A short while after becoming director-general of the BBC, Greg Dyke gathered a whole bunch of staff together at some warehouse near the City Airport to thrash things out and to deliver unto them his vision for the corporation. There was an air of trepidation among those gathered; Greg had very recently flexed his muscles at Television Centre by banning biscuits. These biscuits were the sort you have at meetings and which, incidentally, I have never seen anywhere except in meetings — three or four different kinds of biscuit waiting balefully on a white plate alongside a screw-top jar of stewed, rubbery coffee, telling you that you were in for an hour or two’s concerted misery, probably with a PowerPoint presentation on an overhead projector and maybe even a professional facilitator. There was an oatmeal-type biscuit and one resembling an Abbey Crunch and a pale circular thing which, if it could talk, would have explained indignantly and probably in a Midlands accent that it was ‘a type of shortbread, actually’. Dismal Meeting Biscuits.
Anyway, they all got banned by Greg and we staffers got nervous as a result. Plus there was the jealous suspicion, as there always is at these times, that further up the food chain in the BBC people were still having their biscuits and eating them, probably coconut biscuits too, or maybe even Bonne Maman Galettes from Waitrose. Greg had also said that the BBC was too bureaucratic, that there were far too many middle managers and that quite a few would have to go, but that wasn’t a problem because we all agreed with him on this issue. Everybody knows the BBC is too bureaucratic. Axe the middle managers, sure — but leave the biscuits alone.
Which is why the meeting in Docklands was so surreal — I mean even more surreal than these ghastly corporate get-togethers usually are. Hundreds of us waited patiently with our hands raised ready to urge Greg to wreak havoc upon the useless and stupid middle managers, to kick them out and chop them up, to brook no excuses from them, to be merciless. And Greg, sitting up on a dais, had a slightly bemused expression on his face because every single one of us was, indeed, a middle manager. And it must have slowly dawned on him that while every one of us was a middle manager, and he knew we were middle managers, we all thought other
people were middle managers and that we, meanwhile, were doing useful, productive stuff. The level of vituperation towards middle managers from the floor became so intense at one point that the DG actually felt moved to say that middle managers weren’t necessarily bad people and that they had wives, families, hopes and aspirations etc.
And so it was that the bureaucracy did not get pruned, or did not get pruned very much; it had become so entrenched, so dependent upon its other constituent parts, that it no longer considered itself to be a bureaucracy at all. It had deluded itself and, over the years, built up complex mechanisms for supporting that delusion.
I mention this because the BBC needs to save two billion quid in the next six years and seems not to have the slightest idea of how to go about it. The biscuits, remember, have already gone. Seen from the outside we find it easy to say the following: cut the jobs of 2,000 people who do not contribute directly towards programmes. A swift 10 per cent cut in staff. But seen from the inside this is an impossibility, because the delusion rules. It is a very similar delusion to the one remarked upon by a friend of mine who sits upon the BBC’s executive board and frequently asks why the BBC is doing certain things. ‘This is core broadcasting,’ comes the perpetual response — to which the question is, well, what exactly is peripheral broadcasting? The present Director-General, Mark Thompson — a good man — seems determined not to lose a single BBC channel, presumably because he thinks they are all ‘core broadcasting’. And yet only people within the
BBC could possibly argue that BBC4, with its pygmy 0.4 per cent audience share and annual budget of £46.8 million has a separate raison d’etre from BBC2. We all know that BBC4 — which produces some genuinely first-rate programmes — is doing the job which BBC2 is meant to do but which has largely given up doing in order to pursue the ratings. At the moment a quarter of viewers have no access to BBC4, one of the few channels which really does fulfil its public service remit. (BBC2’s new ‘idents’, by the way — that’s the number two shown in different settings as a ‘window on the world’ — cost £700,000. Core broadcasting, mate.)
BBC3’s budget is close to £100 million and the BBC insists that it pays its way by producing new drama and comedy. But it hasn’t produced very much, despite its multifarious awards and critical acclaim. And shouldn’t BBC1 be the conduit for new drama and comedy? Did you know that there was a BBC7? Have you the remotest idea what it does? Do you want a BBC7?
The likelihood is that the Corporation will shelve or scale down some of its more grandiose and expensive schemes — such as the move back to Broadcasting House, which will cost much more than the originally budgeted £813 million — maybe cut a few jobs here and there but, on the whole, carry along as usual. That will mean an across-the-board reduction in quality and particularly in the BBC’s ability to do in-depth news and current affairs. Foreign bureaux will close; staff numbers on important, public-service programmes (Newsnight? Panorama? Today?) will be reduced. The BBC’s newsgathering operation has already been warned that it will need to save £4.5 million from its yearly £90 million budget — and you can bet it won’t be the vast profusion of fairly useless middle managers there who take the bullet. It will be the journalists, the producers and the researchers. The middle managers, as ever, will be the ones making the cuts.
The choice for the BBC is pretty simple. It has either to shed the delusion and redefine itself, stressing quality of output over quantity and tilting the balance back towards the public service ethos and away from the pursuit of ratings. Or it has to continue its attempt to straddle the two poles of public service broadcasting and pursuit of ratings and see its reputation for quality, and thus the licence fee’s reason for existence, ever more quickly eroded. Seems a simple choice to me, but then I don’t work for the BBC anymore.
