The BBC executive board gathered for its regular meeting last Tuesday morning
for coffee, biscuits and meltdown. The previous evening, at 5pm, the
deadline had passed for producers to come forward confessing, in a spirit of
openness and honesty, to programmes they had made that had misled the public
in some way.
The invitation for them so to do had been extended by both Jana Bennett, the
BBC’s director of vision and an executive board member, and Jenny Abramsky,
the BBC’s director of audio and music. They, and other BBC chiefs, were
giving staff a chance to come clean after revelations that a trailer for a
programme about the Queen had been less than truthful with viewers, and that
the corporation had also been fined £50,000 for faking a Blue Peter
competition.
Much to the apparent surprise of Bennett and Abramsky, two experienced and
highly respected corporation bureaucrats, a procession of contrite and
nervous producers came forward to ’fess up. The public, it seemed, had been
deceived with unnerving consistency, particularly over programmes with
phone-in polls and competitions. And on the corporation’s most noble
flagship enterprises, too. Comic Relief and Children in Need, for example.
“We just sat there absolutely stunned,” one executive board member told me,
“shocked beyond belief. Nobody had any idea that this was going on on such a
scale.”
Not even Bennett and Abramsky, when they asked for producers to come forward?
“Nobody. Nobody at all. And we had the very powerful sense that there was a
lot more to come. And we thought this time no excuses, something really has
to be done.”
In the short term this might mean the ceremonial defenestration, for the
benefit of a baying Fleet Street and an angry public, of some high-ranking
executive. Bennett perhaps, even though she is one of the corporation’s most
talented and savvy apparatchiks?
“But if Jana, why not Mark [Thompson, the director-general]? He is about as
remote in the hierarchy from what went on as she is.”
The feeling within the upper echelons of the BBC is that the sacrifice of a
senior figure would be a capitulation too far to critics, although how far
that view is shared lower down is a moot point. There is a certain glee and
schaden-freude in some parts of the corporation, long dismayed at the grubby
and antiReithian business of chasing the ratings with lowest common
denominator broadcasting.
Either way, all those I spoke to believe the BBC needs a change of culture,
that it needs to decide what it is there for and why we should continue to
pay for its existence, compulsorily and on pain of imprison-ment if we don’t
fork out.
“Why are we doing these phone-in polls?” said the executive board member. “In
what possible sense are they public service broadcasting?
“The programme makers tell you that it’s an invaluable way of reaching the
difficult-to-get C2D audience. But we need to reach them in different,
cleverer ways.
“The BBC has always been very good at reaching middle-class, Old Etonian
audiences; in fact it has whole channels just for them. But it doesn’t know
how to attract the white working class, because nobody from the white
working class works for it. Phone-in polls are an easy and unacceptable
answer. They’ve been suspended now; there’s absolutely no reason why they
should ever start again.”
According to Roger Graef, a leading independent producer, the scams and
manipulations have been threatening to erupt for some time.
“It was lurking under the surface,” he says, “but there were more and more
people coming to my company literally bursting into tears and saying, ‘I
don’t want to do this to people any more’. But they wouldn’t go public
because they were worried they’d never get another job.”
A senior BBC journalist put it even more bluntly. “The BBC has to stop trying
to get in the f****** gutter with all the other tawdry channels. When you
start chasing ratings and using the foul marketing language of City spivs,
it’s inevitable what will happen.” AH, but the trouble is, if the BBC
doesn’t get into the gutter it may lose its raison d’être anyway. For the
past 60 years or so the BBC has managed to straddle two poles – universality
and public service – and thus justify the licence fee. But it is finding it
increasingly difficult to do so.
Never mind all this stuff about a new, imported culture whereby production
teams subsist under intense pressure on short-term contracts and are not
imbued with the BBC ethos, such as it is. That may be in the mix somewhere,
but it is not the crucial point.
It is about why the BBC exists at all and where it locates itself in the
future. And each way the corporation turns it finds a howl of complaint.
When it attempts to achieve universality by diversifying in order to serve a
specialist audience and dreams up such channels as BBC4 (audience share:
0.4%) and BBC3 (audience share: 1.3%) it is accused of spreading itself far
too thinly and as a result splurging huge amounts of licence-payers’ money
on a vanishingly small audience. Indeed, you might wonder why there is a
need for both BBC2 and BBC4 to exist as separate entities when their remits
are more or less identical.
Those who accuse the BBC of doing too much, and sacrificing quality as a
consequence, were given plenty of ammunition by the current fiasco: at least
one of the programmes that rigged its phone-in competition did so because
nobody from the audience phoned in. They were broadcasting to an audience of
close to zero.
On the other hand, when the BBC attempts to fulfil its charter by providing
top-quality mainstream entertainment for a mass audience, the critics attack
it for trying to compete with the commercial sector in chasing ratings and
paying too much money for household names. Take the Jonathan Ross contract
as an example.
“The BBC was burbling with happiness because it had got Jonathan Ross for
‘only’ £18m when he had asked for £24m,” the senior BBC journalist remarked
with some derision. “He draws only about 3m viewers every week – for which
he is paid almost eight times the entire yearly budget for a programme like
The World Tonight. How can that possibly be justified?”
Privately quite a few BBC executives admit that the Ross contract was a
misjudgment, politically, morally and practically. One told me it had cost
the BBC “a couple of hundred million quid” when it came to charter renewal
because the politicians were ill-disposed towards an organisation that could
be so cavalier with licence-payers’ money.
Others argue that the BBC should not compete with commercial organisations
because the BBC is simply inept at doing so, and they use the Ross contract
as a case in point.
For the executive board member it’s a more straightforward calculation. “If
there’s a commercial organisation that wants to pay Jonathan Ross £18m and
thinks it can draw an audience that justifies the salary, then let them do
it. It’s not for the BBC. Exactly the same applies to phone-in polls.”
WHAT should be done? The BBC provided an easy sacrificial victim by
“suspending” all commissions from RDF, the independent production company
which supplied the original shots of Her Majesty. But the firm says that
they e-mailed the BBC three times asking to see its edit before
transmission. Someone in the BBC jumped to the conclusion that their trail
showed the Queen storming out. At no time did they ask RDF whether this
actually happened.
The Beeb’s director-general has also ordered that all 15,000 staffers and a
good few thousand independent producers must be inculcated in the ethos of
the corporation through new training schemes. You might argue that it would
be prudent for the BBC to decide exactly what its ethos is before embarking
on such a laudable process. At the moment it is not remotely clear.
It is vague about the extent to which it should be competing with the
commercial channels, and even more vague about the notion of what
constitutes its “core broadcasting”.
“You know, whenever I ask them about some new programme or channel
they’re planning,” the executive board member told me, laughing, “they
always tell me that it is core broadcasting. And I say to them, ‘Right,
okay, well give me an example of something the BBC does which is peripheral
broadcasting’. They can’t come up with an answer.”
It is this lack of focus that the BBC management needs to address – as well as
the simple fact of not misleading viewers.
At present the BBC’s default position is that everything it does is always for
the best in this, the best of all possible worlds. But if the BBC is still
to be with us in 10 years, with a statutory licence fee, it needs not only
the trust of its captive audience but a far clearer idea of what it stands
for.
Additional reporting: Dipesh Gadher
Faking it – how broadcasters misled the public
Never before has the BBC been forced to admit so many mistakes. In the past
fortnight it has revealed that production staff fixed phone-in competitions
on Children in Need, Comic Relief, Sport Relief, a children’s television
programme called TMi, the Liz Kershaw Show on BBC 6 Music and on White
Label, a pop music show on the World Service.
In each case, BBC staff had posed as winners or had announced a fictitious
winner following technical problems with phone lines.
— The Liz Kershaw Show, which was presented as live, had a competition in
which listeners appeared to win prizes. However, the BBC admitted: “There
were no competitions or prizes and all the callers were actually members of
the production team and their friends.”
— The Treasury has complained about a recent Newsnight report in which
scenes were manipulated to make it appear as if Gordon Brown’s press officer
was deliberately picking on a reporter.
— This weekend the BBC revealed that it had misled viewers in a wildlife
documentary called Incredible Animal Journeys broadcast in May. The
programme claimed to show Steve Leonard, the presenter, tracking the
migration of a pregnant caribou via a GPS receiver from a hotel room in the
Yukon. In fact, the scenes were “reconstructed” several weeks later in the
UK.
The broadcaster was only rumbled after an eagle-eyed viewer spotted a British
electrical socket in the background.
— The Beeb is far from the only broadcaster to mislead viewers. Channel
4 broadcast a quiz on Richard & Judy that enticed viewers to enter, even
though a shortlist of winners had already been drawn up. Eckoh, the company
that ran the phone lines, has been fined £150,000 and Channel 4 could face a
similar penalty.
— Five was recently fined £300,000 for broadcasting Brainteaser, a
lunchtime quiz in which production staff stood in for real winners on
several occasions. The channel also admitted on Friday that some scenes from
its Killer Shark Live series were not live, but prerecorded. The show, like
Brainteaser, was made by Endemol, the creator of Big Brother.
— Nor has ITV gone unscathed. GMTV is alleged to have defrauded
viewers of up to £10m over four years by accepting calls, via premium rate
lines, on its morning quiz after winners had already been chosen.
Concerns have been raised about other ITV shows including Dancing on Ice and
The X Factor, prompting Michael Grade, ITV’s executive chairman, to halt all
premium line phone-ins temporarily and to instigate a review.
— If it is any consolation to British audiences, some foreign
broadcasters have perpetrated far worse frauds. Last year at least two
Mexican stations broadcast “live” reports of a dawn raid to rescue three
kidnap victims. It later turned out that the raids had been staged for TV
audiences hours after the real police operation had been carried out.
