by Roger Mosey
In our office in Beijing, I showed Dave Gordon an email we had received from a fencing fan, protesting that we were offering no live coverage of his sport. ‘That surely can’t be true,’ I asked, ‘with all the red-button services and online streaming?’ But it was correct because 5,000 hours of sport were being squeezed into 2,500 hours of airtime, meaning that half the Games were simply not seen by our audiences. Dave was in the vanguard of wanting to change that, and we made the pledge without being completely sure how we were going to deliver it. It was an example of an editorial ambition being handed to the technology teams for them to solve – and, gratifyingly, they did.
Allied with this was a feeling that 2012 could be the breakthrough year for digital Britain. We presented this as an ambition originating in broadcasting history, though quite who crystallised it for 2012 is lost in the mists of the Olympic project. It had been in 1936 that the abdication crisis had seen the nation brought together by radio, as people gathered around their wireless sets to listen to King Edward VIII renounce the throne. Seventeen years later, television came of age for the Queen’s coronation. There was a massive surge in the number of television sets sold to households across Britain; and, for the first time, more people watched an event on TV than listened to it on radio. For London 2012, we could see that we would have more online and mobile services than ever before. Social media would be at its most widespread, allowing people to share the moment. If Dave’s plans came to fruition, at peak times we would need a total of twenty-four channels to cover all the Olympic action. Our aim was that whenever you wanted it, and wherever you were, you would be able to enjoy London 2012 from the BBC; it would be the time when digital services came of age. At this stage we did not know that the royal boost to this would come not from a coronation or an abdication, but by the Queen appearing to jump out of a helicopter.
Perhaps as a subconscious tribute to Gordon Brown, we drew up a five-point plan for what we hoped to achieve – and we published it. Number 1 was to offer brilliant coverage of the sport. Number 2, we wanted to bring the nation together round a whole series of events in 2012, including the Diamond Jubilee, the torch relay and the Cultural Olympiad, in addition to the Games themselves. Number 3 was to have wide-ranging and expert news reporting of the events: independent and impartial, but also proportionate to the scale of the year when our capital would be the centre of world attention. Number 4 was to drive digital: to encourage its use, and offer unprecedented choice and personalisation. We wanted to reinforce this commitment to the future by capturing some of the Games for the first time in Super Hi-Vision, a technology developed by Japan’s NHK and the BBC; and we would offer some live coverage in 3D. Number 5, we wanted to secure a legacy for the BBC and for the country, by engaging the widest range of audiences and delivering projects with long-term benefits.
The torch relay is one of the examples of the benefit of taking decisions early, with some plans signed off as early as 2009. In LOCOG’s research, conducted by their marketing head Greg Nugent, the torch relay was a hazy concept for many in Britain: they knew little about what it entailed. But when it was explained to them that it might mean the torch coming to their town or city, possibly even right along their street, they really liked the idea, and LOCOG saw this as the means by which enthusiasm for the Games would spread across Britain in the weeks before the opening ceremony. This tied in with the BBC’s strengths in the nations and regions. It was a gift to local radio stations and regional television, who could have ‘the Olympics’ on their patch when the torch came to town.
We therefore built into our budget the funding for every region to have a special TV programme for the relay, and for every local radio station to have money for an enhanced breakfast show and extra reporting. Colleagues from the BBC’s nations and regions met with LOCOG many times to work on the torch’s route, how its journey would be announced and then the detail of the daily schedule. As often as we could manage it, the torch’s biggest moments would be ‘live’ into the BBC 6.30 p.m. regional news programmes. We invested, too, in 3G technology that would allow the relay to be covered live on our website throughout its journey: ‘Torchcam’ was to be one of the hits of 2012.
But one of the biggest moments was planned to be in a place that didn’t exist. We thought it would be an amusing idea to take the torch to Walford, in London E20 – better known as the home of the soap EastEnders. I was uncertain whether the people running EastEnders would take to the idea, because there is a tricky balance to be struck between real events and continuing dramas. However, the argument was that it was surely impossible for an East End borough not to have any reflection of the Olympics happening in the East End of London in 2012, and we had a gratifyingly warm welcome from the EastEnders production team when we put the proposal to them that they could have the actual torch being carried through their fictitious borough. It was they who added the idea that this could be ‘live’ – adding a live segment to an episode partly on tape. Hence from some considerable time out, the characters of Walford were seized by the prospect of the torch visiting them.
The announcement was made in the Queen Vic on the same day that the route was announced to the real places hosting the relay in the rest of the country, with a long-term plot developing about who would carry the Olympic flame. We had held meetings in which LOCOG had set out their high aspirations for torchbearers: that they would be an inspiration to others and pillars of their communities. The EastEnders producers had explained that most of the inhabitants of Albert Square had lived rather more vivid lives, given the local reputation for crime and lurid personal relationships. In the end, the character chosen was Billy Mitchell, who might have struggled with the real-life vetting process. On the night, LOCOG arranged for a special mini-convoy to break away from the main relay party to go to the EastEnders set in Elstree, where the live outside broadcast captured Billy’s run on BBC One. For students of the media, there was the additional pleasure of watching the BBC News channel simultaneously broadcasting a scene from a soap opera with the caption ‘Live from Walford’.
This customising of the relay reflects the close relationship we had with LOCOG. I had a formal opposite number in Jackie Brock-Doyle, their director of communications and public affairs, and we would meet or speak every week, or, in 2012 itself, almost every day. We didn’t always agree about everything, but when action was needed the system worked. Dave Gordon phoned me in considerable alarm one day when he saw that a crowd direction pylon was being erected in a place that would be right in the middle of the shot from our Olympic studio window. It meant that instead of viewers seeing the Aquatic Centre behind Sue Barker’s head, they might witness a revolving electronic message about delays on the District Line.
Within an hour or two, Jackie had sorted it out – at some cost to LOCOG, since it involved digging up concrete foundations – and the nation was spared unwanted travel news on our flagship broadcasts. Jackie’s deputy, Joanna Manning-Cooper, was similarly adept at reconciling the needs of the organising committee and broadcasters, and was a neighbour of mine in Richmond and a drinking companion on tough days. All of this was outside the International Olympic Committee’s playbook: in their theology, the IOC dealt with the organising committee, and their partner was the official host broadcaster, Olympic Broadcasting Services, who provided core coverage of the Games for the whole world. There was no formal role for the rights-holding broadcaster of the host nation, but LOCOG and ourselves ignored that protocol. We saw our partnership as essential to making the Games a success within the UK.
It meant that we had privileged access to London’s Olympic story. Five years before the opening ceremony, we walked around the site where the main stadium was going to be built, and we were there after the first concrete had been poured, when you could start imagining where the track and the stands would be. I recall a visit to the Olympic Park on a bitingly cold but sunny morning in January 2008, with Beijing still to come, in which the team and I felt for the first
time that this was truly going to happen: the athletes of the world would be running and swimming and cycling here, in what had previously been a wasteland in an unfashionable part of east London. Later we worked with LOCOG on a series of countdown events, with ‘three years to go’ somewhat predictably being followed by ‘two years to go’. There were attention-grabbing moments such as the first run along the Olympic track, and sporting heroes marched live on network television across one of the bridges newly installed to convey the crowds from transport hubs to sporting venues.
However, the public relations impact of these events could often be hijacked, in an apparently amiable way, by the Mayor of London. The idea of a media visit to the velodrome when it was partially completed was to showcase cycling stars spinning round the track, but Boris Johnson spotted an opportunity. He climbed aboard an unused bike and set off himself, a little uncertainly, round the velodrome – pursued, of course, by a phalanx of photographers and video crews. Those pictures made the news bulletins and the following day’s papers, and it was characteristic of the mayor’s ability to win over some and to leave others grinding their teeth.
For a couple of compelling meetings, I was co-chair with Johnson of the London telephony working group. It was set up to try to resolve the enormous pressure there would be on the mobile networks, and Amanda Farnsworth’s early intelligence had been alarming. She came back from a meeting where the operators had predicted that not even voice and text services would run flawlessly, because of the unprecedented demand. Our aim of offering video services to mobiles was impossible: there was not the digital capacity in the UK to enable that, and nor were there enough phone masts in east London.
Hence a planning group comprising the mobile companies, the mayor, the BBC and LOCOG. Johnson would start by brandishing some huge old mobile phone at the operators. ‘What am I going to be able to get on this gizmo?’ he would boom, apparently oblivious to the smartphone generation. But you could spot his political savvy too. The mobile companies’ standard response was to call for more investment – either from the government or from the city authorities. They wanted someone else to put in the infrastructure, if needs be from the public purse. The mayor would have none of it: he was not going to spend his budget on something that would benefit the phone operators or the video suppliers. After the clowning around at the start of a meeting, it would become apparent that he was no soft touch.
There were, unavoidably, some bumps in our relationship with the organisers. LOCOG awarded the rights for the Paralympics to Channel 4, much to our unhappiness at the time. We had seen the possibility of a Channel 4 bid because it looked commercially attractive to them, but they came in at an offer way above what we thought was realistic. It was a blow to Dave Gordon in particular, because he had championed disability sport for many years and had pushed BBC Sport to bring it into its mainstream coverage, so it was galling that the International Paralympic Committee did not support that long-term commitment when the Games came to London. But it was, possibly, the right decision. Channel 4 covered the Paralympics well, and, as I watched our television team drive themselves to exhaustion during the Olympics, it would have been tough to ask them to do it all over again two weeks later. A fresh perspective was of benefit. For ourselves, we were proud that Radio 5 Live managed to do justice to both the Olympics and Paralympics.
More of a conundrum throughout the Olympic project was what to do about the Cultural Olympiad. This is intended to be a feast of the host country’s arts, running from the handing over of the Olympic flag – so in our case from 2008 – to the Games themselves. The words ‘Cultural Olympiad’ were, and remain, a mystery to most people, and I always had a suspicion that LOCOG’s high command regarded this as a distraction from the main business of getting the Games right. But they dutifully set up a Cultural Olympiad team, and it churned out a number of forgettable small-scale events from some years out. These events ate up Cultural Olympiad funding, and by 2009 there was an unhappy conjunction of no compelling story about Britain’s Olympic arts, with much of the money already allocated to dull initiatives.
To the rescue came a figure from my past: Tony Hall, then chief executive of the Royal Opera House, now the new chairman of the Cultural Olympiad board, and Ruth MacKenzie as the director charged with putting together something the public would want to see. Almost every arts panjandrum in London was by now on the board, so it was made up of people like the directors of the Tate and the British Museum and the Royal Shakespeare Company along with the mayor’s cultural adviser – and Mark Thompson from the BBC (when he was not otherwise engaged) or me (when he was, which was often).
I found it partly amusing and often infuriating. The wilful ignorance of sport on the part of some members was a shock, though I know they regarded me as annoyingly resistant to their vision of the arts. More worrying was the attention given to getting public funding for work of questionable value to the taxpayer, of which the Arts Council’s ‘Artists Taking the Lead’ was a prime exhibit. Immediately nicknamed ‘Artists Taking the Piss’ by wicked folk at LOCOG, it gave six-figure sums to decidedly peculiar initiatives. A column of steam was promised for Mersey-side: ‘a slender, sinuous spinning column of cloud rising into the sky from the surface of the water on East Float in the Wirral’. It never happened. The London project was Bus Tops: ‘a public art installation on the roofs of bus shelters. LED panels became canvases, showcasing digital commissions by a range of established artists, as well as allowing Londoners to display their creativity, play games and express what is special about their city.’ I never met anyone who had seen one, let alone played games with it. ‘Nowhereisland’ was a travelling island, which even The Guardian said ‘deserves to sink’. The East Midlands got some crocheted lions in glass cages. ‘Godiva Awakes’ was a giant Lady Godiva, only slightly compromised by being clothed and propelled by bicycles. All of them were routinely described by the arts types as ‘spectacular’ and ‘extraordinary’, of which only the latter was true for me – and not as a positive. The total cost was £5.4 million. Jackie Brock-Doyle and I would sit within each other’s sight and roll our eyes in bafflement or outrage at the latest idea, and I could have sworn that there were points when even Tony’s eyebrows were raised a little too.
We had hoped for some of the artistic projects to be good enough for broadcast on BBC One. When I observed that it all seemed a bit BBC Four, if that, I was reprimanded by a panjandrum. ‘In that case it’s simply a matter of putting that BBC Four material onto BBC One,’ he said, primly. One of the icons of the arts world also sighed about the relationship between the Olympics and sport. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice’, he mused, ‘if we had some sport supporting a major arts festival, rather than the other way round?’ Sadly, the world still waits for a West Ham v. Stoke match to build up excitement for the Turner Prize.
I came to like and respect Ruth MacKenzie a great deal, and she and Tony grabbed the Cultural Olympiad agenda as best they could and reshaped it into the London 2012 Festival, which was more comprehensible to the public. But at the BBC we mainly did our own thing and simply commissioned some decent programmes that would fit under the Festival banner – hence the Shakespeare season, with the memorable Hollow Crown series; the Radio 1 Big Weekend in Hackney; and the 2012 Proms, which had already been promised as having an Olympic tie-in. I enjoyed escorting the BBC Trust chairman, Lord Patten, through the muddy fields of Hackney Marshes for what was possibly his first live experience with Dizzee Rascal and Plan B.
Throughout the long planning period, we found dealing with the BBC Trust to be a dispiriting part of the job. Chris Patten, who arrived only just over a year before the Games, was the exception to the rule: he understood sport and was enthusiastic about the Olympics. Many of the rest were the spiritual siblings of the folk on the Cultural Olympiad board. In our update sessions that started after Beijing, trustees would always have questions about the arts or education initiatives around the Olympics. But I cannot recall any significant issues
being raised about covering the sport of the Games: nothing about building a profile for minority sports or ensuring excellence around the athletics, swimming or ceremonies. When we set out the audience figures for Beijing and made our predictions for London, one senior trustee asked dismissively, ‘Are you really sure people are going to want to watch this in those numbers?’ – to which our answer, even in 2009, was an unequivocal ‘yes’.
As we got closer to the Games, the seeming misery of some trustees increased. In a textbook example of looking through the wrong end of telescope, one Trust committee obsessed about our need to provide alternative coverage to the Games. They extracted guarantees from the management that none of the beastly Olympics would encroach into peak time on BBC Two or BBC Four, without considering the storm there would be among viewers if a gold medal cycle race was chopped off in its prime, or factoring in that there were hundreds of alternative channels available. Almost never did we get a spark of enthusiasm from them that this was a once-in-a-lifetime festival of sport and the BBC should do it justice on those terms.
There was further frustration in dealing with the Trust bureaucracy. It is right, of course, that new services should be subject to scrutiny, and regulation is essential for broadcasting. But when we started to imagine, prompted by an enquiry from Sky, that our twenty-four online channels of sporting action might become twenty-four Games-time television channels, we realised how much more complex our regulatory framework had become. In 2011, one of the BBC management team who dealt with the Trust gave us the timeline for approval of what was being construed as a suite of new services – even though they were only going to be there for seventeen days. He noted the likely need for a public value test, the required consultation periods and the rest – and concluded that everything might not be fully approved until September 2012. Amanda Farnsworth and I tried to discern whether he was joking or not, but there was no flicker of a smile on his face. The Trust did, fortunately, recognise that approval for Olympic services after the Games themselves might not have been the smartest move. Indeed, having the twenty-four channels available, not just on Sky but on Freesat and Virgin cable, became a great success, thanks to the ease of finding sports live and uninterrupted via the programming guide on a digital box.