by Roger Mosey
John Birt was helpful in unlocking this dilemma. I was only the recommendation of the interview panel, so I had to go and see him for a one-to-one chat to be confirmed. It was not the toughest of grillings. ‘Do you like sport?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I replied, and it was clear the discussion was going in the right direction. But when I had a chance to ask the DG what he thought about the station, rather than going for the macro view I asked him a specific question about that day’s news agenda. There had been a small and relatively dull development in the Northern Ireland peace process, and England had won a key World Cup qualifier. 5 Live’s news had dutifully led on Ireland, but I suggested to John that a coherent news and sport network might put the football first as a way of attracting people into the station’s news programming while still paying Northern Ireland due attention a little lower down the running order. He thought for a moment, then said he agreed – which I felt gave me permission in the coming months to refresh the editorial thinking and make the station speak with one voice.
Jenny was still my ultimate boss on 5 Live since we were part of her continuous news empire, and she tolerated my murdering of some of her beloved programmes in the interests of a more fluid, contemporary station. The template was already there in the sparky breakfast show with Peter Allen and Jane Garvey, edited by Bill Rogers, but on the fringes of the schedule there had been a black programme, an Asian programme, a gay programme, a series on popular protest songs, a history of agony aunts and all sorts of worthy ‘built’ programmes. I stabbed them one by one. I discovered, though, that commissioning was a much slower process than editing a programme. I turned up at my desk on Day 1 and said we should have a sports magazine programme on Sunday mornings, and I was discomfited to find that it would take months to do. We had to wind down the contract of the existing programme in the desired slot; go to a tender process for the new one; and fit it all within our budget cycle. This was a different world from the instant hits of daily journalism, but one that became more satisfying. The sports magazine programme – Sportsweek – is still running, and doing what we hoped it would in finding the newsmakers and creating headlines for the Monday morning newspapers. It illustrates the different scope of a controllership compared with an editorship. You become responsible for the range and tone of everything on the station, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. You allocate budgets across news and sport and independent companies, and at times you run competitive processes to decide which programmes or teams will occupy a particular part of the schedule. For instance, we replaced a flabby in-house news magazine on a Sunday morning with The Sunday Service, produced by an outside independent company. It brought Fi Glover into a prime slot on the network, with a regular pundit team of the journalist Andrew Pierce and the spin doctor Charlie Whelan.
What you do less of as a controller is intervene in the running orders of individual programmes, although I did take an interest in what the subject was for the hour-long phone-in each morning at 9 a.m. My Today instincts would take over if I heard a trail for what I thought was a poor topic, and I would call the office – doubtless making hearts sink on the production team – and ‘suggest’ they might opt for something different.
It was essential that 5 Live was credible in its news coverage. At the time I went there, it was the only continuous news service in the BBC apart from Ceefax. We therefore made some grand gestures to signify that we mattered, including hiring David Dimbleby to present a special current affairs debate at the height of the Kosovo conflict. I’m not sure he had ever even heard 5 Live before, but he coped valiantly with jingles and sports news bulletins.
In former days, major breaking stories would have been the responsibility of the radio newsroom and the Radio 4 sequence programmes. When Princess Diana’s car crashed in a tunnel in Paris in August 1997, 5 Live was the only BBC news service broadcasting as the information started to emerge in the early hours of the morning. Woken at home, I changed the schedules to take off the Birmingham-based discussion programme that was on air and replace it with news output from London. But, perhaps thanks to my fuddled, just-awoken state, I was initially unable to shake off the feeling that this was like a vivid version of the royal obituary rehearsals we had done so many times in the past. In the early hours there was the erroneous eyewitness account on American television claiming that Diana had walked away from the crash, while some reports of her death emerged out of Manila, where the Foreign Secretary Robin Cook happened to be. It was uncannily like a scenario devised as a test of our obituary procedures when, based on fragmentary and contradictory wire reports, Prince Charles was said to have been trampled to death during a polo match in the Middle East. Only this time it was real, and the journalistic challenge was made even tougher by the shock we were feeling about the tragedy unfolding in Paris.
Since it was a bank holiday weekend – as with the death of the Queen Mother five years later – presenters were initially hard to come by when we hit the phones to put together on-air teams. We realised, somewhat too late, that a rota which had some people off one week and a different set off the next had the flaw of potentially having everyone unavailable on the weekend in between. One presenter gamely came in straight from a dinner party but had consumed so much wine that we put her back in a cab and sent her home. Eddie Mair answered his mobile promptly but was abroad. In particular, we needed to put together a breakfast programme, when the nation would be waking up to the most shattering news in a generation. We were relieved to find Jim Naughtie available to be the Radio 4 voice, in combination with Peter Allen for 5 Live. I stood in the corner of the familiar Today studio watching them open the programme, while still in disbelief about the words coming out of the speakers.
After the first-ever combined Radio 4 and 5 Live breakfast programme went off air, we had ‘scratch’ combinations of presenters from the two networks providing a continuing news service through the day on the conjoined channels. The odd rough edge in presentation was disguised by the quality of the guests, as world leaders including Nelson Mandela responded to our requests for live interviews. We had extraordinary moments of live broadcasting, such as Tony Blair’s eulogy to ‘the People’s Princess’. At one of our stocktaking meetings during the day, John Birt materialised at the back of the room in a pleasing show of DG solidarity, and the only curiosity, looking back at it, is that we were so reluctant on that day to open the phone lines and get the audience’s reaction to such a momentous event. Radio 5 Live was built around phone-ins and they were not unknown to Radio 4, but the fear of creating the wrong tone – of having a caller who might have said they didn’t care about Diana – meant that we waited over twenty-four hours before Brian Hayes was allowed to solicit Britain’s views on air.
It was, candidly, something of a relief that the day of Diana’s death also happened to be the day of the US Open Tennis final featuring Britain’s Greg Rusedski, so our fourteen hours of obituary programming had a logical end in the early evening as 5 Live reasserted its sporting identity. Our specialisms stood us in good stead for the funeral, too. Many of the best commentators on sport are gifted wordsmiths who can apply themselves to any event. For the radio coverage of Diana’s funeral, we therefore used sport commentators to be out with the crowds and to commentate as the procession moved by, supplementing the more traditional voices of Radio 4.
I was fortunate on 5 Live to have the space to bring in new regular news presenters, with Nicky Campbell the highest-profile. He was introduced to me by the fabulously assertive agent Jon Thoday, with the statement that Nicky had had enough of doing Radio 1 and wanted to move into speech radio – which in those days was extremely unusual, even though he had the reputation of being Radio 1’s intellectual. This was only slightly undermined by his hosting of ITV’s Wheel of Fortune. But I leapt at the offer. Something about Nicky made me think he was perfect for the next stage of 5 Live, and it was only when I heard him on his new morning show that I realised precisely what it was: the ability to create one of the b
etter pub conversations in which you move from high politics and sport to ethics and entertainment – all with intelligence, but in an engaging and non-pompous way.
Nicky had one of the classic presenter–editor relationships with his boss Mark Sandell, and they rightly won a Sony Award in the first year of the show. But Nicky was also adept at managing me. There was one day when I was listening in my office with increasing irritation to what I thought was a wayward and irrelevant discussion. At precisely the moment when I was itching to tell the studio to move on to something better, a computer message flashed up from Nicky. ‘Yes, I know. This isn’t right. Moving on.’ Those instincts serve presenters well.
I was also certain about the talents of Victoria Derbyshire, who was found by our commissioning editor Steve Kyte. She had done some guest-presenting on our Media Show from Manchester, and hearing her voice coming out of the radio I thought she had the perfect combination: warmth and just enough of a northern accent to be distinctive without sounding too much like Radio Lancashire. I read an article by Victoria some years later when she described the meeting in which I asked her to stand in on the 5 Live breakfast show: ‘I recall thinking I had to be really cool in the way I reacted in case he thought I was too northern or common, so I expressed my gratitude, ran down Regent Street to All Bar One and ordered half a lager and lime. I wanted to scream with happiness.’
When I made a contribution to the taped tributes the BBC collected when she left 5 Live, I retold the story and joked that she fitted the bill because we wanted someone who sounded northern and common. But she is a broadcaster with conspicuous talent and especially in her interviewing – which can range from the empathetic to the tiger-like, with the latter deployed especially when confronting a BBC boss. I went onto her show years later as director of London 2012, and she mercilessly challenged me about staff numbers and costs, to the fury of my BBC press officer in attendance. It may be strange to outsiders that a BBC station covering the Olympics challenges the resourcing of the BBC’s coverage of the Olympics, but I would rather that than a Stalinist silence about internal issues.
It was more of a gamble taking on Edwina Currie. The cynical reason for doing so was that we had late shows on Saturday and Sunday nights which had low audiences and no profile. We also had a commitment to doing the programmes from Birmingham. We always had floods of demo tapes from would-be presenters but, unsurprisingly, few were anxious to be in Pebble Mill after midnight at a weekend. It was hard to think of anyone who would put that part of the schedule on the map – unless you had someone who really was ‘love her or hate her’, with a probability of the latter. I had bumped into Edwina on Radio 4 over the years, and I liked her feistiness. She had lost her seat in the Labour landslide of 1997 and was therefore available, indeed very available, plus her former Derbyshire constituency gave her enough of a link with the Midlands for a Birmingham posting to be credible.
I am not sure how aware she was of these not entirely flattering calculations, but full credit to her for taking on the role and for being the person who was incarcerated in Pebble Mill until the early hours. She even lived with us calling the show Late Night Currie. To describe her early programmes as ‘rough’ would be accurate, but she became a decent presenter who got the BBC way of doing things – proudly announcing that her own views had been surgically removed. I admired her pluck in doing something new and delivering us increasingly impressive audience figures, while also being relieved that her Birmingham location meant that she was one presenter fewer on my doorstep.
But inevitably for BBC bosses, on Radio 5 Live as much as Today, it is the departure of presenters that makes the headlines – and my moment in the spotlight as controller was when I fired Danny Baker as a 5 Live football phone-in presenter. This was painful because I loved Danny’s style as one of the brightest and most articulate radio hosts, as well as someone who clocked up the ratings. We were bothered, though, that his behaviour on air seemed to be getting ever more unpredictable: he urged Spurs fans to throw their programmes onto the pitch (illegal) and he routinely wished ill will on specific football club directors. But this was just building up to a programme where any executive listening would have had to hide behind the sofa with his hands over his ears. It followed a controversial refereeing decision by Mike Reed in a cup tie between Chelsea and Leicester, and Danny let rip: ‘Football has a maggot at its golden core, and that maggot is referees,’ he said. ‘Most of them need a good slap round the face. Hacks should doorstep this man like he’s a member of Oasis … That worm should be on the phone now, Radio 5 should be knocking down that ref ’s dressing room and asking do you know on behalf of all referees how bad you are.’
Then, when a caller defending referees ill-advisedly suggested Danny should shut up, he turned on his producer behind the glass and yelled: ‘Keith – will you take him off? Seriously. What is the matter with you? What is the matter with you in there? I’m not a confrontational shock-jock. I’m not like this. Will you stop putting through smart-arses who just want to be contrary? Give me back my old producer, someone.’
I went into work the next day knowing we would have to take the programme off because for a BBC programme to suggest referees needed ‘a good slap round the face’ is not on – and it compounded the previous offences for which he had been given a warning. When I arrived in my office, Bob Shennan, then the head of radio sport, was waiting there grim-faced; for him there was the extra factor of the on-air haranguing of one of his producers.
It was a rather muted sacking in that we only asked Danny to leave his Wednesday night phone-in; we wanted him to stay on Baker & Kelly Upfront, which was a more amiable pre-match show with Danny Kelly on a Saturday lunchtime. Baker, understandably, thought you could not be half sacked from a radio station – so he quit, creating lots of headlines, and jumped ship with the other Danny to our rivals, Talk Radio. There he had the satisfaction of going head to head with his arch-enemy David Mellor. I often thought Danny delivered the more entertaining show but it was Mellor who won the ratings war.
The immediate problem was how to replace Danny, and an astute agent made a call while Mr Baker’s 5 Live body was still warm. How about Richard Littlejohn, he asked? And a quick debate in the office led us to the view that that was rather a good idea: Richard was an experienced broadcaster, a high-profile columnist on The Sun, a football nut and also agreeably outside the usual BBC presenter gene pool. So Littlejohn was hired within twenty-four hours. I had been interviewed on 5 Live about Danny’s departure and I went back on the station to announce the arrival of Littlejohn, only to be sandbagged by a characteristic Eddie Mair question: ‘You’ve been on your own station twice in two days,’ he noted. ‘Do you think that’s how Robert Maxwell started?’
Leaving any hint of media mogul self-aggrandisement aside, though, Littlejohn was a popular signing and within a couple of years he had displaced Mellor from the flagship 6-0-6 phone-in. Some years later Bob Shennan rehired Danny Baker for 5 Live.
On the sport side of the station, I had the guidance of my experienced deputy Mike Lewis and I came to enjoy the poker-playing side of sports rights negotiations. This was a time when competition was starting to bite in radio, with Talk Radio a fully-fledged commercial speech network keen on the success that 5 Live had acquired through live sport – and, as sign of that, rebranded as Talk Sport after the arrival of Kelvin MacKenzie at its helm.
Kelvin ran the BBC awfully close on snatching Test Match Special and at one point he was bidding for anything that moved in a sporting arena. With hindsight I suspect the BBC was initially too defensive in response and there was no problem for either side when we shared some events, as with the FA Cup contract from 1999, but we relished the adrenalin rush of the competition with Kelvin even if some of his activities gave us disturbed nights.
The papers never cared when we retained a set of sports rights. Television was going through a rocky period of losing cricket and Formula 1, so the only story for the press was further
losses. I was amusingly stitched up by the Evening Standard when I noted this in an interview on our Sportsweek programme. ‘All it needs is the opening of a bid process’, I said, ‘such as Open Golf, and you get headlines like “BBC could lose Open Golf”.’ The next day the Standard duly obliged with the headline ‘BBC could lose Open Golf’. But we realised this reflected how crucial sport was to the corporation.
Astonishing effort went into the bid to keep Wimbledon across television and radio, and we radio folk watched open-mouthed as the TV presentation to the All-England Club included constructing a special television gallery within a Wimbledon auditorium, which revolved into sight on the click of an executive’s fingers, to show how keen we were to retain the rights. Some years later, when I was director of sport, Mark Thompson mused that losing Wimbledon from the BBC would be like the ravens leaving the Tower of London – and he was right, even though there was the occasional rumble from Corporate HQ about how sustainable it was going to be to stay in sport in an age of hyperinflation of rights fees.
Kelvin was brilliant in attack. In one magazine interview he accused us of being state monopolists.
Twenty years ago it would have been called British Steel. When I wake up in the morning I think how I can earn revenue and grow our business. When the BBC guy wakes up it’s 11 a.m. and he’s trying to work out whether it was the Rioja or the port that caused his stomach upset. He has a couple of meetings and is home for tea … Buying sports rights shouldn’t be the role of the BBC. A public service broadcaster should be doing programmes about sparrows in Serbia and the lower-crested rhubarb-hunter.