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The BBC can be brilliant - despite its shambolic army of suits and bean-counters

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Let me assist you to clamber over the heaped corpses of the BBC’s failed, and now sacked, senior executives. I will then tell a fable that reveals what a mess the Corporation has become.

A broadcaster friend of mine recently moved into the BBC’s absurd, new £1 billion television palace alongside Broadcasting House.

He found, on arrival, that the vast open office floor had no coat-hooks or wastepaper baskets: trendy designers consider them inappropriate to their 21st-century vision.

Time for change: The BBC is too vast, bloated and far too management-heavy for any one person or even a group of people effectively to govern

My friend sent a note to George Entwistle, then newly-installed as Director-General, wishing him well and begging him to do something about the coat-hook nonsense.

Entwistle wrote back, thanking him for his good wishes, but regretting that action on such a matter would be beyond his powers.

This story seemed merely comic when I heard it two months ago. But it now seems an appropriate metaphor for the shambles at the BBC.

It is too vast and bloated, too diffuse, far too management-heavy for any one person or even a group of people effectively to govern.

An endless succession of little men and women is appointed to its big jobs. The most senior of them could not even decree the introduction of coat-hooks before he himself was pushed into a wastepaper basket with a cheque for £1.3 million.

Disposable: The people who make today's TV and radio shows are overwhelmingly short-term contract workers, used and dropped at the whim of BBC commissioning editors

Before any decision is made about who should be the BBC’s next Director-General, a radical rethink is needed about what the Corporation is. We all say, and sincerely believe, that it still does many things wonderfully well — most of them in Radio 4.

But it is quite unnecessary for them all to be done within a single vast edifice, which is not merely out of control but uncontrollable.

It might as well be argued that all British subsidised stage drama should be produced in a single grand National Theatre, or that a state music directorate should run all the country’s bands, orchestras and string quartets. The BBC worked much better when it was much smaller, as it should now become again.

Whether by a charter revision or merely by administrative decision with government approval, it should dramatically downsize itself: shedding local radio stations; restoring the independence of its World Service; cutting loose its commercial arms; and — above all — axeing whole swathes of managers.

When I first walked into the BBC Club at Lime Grove Studios back in 1963, nine-tenths of the people drinking at the bar were creative staff.

Rabbit in the headlights: George Entwistle, on screen, showed that he was unfit to be the public face and voice of the Corporation, as every Director-General must be

Today, every BBC facility in the land is dominated by bureaucrats: much of the broadcast output — including the notorious Newsnight paedophilia investigation — has been sub-contracted to independent production companies geographically and spiritually remote from Broadcasting House.

In olden days, those of us lucky enough to work for ‘the Corp’, which then seemed one of the most exciting places in Britain, were part of a culture we loved and took pride in.

Sure, hidden away in back passages there were ‘suits’ and bean-counters who did the accountancy for the turbulent herd of presenters, producers, researchers and technical staff. But nobody doubted that the people who mattered were programme-makers.

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Today, all that is turned on its head.

A Dalek army of management consultants was turned loose on the BBC in the 1990s, in the disastrous era of the then Director-General John Birt’s dominance.

He deserves some credit for getting the Corporation into the internet age, but at the price of putting ‘suits’ in charge and squandering vast sums of taxpayers’ money, not least on rocketing executive salaries, starting with his own.

His successors did even worse, succumbing to Labour government bludgeoning to move much of the organisation to the wastelands at huge expense, and abandoning TV Centre in West London in favour of a new production centre built on some of the most expensive real estate  in Britain.

The people who make today’s TV and radio shows are overwhelmingly short-term contract workers, used and dropped at the whim of BBC commissioning editors.

Most of those with permanent staff status, job security and pensions are managers.

At least a third of these people — gender commissars, race monitors, laptop- twiddlers and number-crunchers — could be thrown overboard tomorrow without the smallest effect on programme output, except to make broadcasters feel a joyous surge of liberation.

Some apologists argue that newspapers are today attacking the BBC with disproportionate fervour, in revenge for the shameless glee with which the Corporation’s reporters have covered the phone- hacking scandal at News International and the Leveson inquiry that followed.

It is certainly true that newspaper journalists recoil from the prospect of Lord Justice Leveson recommending statutory regulation of the Press when the BBC’s staff, who fall outside his remit, have shown themselves capable of equally disgraceful follies and excesses.

But it is plain that something is seriously wrong with the BBC (which does have a statutory regulator), and with the sort of people appointed to its leadership.

One look at George Entwistle on screen, a rabbit in the headlights, showed that he was unfit to be the public face and voice of the Corporation, as every Director-General must be.

Yet this was the man Chris Patten and the BBC Trust had just put in charge.

Entwistle’s subordinates who stepped aside yesterday were no more fit for their roles.

I should declare a sort of personal interest.

Though I never applied for either job, in years gone by I was myself tempted by the notion of becoming Director-General or Chairman of the BBC. I thought I could have done the job better than some of the incumbents, just as veteran presenter David Dimbleby has always believed of himself.

Today, both of us are too old, quite apart from our other shortcomings. My friend Sir Christopher Bland, who was once BBC Chairman, told me quite rightly ten years ago that I would have been a hopeless Director-General, because I would have lacked patience to sit through three-hour meetings to discuss whether the Corporation employs enough disabled gays — I exaggerate a little, but not much.

Moreover, it has become plain that no one person can manage this grotesquely overblown organisation.

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When Chris Patten steps down as Chairman — and I believe he must stay in his post to see this crisis through — he should be succeeded by some such figure as Sir John Rose, the tough, brilliant former chief executive of Rolls-Royce, with an explicit mandate to preside over a drastic shrinkage of the Corporation.

Let the licence fee continue, if an alternative system of funding seems impossibly radical, but it should be cut.

In appointing a new Director-General of a slimline, current affairs-focused BBC — for it would be unthinkable to sacrifice that wonderful brand name — the Trust should look for the qualities of leadership, grip, journalistic skill and public presentation that have been conspicuously lacking in the recent past. No ‘suit’ of either sex need apply.

In the months ahead, there is a danger that inertia will regain its hold: that the Government will decide, with so many  other problems on its plate, that it cannot face precipitating a big bust-up at Broadcasting House.

Such a decision would be a serious misfortune for the British people, to whom the old, trustworthy, decent, sometimes boring but sometimes brilliant old-style Auntie BBC meant so much.

The existing set-up is broken. Radical change is needed in the new era of broadcasting. Some big men and women must be found to implement this, in place of the overpaid time-servers who have egregiously failed.

 



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