by Roger Mosey
This took the form of taking the show on the road, and letting in the fans who would thrill to the sporting gods and goddesses around them. Under the guidance of Philip Bernie, Carl Doran and director Paul Davies, we made a leap of faith and booked the NEC in Birmingham for SPOTY in 2006. Instead of the neat rows of blazers in Studio 1 of Television Centre, we were going for a vast arena with a crowd into the thousands. A live orchestra would play the theme tune, and stunts would be attempted live and on a scale greater than had been possible before. There would be no margin for error: every moment would be live on BBC One. It was therefore with a queasy feeling in my stomach that I stood on a Sunday afternoon in December in an NEC hanger, empty of people except for the technical staff, looking at the seats awaiting Midlanders’ bottoms. As with the move of the news to 10 p.m., I had an insistent voice in my head: ‘If this goes wrong, it will be very, very bad.’ It needn’t even be our fault. All it would take was a rogue fire alarm and we would have had BBC One showing an apology caption and playing seasonal music.
In fact, the programme was spectacularly better than the previous one – and it came with a talking point that guaranteed newspaper headlines. In what was a relatively thin year for the main award’s shortlist, the public chose as its winner the Queen’s granddaughter Zara Phillips. She contrived to make one of the more inarticulate acceptance speeches, telling the crowd: ‘People have said to me, “Have you prepared a speech?”, and I was like, “No,” I wasn’t expecting it all.’ This appeared to be true. She then used the word ‘amazing’ a lot: ‘It’s amazing, thanks to all the voters, it’s just amazing to be here with all these amazing sports people.’ But this was wonderful publicity for us and for the new format, and SPOTY never looked back. By 2008, we had taken over the Echo Arena in Liverpool with an attendance of more than 10,000, and in the years since I left BBC Sport it has grown still further.
That Liverpool event was special because it was the celebration of Team GB’s stunning performance at the Beijing Olympics. The Games in China – and then the Games coming to this country – became the ever more insistent theme of my time in BBC Sport. In 2006, I went to China with Mark Thompson for a DG visit with an Olympic dimension, and we got a tantalising flavour of what to expect. Mark had been pondering on the plane on the way over about what he would say if he was asked whether he had been to China before. He had – but it was for coverage of the student protests and the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. This didn’t seem like the best introductory chat with our Communist hosts, so we allowed a little fog to descend over when precisely he had visited the country in the past.
We found our welcome differed from ministry to ministry. At the foreign affairs ministry, there were sympathetic-seeming and relatively liberal officials explaining the complexity of running a country of China’s scale. At the propaganda ministry we were told in no uncertain terms that the Chinese government did not welcome the BBC’s broadcasting services and our distorted sense of news values. Perched on huge chairs in ceremonial meeting rooms, I sat alongside Mark as he patiently explained to the Chinese officials via an interpreter the difference in our approach to news. ‘If you build a hundred houses’, he said, ‘and one collapses – in Britain we would focus on the one that collapsed, while in China you might want to report on the ninety-nine that have been successfully completed. But that is how we see news.’ They didn’t look convinced.
For all that, we had a rattlingly enjoyable trip. We made our first visit to the Bird’s Nest Stadium, and we met BOCOG – the Beijing version of LOCOG. There was an insight into the mood of a host city when there’s less than two years to go: excited but apprehensive, at risk of drowning in the detail. My caveat about the visit, as someone who is notoriously picky about food, was Chinese cuisine – and in particular an Imperial-style banquet given to welcome their guests of honour. Every course produced a new horror for me to endure, and the only salvation was that everything was placed on a lazy Susan. This allowed me to spin the offending foodstuff – why sinew of deer, for heaven’s sake? – round to a neighbour. But the alleged pièce de résistance was a turtle. It arrived in a large dish shaped like a turtle, and the lid was whisked away to reveal a real, cooked turtle underneath, still in its shell. The shell was dexterously removed, and the poor little naked turtle was chopped up in front of us. Mark prides himself on being able to eat anything, and found my squeamishness amusing. ‘Try a bit, Roger,’ he chirped. ‘It’s a bit gamey, it’s a bit stringy, but it’s fine, really.’ My mind was set. It was gamey, it was stringy, it was a turtle: I was not going to eat so much as a sliver.
What became cemented in our minds during that trip was the extent to which Beijing would be a news story as well as a sport story. It was impossible to divorce modern China from its Olympic Games, and we would be missing the long-term significance of the event if we concentrated on personal bests and plucky winners to the exclusion of the Chinese Communist backdrop. On the plane home, Mark and I made a decision. We would ask Huw Edwards to commentate on the opening ceremony, the place where China would tell us about its history and its present, and make this a news assignment as well as a sport one. He would also be the commentator for London 2012’s ceremonies, because they too would be a news story: the moment when Britain showed whether it could deliver the Olympics. Using Huw on both events would have a pleasing sense of strategy, and it would also show we wanted to bind together the BBC News and Sport operations, which in the past had tended to regard each other as the enemy. They would unite under Welsh leadership.
Beijing 2008 was the most comprehensive foreign BBC outside broadcast. There was the usual brouhaha about the number of staff we were sending: a publicly announced 437. This always generates the most illogical headline: that the BBC is sending more people than there are British competitors. Nobody has ever explained the correlation between the size of a broadcasting team – supplying output twenty-four hours a day from a difficult time zone and with multiple sports – and the number of competitors that have qualified from an individual country. As usual, then, the BBC team set off amid much carping from critics – and, as usually happens too, they came back with praise ringing in their ears.
The coverage was brilliantly marshalled by Dave Gordon, whose experience of Olympics goes back to Montreal in 1976 and who was the guiding force behind the sport broadcasting in London in 2012. It started with the quirky ‘Monkey’s Journey to the East’ promotional campaign, which moved out of the comfort zone of traditional BBC Sport titles and into a world of cartoons, with music by Damon Albarn. The Games themselves had wonderful coverage by the host broadcaster, elevated further by the excitement, emotion and wit from our on-air team. We realised what a fine athletics commentator Steve Cram was becoming, and how miraculous it is that a swimming commentary team makes it onto BBC One only once in a blue moon but they manage to be such fabulous broadcasters when they do.
Mark Thompson and I went out for the beginning of the Games. The night before the opening ceremony we were at a British embassy reception, and the talk was about the jitteriness of the organisers. There had been terrorist incidents before the Games, albeit hundreds of miles from Beijing, and they had prompted an increase in security. The rumour was that every single bus in the Chinese capital had an armed soldier aboard. I could not help thinking that this was foreshadowing London, where tension would be stoked by the wider range of risks in a free country and by the news-hungry western media. We were struck in Beijing by the sterility of the Games in the interests of security and order: an Olympic Park kept free of ordinary Chinese, and a city where you would never know the Olympics were in town except for the groups of people gathered around television sets. This was not the way anyone wanted London to be – and yet you could see that one tiny incident was all it would take to derail the event. The margin for error was vanishingly small.
Mark was treated as a VIP at the opening ceremony, being entertained for lunch by the Chinese President and travelling to the stadium in a min
ibus with Rupert Murdoch. I was Cinderella, left in the kitchen – or, more accurately, the BBC offices in the broadcast centre, where I jammed on my headphones and watched the output alongside Dave. On the following day, Mark and I joined together again for a mission around Chinese government departments, where we endured the ritual spanking for BBC executives who displayed journalistic tendencies, and we defended the independence of our output. Then it was time for a visit to the sporting events, with Mark’s interest rising more because of our fellow guests than in response to the action on the pitch. We saw George W. Bush and an assortment of Silicon Valley moguls at the swimming and Prince Albert of Monaco at the archery, and bumped into Seb Coe in a hospitality lounge. It was networking heaven. It was also another reminder of what the modern Olympic circus is about, especially in cities with even better power hubs and shopping facilities and hotels than Beijing. The world really would come to London in 2012.
Mark flew home musing, he told me later, about how the BBC would do justice to the London Games. I was thinking the same. I had been in BBC Sport for three years, and I had no idea whether the BBC would want me to do four more years and lead the London coverage. There was the complication of the move of BBC Sport to Salford, which was due in 2011. As a northerner, I believed in the devolution of broadcasting to the regions, but as someone who had been rooted in London for twenty years, I was unsure whether I wanted to move myself. Almost all my friends and my extended family were within easy reach of my London base, and they told me volubly that they couldn’t imagine me being transported to Salford Quays. I therefore had a mix in my head of thinking I might need to leave sport and being mulishly resistant to the idea of not being involved in the London Games.
Providence helpfully arranged that Mark Thompson’s musing, along with that of Mark Byford, came to the conclusion that I should be offered the job of BBC director, London 2012. It was the perfect outcome for me. They conceived the job as being in charge of everything the BBC was planning: not just the sport and news but digital innovation, the Cultural Olympiad and the London content in every single genre. It was going to be based in the capital, while BBC Sport moved north on schedule. I would report to Mark Byford, with the DG taking a close interest, and I could build and run a support team as I saw fit. It was an opportunity I simply couldn’t resist. I had the chance to lead the BBC through the biggest event in the UK in our lifetimes, and, although anything labelled by the BBC as a ‘project’ was automatically to be regarded with suspicion, this surely would transcend that. Even if it did not, I reasoned that this would almost certainly be the last big job I did at the BBC – so it didn’t matter whether it pushed me up the greasy pole of career advancement or not. For once, this was simply about getting something right – and something that was of huge significance to the organisation and to the country. I accepted the two Marks’ offer in about five seconds flat.
The BBC’s coverage of Beijing ended on 17 September 2008, with the closing ceremony of the Paralympic Games. Around 42 million people had watched the Olympics and 13.5 million had tuned in to the Paralympics. The BBC’s approval ratings were close to record highs, driven in part by the sporting summer.
It was a month later, on 18 October, that Radio 2 broadcast a recorded segment of The Russell Brand Show in which the presenter, aided by Jonathan Ross, left a series of lewd messages on the answerphone of the actor Andrew Sachs. They were about the relationship Brand had had with Sachs’s granddaughter, and they should never have been broadcast. The resultant furore – named ‘Sachsgate’ – sent the corporation’s reputation plummeting, and the handling of the crisis was dismayingly shaky until Mark Thompson flew back from holiday and took control. We felt the pain of the Ross–Brand affair even more keenly in BBC Sport because we had worked so hard through the summer to show the corporation at its best – and now here were out-of-control presenters, and woeful editorial grip, undermining those efforts. A reputation in broadcasting can be lost as quickly as it is gained. But we did, at least, have London 2012 to look forward to and the chance of a much greater legacy for the corporation.
CHAPTER 10
OLYMPICS
IN THE SPRING of 2009, I moved from BBC Sport, where I had been leading a division of 500 people and a budget that ran into hundreds of millions of pounds, into an office newly created for the BBC London 2012 team. There was me; my PA, Elaine Gold; a terrific project executive, Amanda Farnsworth; and a few empty seats. We had no budget, not even one for ourselves at that stage. We had an uncertain place within the BBC structures, because we did not sit with any of the major power blocs. I had a strong relationship with my successor in Sport, Barbara Slater, but there was no template for the ultimate authority on an Olympic Games sitting outside the sport division. And we had no output planned for more than three years. My young cousin Damien put it nicely at the time: ‘Nobody will have the remotest idea what you’re doing now, but there’ll be a blinding revelation in the summer of 2012 – for better or for worse.’ But I had received a heartening email from Sebastian Coe when my appointment was announced: ‘I can’t tell you how pleased I am for you and for the project. I’ve sensed for some time it would need one person to really drive this through to 2012, and by a country mile you are the right person to do this.’ Seb alternated this praise with a teasing line on public platforms about my experience of Beijing. I had said, somewhat too simplistically, that my dominant impression from there was just how big the modern Games are. Seb would say, deadpan, ‘And this is Roger Mosey, whose revelation from Beijing was that the Olympics are, well, big.’ It was fun working with him, and Seb deserves all the plaudits for his leadership of the organising committee, LOCOG.
When I was offered the 2012 job, I consulted colleagues who said that my condition for taking the role should be that I would be given control of the entire BBC Olympics budget. At the time, I said that was not too much of a concern, and I was reluctant to erode the authority of the other divisional directors, notably sport. My main grip on the event was the agreement that I would be the individual managing the BBC’s relationship with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and with LOCOG. This allowed our office to be a ‘one-stop shop’: any BBC programme wanting do anything about the Olympics needed to make an approach through us, and if the IOC or LOCOG wanted anything from the BBC, they knew who to call. But an intervention from the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee handed the 2012 budget over to us too, because they ruled that the BBC’s approach to Beijing – separate budgets for news, sport and other programme departments – was wrong. There should be one individual responsible for the financial control of major events.
The BBC agreed with the recommendations, as it is politically wise to do, and I was handed the spreadsheets. We appointed a head of production for the whole of the BBC’s Olympic programming, Jamie Hindhaugh, and Dominic Coles became chief operating officer for the 2012 project alongside his other BBC roles. Dave Gordon, as BBC Sport’s head of major events, had a reporting line to Barbara Slater and to me. This was the engine room of the operation, but it fitted within a governance plan that worked extremely effectively. We had representatives from BBC News, Sport and Future Media – the tech guys – at our regular management meeting, and the BBC 2012 steering group was chaired by Mark Thompson or Mark Byford, with all the main directors attending.
This meant that we could operate as ‘one BBC’, in an echo of what the BBC values had aimed for, and any turf wars were sorted out rapidly. People like Helen Boaden for News, Jana Bennett and later George Entwistle for Television, Erik Huggers and Ralph Rivera from Future Media, Caroline Thomson from Operations, Tim Davie from Radio, Lucy Adams from Human Resources and Zarin Patel as finance director were all involved in the planning; and their enthusiasm played back into their home divisions.
Our team built up steadily in the three years of the project. But the most pressing early need was to define what we were there to do, and what viewers and listeners could expect from the BBC in
2012. Two big ideas were already forming. The first was a commitment we had made that we wanted to cover every event from every venue – which sounds obvious, but had only recently become possible thanks to the spread of digital technology. In the Olympics of the 1990s, the BBC had been confined to its two terrestrial channels. By Sydney in 2000, there was a very basic website, and for Athens in 2004, the red button was becoming part of our Olympic repertoire along with video streaming on the web. But even by 2008, with six red-button channels on offer, we were still only able to offer people in Britain about half the content available from the host broadcasting operation.