received psychiatric treatment on his return but was visited by suicidal depressions for the rest of his life and received electric shock therapy. To add to the instability, he repressed a homosexual streak that led him, at the age of 24, to fall in love with a 17-year-old boy called Charlie. “Very good looking with awfully pretty eyes,” he told his diary.

In a whole hour nobody said anything nice about his personality. This was a man prone to jealous rages who kept a list of those he most hated, a league table up which slithered Mountbatten, Charlie and his son-in-law. A fixture on it was Churchill, the government’s propagandist during the General Strike. To Reith, Churchill was a hedonist, but to a strict Presbyterian like Reith, Scrooge would have probably looked like one, too.

His daughter, Marista Leishman, talked of his “ambassadorial” visits to the nursery, where he once reminded a nurse that she was carrying in her arms a future prime minister or archbishop of Canterbury (the lad became a forester).

He neglected his wife and in old age fell in love with a dancing teacher called Dawn who one night had the honour of receiving a call from him announcing that he was sitting with a service revolver in his lap ready to blow his brains out. “A sexual relationship?” asked Dyke. “Most certainly not. I would have found it grotesque,” she replied. “I think he was a total fantasist.”

Of the comparisons between Reith and his television biographer, a rather less successful BBC director general, there was virtually no beginning. Reith was paranoid; they really were out to get Dyke. Dyke is proud to be a geezer; Reith, offered a knighthood at 35, snorted and said it was not enough. Dyke is a populist; Reith a patrician. That said, Dyke warmed to the idea that Reith’s departure from the BBC in 1938 was, like his, enforced and he ended up more sympathetic than when he started to the idea that Reith had successfully fought for the BBC’s independence. His other assertion, that he actually quite liked him, was harder to believe. The film’s most moving moment came in footage of Reith’s daughter and the former DG walking arm in arm in the snow together, the former DG in question being, of course, Dyke not Reith.

The only dimension missing was an attempt to link Reith’s madness to whatever it was that made him so effective. You would not call the subjects of Five’sTourette’s on the Job mad, but even the most psychiatrically correct would allow that they were all mentally impaired and, in some cases, literally barking. Yet this was a perception-changing documentary that almost made me agree with its proposition that Tourette’s is primarily a “disease of the onlooker”.

Whereas it was no surprise to me that sufferers could hold down some jobs — we met a post office worker, an advertising executive and a comedy club owner — teaching did not sound like one of them. Yet Brad, an American who barks and whoops and goes “wap-wap,” has ended up, after 11 years’ teaching, with a teacher of the year award. Seeing him in the classroom, you had to conclude that he was a gifted communicator, perhaps because of, rather than in spite of, the verbal tics he needed to compensate for. Children view most teachers as eccentrics; to them Brad was simply one of the more harmless ones.

Tangled up in time

It’s the penultimate Life on Mars tonight but what on earth (or Mars) is happening to the American version currently being made? According to Broadcast magazine, in one episode the Gene Hunt figure beats up a long-haired hippy who turns out to be Bob Dylan, before he became famous. Yet Life on Mars is meant to be set in the mid-Seventies. Dylan would have been famous for more than a decade, wouldn’t he?

The sky at late night

Sir Patrick Moore got in a jibe about the transmission time of The Sky at Night on its 50th anniversary show. Introducing a facsimile of edition one, the young Moore, played by Jon Culshaw, warned it should never go out later than 10.30pm — a reference to its 650th edition slipping out at 1.55am in January. “It must have been a woman,” Old Moore fumed then. In fact, the scheduler was a bloke but, sure enough, there wasn’t one female face on Sunday’s celebration. What a strange show for producer Jane Fletcher to work on.

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