by Roger Mosey
The success of the 2012 opening ceremony, and of the BBC’s coverage of it, are now accepted facts. I watched it on the night amid a group of BBC Sport colleagues with my heart in my mouth – knowing how fine the line is between triumph and tragedy. But walking home afterwards in the early hours of the morning to our flat in Hackney, I passed groups of people still out on the canal towpaths who had been watching the ceremony on their mobiles and, across the water, in real life as the fireworks had illuminated east London. Judging by the number of empty bottles on the grass, they had been having quite a party. If ever you could say there was a ‘buzz’ it was that night: there was an unmistakable sense that it had been not just all right but breathtakingly brilliant. It only remained to see what the television audience numbers had been like, and here we had had relatively conservative predictions. Given that a home nation’s World Cup match gets around 20 million viewers, we would have been pleased if we had matched that. Very few programmes these days break the 10 million barrier. But when the ratings popped up on our computer screens at 9.30 the next morning, we found we had exceeded our expectations by a mile. The average audience throughout the period of 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. was 23.4 million, with a market share of 84 per cent. The peak was 27.3 million, and more than 20 million were still watching at half past midnight. These were the best figures since the current television ratings systems began, and the largest audience on any channel in the twenty-first century. We press-released and tweeted and Facebooked the glad tidings: we wanted to reinforce the story that this was already a success, and there were sixteen glorious days yet to come.
I would never have imagined that those sixteen days could run as smoothly for the BBC as they did. After the Diamond Jubilee pageant disaster, which involved muddy lines of communication and confusion about who was in charge, Mark Thompson had designated me to be the single point of referral below him. If anything cropped up – from national emergencies and editorial crises through to scheduling clashes – I would be on call to deal with them at any hour. There was a fantastic team around me, of course, but I expected to have interrupted nights and early morning conference calls and executive meetings to deal with whatever the Games threw at us. I thought it would be like being back in news at the time of war: unrelenting and difficult. Instead, it was unrelenting but surprisingly easy. Dave and I were in the office from before eight in the morning and left usually after ten in the evening, and there were television schedules to debate and plans to be tweaked and feedback to be given. But I have never been so impressed by the enthusiasm and dedication of the BBC’s staff, exemplified by the lads (they were almost all lads) in the video editing area. They put in long shifts in an oppressive room buried in the middle of the IBC, crafting the montages of the day’s action, which never failed to capture the emotion of each event as well as its thrills.
What became clear early on was that alongside the raw material delivered to us by LOCOG and the IOC, it was the broadcasting that was winning the nation’s admiration. We had not put a lot of money into our studios, which, to ensure that we had a backdrop of the main venues, were in the park about ten minutes’ walk away from the IBC. They were made up of the World Cup studio from 2010, recycled and plonked on top of giant containers, along with a roof terrace where BBC Three plied its trade. To comply with IOC rules, they were not branded, and we were unable to advertise where the BBC was in the park. But the public immediately worked it out, and the studios were routinely besieged by large crowds – especially in the late evening when Gabby Logan’s highlights show was on air. That was when the day’s medallists would arrive to be interviewed, and we sometimes took them into the mêlée accompanied by a roving camera so that we could capture the triumphant athletes meeting their fans. Viewers at home seemed to be enraptured too. The ratings remained at stratospheric levels, and our stars’ popularity shot up.
The most notable phenomenon was the nation finally recognising what a great broadcaster Clare Balding is. In our discussions with the BBC television channels a couple of years out, the one thing that tended to make the schedulers’ lips curl was the idea that the early days of the Games would be dominated in the peak schedule by swimming. For them, swimming was something for BBC Two on a Sunday afternoon, if they really had nothing else to show, and less of a crowd-puller than athletics or the major cycling events. But we were sure that swimming presented in the right way would be a winner for BBC One, and Clare was central to that. We always wanted her to be ‘on location’: in the heart of an event rather than spending too much time in the studio. She is at her best prowling round the winning post of the Grand National or on the towpath for the Boat Race. And, as we watched her in the opening nights of the Olympic swimming, bantering with Ian Thorpe and interviewing Bert le Clos, awash with pride after his son Chad’s gold medal, we knew that was the right call. ‘Why can’t everyone be like Clare?’ asked Jan Moir in the Daily Mail. The Guardian agreed: ‘The biggest national treasure to emerge from the 2012 Olympics may be the BBC’s Clare Balding.’
This is the kind of thing that tends to curdle the milk in other presenters’ morning coffee. They all want to be a national treasure because it is in the bloodstream of anyone who ventures in front of a camera. But the team stayed remarkably harmonious because, in my view, they were all at the top of their form. I think Gary Lineker is consistently underestimated: it is a miracle that a great footballer can also turn into one of the best television presenters of his generation. He and Sue Barker and the rest of the studio anchors created the relaxed, informed atmosphere we wanted on air – from opening to closing, and at all points in between.
It was unashamedly patriotic coverage, too. Everyone remembers the behind-the-scenes footage of the BBC athletics team going crazy as Mo Farah won his gold medal, and it was, of course, our doing that those pictures made it into our main broadcasts and onto social media. We were rooting for Team GB, and we wanted everyone to know. Critics sometimes misunderstand this as compromising our journalistic integrity, but to me it has always been simple: sport coverage can be partisan when a national team is involved, while the news output retains an obligation to be measured. Audiences can perfectly well understand Gary Lineker willing on England in a World Cup, but would be less understanding if Fiona Bruce read the news wearing a Three Lions shirt. And there was a marvellous alchemy in the summer of 2012: Team GB were putting in the performances of a lifetime; LOCOG had created a Games that fired up British pride; and the BBC was the means by which this reached the public. One night I stood on the BBC roof terrace with Mark Bright, who was working as one of our football pundits, and, as he surveyed the crowd below and then looked over to the Olympic Stadium, he said simply: ‘I have never been so proud to be British.’ Millions of people would have joined him in that.
There was, though, a small media flurry about whether we were being over-patriotic. This arose from our regular conference calls between the Olympic Park and BBC headquarters, in which Mark Thompson took part, along with the major divisional directors. It had been a theme for a day or two in the middle of the Games that we were bothered about the news programmes over-focusing on Team GB, and we had discussed the fact that a British bronze was often getting a higher place in the bulletin running orders than even the most stellar gold-winning performance by a foreigner. There was no concern at all about the sports programming, but the message had been passed on to the news division – with, seemingly, little effect. We therefore decided to make the case a little more strongly, and Helen Boaden sent some of her editors an email marked ‘An order from the DG’. She wrote: ‘Mark Thompson is increasingly unhappy that we are focusing far too much on Team GB’s performance to the exclusion of all else … As editor-in-chief, he has issued a directive that this needs to change from today. So you need to get cracking on making that shift.’
In the finest traditions of BBC News, it took mere minutes for the memo to leak to the press. They ignored any distinction between news and sport, and went for the predictable he
adlines: ‘BBC ordered to stop being “too patriotic” over Olympics coverage’, with stories saying that ‘channel controllers’ had been told to switch their focus away from Team GB. Initially, we thought this had the potential to be detrimental because we believed we had overwhelmingly got the content and tone right, and the idea that the director-general was unhappy with it, or disliked patriotism, was damaging to us and to him. The moment the leak received publicity, there was a rumbling about ‘bloody management’ within the IBC. The press office therefore took the relatively unusual step of issuing a statement in Mark’s name, with a careful delineation between the different areas of output:
I am as delighted as our audience and the whole BBC team about the brilliant performance of Team GB – and it is quite wrong to suggest otherwise. The BBC has been right to focus on sporting achievements which the whole country has been celebrating and we will continue to do so with pride. We can do that while at the same time making sure that our news programmes fully reflect some of the other great sporting achievements and human stories of the London Games.
With this, and some robust briefing, the story rapidly deflated.
And those were our tactics throughout. We knew we had a lot at stake in the Olympics and the scrutiny of our output would never be more intense, so we had a team trying to squash erroneous stories before they became damaging. When there was a Twitter campaign against Trevor Nelson’s commentary on the opening ceremony, we answered the complaints as soon as they arose, and later tweeted the audience survey results showing that he was liked by the majority of viewers. It was via Twitter that we were first aware that there were problems with the on-screen data from the road cycling. Again, we were able to explain what was happening – that it was a problem outside our control and originating from the organisers and the host broadcasting operation – and Gary Lineker was tweeting an apology within a few minutes of the issue arising. This may sound an obvious thing to do for anyone familiar with the modern practice of PR, but it was less than automatic for the BBC. Indeed, much of the crisis around the Jubilee Pageant had been caused by the failure to explain what was going on and the absence of suitable BBC representatives for interview. Instead, we had locked ourselves in the bunker and received a more prolonged kicking. This was a lesson learned, though arguably forgotten again after the Games.
All of us in the leadership of the BBC Olympics spent long days in the Broadcast Centre obsessively monitoring the output and the reaction to it. The peaks of each day were when the production staff would stand around the monitors, yelling for Team GB competitors as they went for a medal – and a gold always generated a cheer to lift the roof. By the time of the start of the athletics, just over a week into the Games, I was feeling sufficiently confident about the operation to give myself a break from the IBC and go to hear the cheers of thousands more people at an actual event. The irony of having a pass that would get me in to any venue was that I saw almost nothing live. But its virtue was that when I did, it was in the VIP area: the seats designated for ‘the Olympic Family’. I therefore got myself into the main stadium with Dominic Coles watching Mo Farah strike gold, with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge just ahead of me, Ed Miliband appropriately to the left, and the Prime Minister, David Cameron, with Boris Johnson just behind. This led to a moment of misfortune. We were naturally proud of our twenty-four online streams and our mobile services, and the opportunity occurred to show them off to the Prime Minister. The amazing night of athletics was drawing to a close in London, but Team GB’s men footballers were locked in a battle with South Korea in Cardiff. It had been 1–1 at full time; extra time had failed to break the deadlock and it was going to have to be resolved by penalties. David Cameron asked us what the score was, so Dominic brandished his smartphone. There, courtesy of the BBC’s innovation, was the penalty shoot-out being streamed live. Cameron, Johnson and ourselves huddled over the screen – only for it to freeze just before the crucial moment when Sturridge missed his penalty. Cameron took it with the good spirits of a man who knew he had no need of football to make London’s Games a success, while Dominic tried to grab what advantage he could from the disappointment. ‘That shows why we need more money for the licence fee,’ he said. The Prime Minister laughed.
This struck me later as being the opposite of what normally happens. An innovation can be demonstrated successfully to the top brass, only to fail when it reaches millions of regular viewers. Thankfully, we had almost no glitches at all in the streaming and the catch-up services or in the delivery of the twenty-four channels. To our pleasure, they ended up being among the most popular of all digital services, taking around 5 per cent of total television viewing, despite the dominance of the flagship coverage on BBC One and BBC Three. One day I went into the newspaper shop in the Olympic Park and heard from the assistant, who had no idea I worked for the BBC, the perfect self-portrait of the digital generation. ‘I was watching BBC One on the TV last night’, he said, ‘and I had another event streaming on my iPad. And then I was tweeting to my mates about the British golds. Fantastic!’ He was not alone. Our slogan – ‘Never miss a moment’ – was coming true, and you could take delight in sharing the moment with family and friends and the whole nation.
They, and I, wanted it never to end. But on Saturday 11 August, I sat with Mark Thompson in the video editing area of the IBC, watching the montage to end all montages: an item for our programme on the next day, the final night. It played images from the Games accompanied by the words of Seb Coe from the opening ceremony: ‘There is a truth to sport, a purity, a drama, an intensity, a spirit that makes it irresistible to take part in and irresistible to watch.’ The pictures were of Ennis and Hoy and Bolt and Phelps and Wiggins. ‘For us too, for every Briton, just as the competitors, this is our time. And one day we will tell our children and our grandchildren that when our time came we did it right.’ The tape ended with pictures of the cauldron that was still flickering a few hundred metres away from us, but would soon be extinguished.
Tears were flooding down my face. ‘Oh look, Roger’s crying,’ said Mark, loudly, but not, I hope, too unsympathetically. And they were not the only tears of those closing hours of the Games. I have never known such shared emotion as in the production gallery when the final show came to an end, and among the presenters and commentators. We made our way home through the crowds of people who had been there for the dying moments of the 2012 Olympic Games, savouring the memories they would never forget. Britain had done it, London had done it and we had done it too: we were elated and knackered, and proud and bereft. Now that golden time was over, never to return.
CHAPTER 11
DIRECTORS-GENERAL
WHEN I BECAME director of sport, and again in my last year as director of London 2012, I joined what was claimed to be one of the BBC’s top decision-making bodies: BDG, which stood for BBC Direction Group. Those executives outside it wanted to be on it, while those on it never quite figured out what it was there for. Actual decisions seemed to be made somewhere else in the organisation, but the greatest benefit was hearing direct from the boss about what was on his mind – and Mark Thompson’s mind was always a subject of fascination.
One evening our meeting stretched into a dinner and we started talking about Lord Reith: how he had been the founding father of the BBC but had ended up estranged from it, consuming little or no television and radio. This set Mark and the rest of the table ruminating about how few directors-general ended their time at the BBC happily. We went backwards: Greg, who had come a cropper over Hutton; John Birt, who had seen his inheritance handed to Greg, the candidate he didn’t want; Michael Check-land, who had lost out to Birt in seeking to continue as DG; Alasdair Milne, who had been unceremoniously sacked by the chairman. Indeed, said Mark, it seemed that the last DG to leave cheerfully and on his own terms was Ian Trethowan in the 1980s. ‘It makes you wonder why anyone wants to do it,’ he mused – a man who had been appointed only the previous year to the job he had always seemed destined
to do.
I never imagined at any point in my career that I would be DG. It had never been on the radar when I was in radio, and if I had wanted to build a Thompson-like career I would have moved earlier to television. But watching DGs close up, I lacked what made each of them distinctive: the precision and long-term strategic vision of John Birt, the ebullience and showmanship of Greg Dyke, the tactical brilliance and the rhinoceros hide of Mark Thompson. Thankfully, I always knew that was the case for me: it is a terribly difficult job, with the bodies of the defenestrated as its proof.
John Birt was the first DG I witnessed at the top level. He was not popular with the staff, and that included senior staff: the most common occurrence was to come across someone leading a division or a project who was fuming about the DG’s apparatchiks sending back the latest version of a paper because it didn’t fit the approved corporate approach. ‘Iteration’ became word of the day, meaning endless rewriting of papers for a sclerotic bureaucracy. I saw the worst of this in the high temple of Birtism: the annual performance review. I was part of this for BBC News in 1999, and the best part of two days was set aside for it. Enormous amounts of work from our strategists went into capturing every factoid and number that might be required by the corporate centre, and as news board, led by Tony Hall, we had rehearsed our lines and were ready for scrutiny.
It turned out to be one of the most peculiar experiences of my working life. I had imagined we would talk about the content and strategy of news programming; instead we devoted hours to baroque performance indicators which were grouped graphically into something called ‘the BBC cathedral’. Birt was worried that we hadn’t captured the most meaningful data properly and we fretted collectively not about the main TV news bulletins or the Today programme but about whether the colour-coded scorecard had properly changed from amber to green. My colleague and friend Linda Anderson gave the south-west London contingent of news board a lift home in her car, and colleagues who had worked on the review uttered a cry of anguish: ‘It’s mad, completely mad.’ A few years later, performance review under Mark Thompson was done in ninety minutes for the whole of the Journalism group, which then included not just news but BBC Sport and the controllers of BBC Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.