Getting Out Alive: News, Sport and Politics at the BBC

by Roger Mosey

  We ploughed on, successfully, through the Six Nations and Wimbledon renewals. The latter is the one that is so indelibly associated with the BBC summer that it was unthinkable in those days that we should lose it, and the people who ran Wimbledon maintained a careful balance between implying they thought that too and still striking a tough financial deal. They were, however, a pleasure to work with, and that was not always the case with governing bodies. I never warmed to the Royal & Ancient Golf Club, and it came as no surprise in 2015 when the news broke that they were abandoning their long relationship with the BBC and going off to Sky. One benefit of their new deal, they said, would be ‘to plough significantly more money back into participation initiatives up and down the country and worldwide’. It seemed curious to talk about the importance of participation when for so many years golf had not admitted women to the membership at St Andrews and had excluded them from other well-known clubs. My colleague Barbara Slater, then head of golf, would tell the story about planning an Open championship on site. When she and the rest of the logistics team got back to the clubhouse, there was the realisation that she, as a woman, would not be permitted to go through the main entrance. Her approved access that day was through the kitchen. In solidarity, the men in her team walked in through the kitchen with her. The R&A didn’t seem to like footballers much either, and were resistant to the idea of Gary Lineker, a golf fanatic, being our main presenter for the sport. A dinner with the R&A never passed without sniping at Gary. But I kept smiling in my dealings with them, and I was amused to be voted the 51st most powerful person in golf – just ahead of Seve Ballesteros in 52nd – in a sport magazine’s Top 100 list. This, not for the first time, was an unexpected development in my career, since my golfing ability never got past pitch and putt. The R&A were right that I was not their type of clubbable person.

  Next on the horizon was the FA, and the rights package we had for the FA Cup and England home internationals. Presiding over the process was the relatively new chief executive of the FA, Brian Barwick – a former head of BBC Sport and more recently head of sport at ITV. In many ways it is hard to dislike Brian, though his reputation with us hit rock bottom when we emerged bloodied from his rights tender. There were indications in advance that all was not well between us. After a particularly dull draw for the fifth round of the FA Cup, I had posted a blog inviting readers to say which match they would cover and why. This provoked a spirited debate, including comments across a range of BBC outlets – and it went down badly at the FA. Barwick sent me an email saying they would need some convincing that this was the right approach. Even if BBC Sport thought it was a good idea, he argued, we could not manage the coverage elsewhere in the BBC, and we were often let down by another part of the organisation and its negativity. I fired back, unrepentant:

  The latest blog simply invites people to give us their view about the fifth-round picks. Clearly, we make our choices with you in the normal way; but I believe our interactivity strengthens involvement and promotes accountability. That, in our view, is a good thing. On the question of BBC Sport managing its output and the rest of the BBC: I don’t think it’s remotely fair to talk about negativity … The BBC as a whole massively supports and promotes the FA properties – but this can’t extend to managing every comment ever made about them.

  There was a constant muttering from the FA about our star presenters and pundits, too, if they made any overtly critical comment about England or the Cup.

  For all that, we went into the rights negotiations in decent spirits. Ours was a joint bid with Sky, and it was hard to see how anyone would gratuitously ditch the BBC – who had revived the FA Cup, as they are doing again today – and the UK’s premier pay TV broadcaster. At the time of our putting our bid together, we had no sense of an alliance building up against us, and we were prepared to pay a proper price for what was an extremely attractive contract. But, once again, danger came from an unexpected source. Just before the bid went in, we heard a whisper that ITV might be trying to partner with the insurgent challenger to Sky, Setanta. It was not well enough sourced to dramatically increase our bid, nor did we believe the initial stages were going to be decisive. The usual pattern is for a rights holder to encourage a protracted competition to drive up the price, and it will not normally allow an existing partner to be knocked out in Round One. But the FA chose to play by different, unexpected rules. It soon became clear that they had a very big opening bid on the table from ITV–Setanta, and they no longer wanted to deal with the BBC and Sky. A meeting with the FA intended to set out our case in detail, and fronted by Gary Lineker, convinced us the game was up. The FA team showed little interest in the BBC–Sky proposals, and once again they criticised Lineker and Alan Hansen for the comments they had made about their properties. They seemed to want unremitting promotion of the FA, and none of the journalism we saw as essential.

  Michael Grade at ITV was characteristically canny. Having made his eye-catching opening bid, he then asked to go into a period of exclusive negotiation, in which the FA would agree to talk only to ITV and Setanta. This was the right tactic for him, but a peculiar move by the FA, since they could have kept everyone in the frame and tried to push up the price by tens of millions of pounds. And we, with Sky, would have been willing to do that. We were unsure at the time whether an exclusive negotiation was going on, so we rounded up James Murdoch as part of the Sky team and Mark Thompson with the team from the BBC for a conference call. We upped our bid by a large amount, and sent off a fax confirming that to the FA – to get no reply whatsoever. We might well have gone up further still if the auction had continued, but the FA had broken the mould: they had agreed a deal with ITV and Setanta, with none of the bidders tested to the limits of their spending. A senior figure at the Premier League later expressed incredulity at what had happened – both in the FA opting for what he considered to be the lesser broadcasters, and in not squeezing the last drop from the bidders, which is something of a Premier League speciality.

  Dominic and I had to make another couple of visits to the pub in Kew to anaesthetise the pain. This was a bad moment for us. Although we had hung on to the rest of our portfolio of crown jewel events, the loss of regular live football was a terrible disappointment. The FA, I am sure, felt they were doing a smart business deal, but for us it felt like a poor reward for the way we had supported their competitions. We also knew that we would have the task of facing the BBC football production team, who would suffer the blow of losing the output they most enjoyed and which delivered their biggest audiences. In the event, it helped that our producers thought we had been treated unfairly by the FA, and our star team of Lineker and Hansen were similarly mature in the way they responded. But they did want us to be aggressive in striking back, with a bid for the Champions League – then held by ITV and Sky – at the top of their list.

  We had at this stage of 2007/08 both an opportunity and a problem. The one consolation from losing the FA deal was that the money we had earmarked was still there in our sport budget, as allocated by the BBC’s corporate centre, and we therefore had a chequebook ready for use. But the difficulty with the Champions League is that it is heavily sponsored, and we knew that we would have serious branding and commercial policy issues if we were ever to broadcast it on the BBC. In that period, UEFA also had a loyalty to ITV and Sky as their partners, so it added up to a calculation that we would need to pay a whopping premium on top of the going rate if the UK rights were to be transferred to the non-commercial BBC. It was hard to argue why the licence fee should pay for that given that the main matches were already free to air on ITV, and we therefore knew from the start that the Champions League would be the longest of long shots. When we met UEFA to talk about their rights process, they invited us to pose with the Champions League trophy. I did so, sheepishly, hoping that the photos would never see the light of day given the near certainty that this would be a failed rights bid.

  The papers knew none of this, though, and their hype for a BBC Cham
pions League bid was enormous. Throughout the process, article after article detailed our ‘bid’, based on our need for more football, and the lorry-loads of cash we were prepared to pay. On the morning of the bid deadline, the Daily Telegraph reported with confidence, and 100 per cent inaccuracy:

  The BBC will today use up to £400 million of licence fee payers’ money to bid for the rights to screen Champions League football games. Senior sports executives are said to be prepared to bid ‘whatever it takes’ to win the rights from ITV and Sky, prompting claims that the corporation is misusing money that could be better spent on high-quality programming.

  In reality, we had decided months previously that we would not bid for live matches, but we could not say so. It is a risk under competition legislation if a key party announces it is not taking part, because the market might then collapse – and, in any case, the game of sports rights involves everyone having to guess who is in and at what level. I am a profound believer in the public service case for sport, but the rights cannot be delivered other than by competing in a commercial environment.

  What we won instead of the Champions League was something decent that we had worked for, and something else that was marvellous and came out of the blue yonder. The planned-for gain was in football with the Football League contract in partnership with Sky, which gave us a nice set of rights at a modest price: the League Cup semi-finals and final, ten live first-pick Championship matches and all the highlights in what became The Football League Show. I always liked this deal, because supporting lower-league football was something the BBC was well-equipped to do across regional television and local radio as well as on its networks. I was disappointed in 2015 when Channel 5 took the highlights rights away from the BBC.

  But the big one landed unexpectedly. Dominic hurtled into my office one day with the news that he had had an approach from Bernie Ecclestone’s people about the possibility that Formula 1 might be on the market. There was a five-year deal in place with ITV, but – and the initial indications were muddy – either Bernie was able to invoke a break clause, putting the rights back on the market, or ITV had decided that it had too much on its plate and wanted to hand back the final years of their deal. That mattered little. ‘This is proper sport,’ was the verdict of Niall Sloane, our head of football, when I whispered to him the idea of F1 returning back to the BBC, and it did, indeed, tick all the boxes. It was a sport long thought to be lost to the BBC after its move to ITV in the 1990s. It was a succession of compelling events, including practice and qualifying and the races themselves, lending themselves to the BBC’s multi-platform approach. It achieved high audiences, but also what we called ‘hard to reach’ viewers: people, especially younger men, who might have previously come in only for live football, but would be lured back by the roar of the F1 engines. I bit Dominic’s hand off when he first said that the deal could be on offer, and there was a similar reaction from BBC television and from Mark Thompson. This was too good to miss.

  As usual, the rights team did the hard work. I was wheeled in to meet Bernie when the agreement was close to being finalised, on a night when I had a severe ear infection, which meant that I could only hear about one word in three spoken by our new partner. Bernie, always softly spoken, faded in and out, but I could hear enough to tell that he has a tendency to make a joke that initially leaves you wondering whether it is a joke or not. We discussed who might present the BBC’s F1 coverage. ‘Tamara Ecclestone is good,’ he said. It was a few seconds before a smile flickered across his face, and we realised that his daughter was not a serious counterproposal to our intended choice of Jake Humphrey. On the way home, Dominic bellowed into my ears the points I had missed through my temporary deafness – and within a couple of days we were ready to go public with the news that F1 would return to the BBC the following year. This had been nowhere on the sporting industry’s radar, and not a word had leaked that negotiations were underway.

  This turned out to be the same day that UEFA announced the outcome of the Champions League tender. We had a 7 a.m. release time for the F1 news, which was totally unexpected to our staff as well as to the wider public, and I went into Television Centre to do a raft of morning interviews. I was greeted on Today by Jim Naughtie with the on-air comment: ‘It’s very nice to have our old editor back with us’, which prompted a grumpy MP to complain about soft interviewing, but there was a heartening deluge of excitement from inside and outside the BBC. I loved the comment from Murray Walker: ‘I’m absolutely flabbergasted – I was lying in bed listening to the news this morning and I almost fell out of bed when I heard it.’

  When the more predictable Champions League news broke later, it was portrayed as a day of ‘won 1, lost 1’ for the BBC, since almost everyone was convinced we had staked the farm on the UEFA contract. Indeed, the Daily Mail’s sports diarist Charlie Sale refused to believe our press officer when she assured him that we had never bid for the live Champions League. I was at home cooking dinner when Charlie rang me to say that he would accept it only from me and on my honour if I told him there had been no BBC participation in the auction. I was happy to give him that assurance. And we immediately began the exhilarating work of setting up an F1 production team, under Niall Sloane and Ben Gallop, ready to deliver the sport to our audiences. It exceeded our highest expectations, winning plaudits for its digital ambition and awards for the television coverage – and more than filling the hole left by the FA contract. Motor sports are not at the top of my personal preferences, but F1 was, by some miles, the best buy of my time in Sport. It fitted into the story we were trying to tell: that sport would always be important for the BBC and we were emphatically still in the business. As a small supplement to that, the Boat Race – source of the division’s alleged misery some years previously when it had been lost – came gliding back onto our screens too.

  However, the success with Formula 1 reignited the row over cricket. We had thought about spending some of the FA money on the sport, but we still came up against the two obstacles. It was going to be difficult to schedule cricket to its best advantage on the BBC given our other events, and it needed to be on BBC One or BBC Two to make the right impact and garner the large free-to-air audiences. BBC Three and BBC Four were not on air during the daytime hours when cricket is played. Then there was the question of how much we were going to have to pay, with the rights inflated by their years at BSkyB. Our calculations suggested this would not pass the value-for-money test that we had set ourselves, and F1 was going to be more appealing to more people. We therefore decided not to bid for Test cricket. The England and Wales Cricket Board seemed to accept this with equanimity: they renewed their contract with Sky. But mid-way through 2008, they belaboured us with their bats. Giles Clarke, the ECB chairman, led the attack:

  I do think it’s time for a debate on public sector sports broadcasting. Cricket fans – and there are 19 million who are interested – should have a right to expect the public sector broadcasters to mount bids for the nation’s summer sport. After all, how many people play Formula 1? If the BBC is to remain a part of this they must answer to the millions of cricket fans in England and Wales as to how it prioritises its investment in sports rights.

  The curiosity about this attack was that it came only after the ECB had signed its new deal with Sky. On their own admission, we had told them that we would not bid for live cricket packages in March, but they only made a fuss about it in August. We therefore hit back hard through our official statement: ‘The BBC is astonished by the comments by the ECB. We’ve always said any bid for live Test cricket was subject to value for money and fitting into scheduling and in our view neither of these criteria was met.’ I followed up by going on the record myself a couple of days later:

  What seems distinctly odd is that the ECB claim we told them we weren’t bidding for live TV cricket at the end of March. They then kept silent all through April, May and June. They didn’t call the director-general or me or go to MPs or the papers or try to raise the is
sue in any way. Only after they’d done a reported £300 million exclusive deal with Sky did they attack us and call for a debate about the BBC’s sports rights strategy.

  Quite reasonably, the newspapers reported that relations between cricket and the BBC were at an all-time low, but we renewed the radio deal shortly afterwards, and despite the vehemence of the debate there was never any personal bad blood between Giles Clarke and me. I may possibly have told colleagues that I was off to sup with the devil, but we had a an enjoyable lunch together in the spring of 2009 to mark my transition to London 2012 and the end of my professional involvement with cricket.

  Elsewhere in our programming, we wanted to show we remained ambitious. We introduced a sports news show for television called, unimaginatively, Inside Sport. It had its moments, but never achieved what Sportsweek had done for radio. It showed, though, that Gabby Logan – whom we had lured across from ITV – was a smart presenter, able to do penetrating interviews as well as anchor live events. More successful was the transformation of Sports Personality of the Year – known internally as ‘SPOTY’. For some years, the programme had been broadcast from a studio in Television Centre, and it was an extraordinary event for the relatively few who were present. In my first year I stood at the door of the director of sport’s pre-show reception and greeted Virginia Wade followed by Jackie Stewart followed by Bobby Charlton and other greats of the past, and then the current pick of the crop – people like Amir Khan and José Mourinho. I later spoke to a polite youngster who had missed out on the Young Sports Personality award. He was Theo Walcott. SPOTY was eye-popping in its ability to attract celebrities. And yet that was part of the problem of a studio show with a limited capacity: because everyone there was either a high-achiever or a sports administrator, they were more blasé than the public would have been. This hit home when Pelé received a Lifetime Achievement award to applause but no standing ovation, which underlined a sense of flatness in the programme as a whole. It wasn’t helped that year by the awards won by the England cricket team, who were in Pakistan, where it was the early hours of the morning. The video link conveyed accurately their feelings of ‘we’re in Pakistan and it’s 2 a.m.’ When we saw the ratings, we knew the audience shared some of their joylessness: the figures were the lowest ever, and the critical response was no better. It was time for the redesign of another of our warhorses.