by Roger Mosey
The trigger for going into print, which I did in The Times in early November, was reading a couple of pieces in other newspapers which seemed to define being a friend of the BBC as supporting a higher licence fee and not requiring much in the way of reform. I felt this was wrong. I therefore argued that more account needed to be paid to the age of austerity in which licence fee-payers were living, and to reassuring them that the BBC was the optimal size for its public service mission. If this was done with skill, and included some measured retrenchment, it might make the corporation simpler to run – which had been the goal of recent directors-general. There was also a balance to be struck between areas where the BBC is under great competitive pressure, such as among young audiences, and those where it can be argued that the BBC is itself too dominant, such as news. It is uncomfortable that the BBC has a market share of at least 70 per cent in both television and radio news, especially when there is an itch for greater central control of the agenda. Plurality and diversity are important in public media, and that is harder if there is one man or woman at the top with the ability to shape so much of it. I noted that the BBC had admitted that it had not, with the virtue of hindsight, given enough coverage in the past to people opposed to immigration or who believed Britain should withdraw from the EU. I went on to make the argument for the BBC to be slightly smaller, and for the BBC not to be the only vehicle for public service media in the UK. There is already some top-slicing, as it is known, in the BBC’s support for S4C in Wales, in its subsidy for content from city television stations, and in its levy for the rolling out of rural broadband. I said that ‘none of this is an argument for taking a wrecking-ball to the BBC. Its strengths remain manifest’, and concluded:
The BBC should not have to contest its funding year-by-year and should have a guarantee of the dominant slice of the licence-fee pie. But the hard question for the corporation is why in a digital age it should have the whole pie to itself forever – when doing something different might be better for the public good.
In its reporting of my article, The Times, possibly predictably, went further than I had done by claiming that I believed the BBC was biased to the left, and the piece encouraged grumbling about left-wingery in the usual quarters. I should have been even clearer that the real enemy was homogeneity in news output. Other reaction was rich in its variety. ‘Mosey unleashed!’ said an email from one of my friends. ‘More please.’ A number of BBC staff texted their support, and one – Mark Urban – went public describing it on Twitter as ‘excellent piece in the Times. I share your view BBC no longer dominated by left. But its liberal values can be suffocating.’ More compliments came from people at ITV and Channel 4 and from the independent sector, principally around the idea that there might be financial support for high-quality non-BBC news services. A former chief executive of the Royal Television Society described it as ‘thoughtful’, and the letters I received at Selwyn were all positive. The official BBC response was measured: ‘We want every licence fee payer to have a part in the conversation about the future of the BBC. This is one strand of that.’
Soon, however, there were signs that some BBC insiders took a dimmer view. There was the traditional punishment for dissent: a couple of catty pieces in the Guardian diary. Friends still in the corporation conveyed the image of dark corners where pins were being stuck in a voodoo doll. At no point, though, did anyone from the BBC engage with the arguments I had made. My views may be right or they may be wrong, and I would never claim a monopoly on wisdom. But seemingly the only on-the-record response came from the director of television, Danny Cohen, in a speech at a Christmas programmes launch. In the previous weeks, I had not been alone in questioning the size of the corporation. David Dimbleby, Jennifer Saunders and Lord Sugar had all made comments about the size or alleged overstaffing of the BBC, and they were to be followed by Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys. Danny Cohen started sensibly by saying that ‘the BBC is an imperfect institution and “critical friends” are an important way for us to keep improving’. However, he then went on to question why ‘some of our on-screen talent and some former members of staff choose to attack or undermine the BBC in public rather than express any concerns they have in private conversations within the BBC’. I tried to imagine that conversation. ‘Danny, I’m a bit bothered about homogeneity in news.’ ‘Thanks so much for calling, Roger, we’ll attend to it right away.’ I failed. It seemed peculiar to try to shut down a debate and to exclude from it people who know the territory.
What also seemed to be playing out in some quarters was the view that friends should publicly support all BBC policies, while anyone who questions any of them is slotted into the ‘hostile’ camp. In fairness to the BBC, this is partly because critical comments are seized on by genuine enemies in the press and Parliament, and there is an unforgiving harshness to much of the debate about broadcasting. But this cannot be the reason for not having the discussion about the size and shape of a great national institution. What, for instance, if someone had recommended in early 2010 that the BBC should have a frozen licence fee for five years, incorporate World Service, help fund S4C and buy news-gathering from rival local television services? The less wise within the BBC would promptly have parked any such views into the ‘enemy’ camp – but that is the deal that emerged in the summer of 2010. It was markedly better than what much of the public sector got, and towards the end of those five years the BBC was trouncing its competitors in the television, radio and news ratings – and still delivering exceptionally good programmes and services.
A debate about what happens next should never be a bad idea. The BBC is not a little pink sugar mouse that will melt away at the first drop of rain. A few months later, when Rona Fairhead was appointed to chair the BBC Trust in succession to Lord Patten, I gave a comment to The Guardian recommending that she do three things: ‘Act radically about the BBC’s governance; fight for its independence; and be free-thinking about the future shape of the organisation.’ I’m pleased that she has come round to the view that the days of the Trust in its current form should be severely limited, and I hope the BBC will step away from the position that it alone must do everything from the licence fee.
These brief episodes of putting my head above the parapet were followed by a multitude of requests from BBC programmes to go on the air to be critical of the BBC. I turned them all down. The only interview I did after the Times piece was a slot on 5 Live about why listed events should remain to protect free-to-air sport. Subsequent BBC imbroglios got the phones ringing again.
In the spring of 2015 there was a reminder that the director-general is only a steak dinner away from another crisis, when reports emerged of an assault by the Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson on one of his production team. The reason was apparently the lack of hot food after a day’s filming, and the offer of a cheese platter instead of the star presenter’s desired steak and chips. Given the importance of Top Gear as BBC2’s most watched programme and a major source of commercial revenue for BBC Worldwide, firing Clarkson must have seemed initially like a nuclear option. Friends inside the BBC spoke of it being back in ‘full crisis lockdown’, and one emailed me to say, ‘The BBC is its usual bonkers self with a bit of added bonkersness right now.’ I resisted multiple invitations from Today and Newsnight to comment while the story dominated the headlines, mainly because it is daft to express an opinion on this kind of thing before the facts are established. I sensed that the BBC had made the crisis rather worse for itself by having placed Clarkson on a final warning when it wasn’t altogether clear that his past transgressions were serious enough, and its external communications had wobbly moments, as ever, while the controversy raged. But when it was proven that there had been a physical attack, Tony Hall was right to brandish a straight red card. It was a proper corrective to the culture of presenter power that has lurked in too many programme areas.
Otherwise, I continued to be engrossed by life in Cambridge and I realised that one of the most striking things was how
self-contained it could be. Everything I wanted was within a few minutes’ walk of the college. Some of the first-year students talked to me about feeling they were in ‘the bubble’: their whole existence was college, work, lectures and university social life, and things happening in the world outside felt distant. I knew what they meant. One fellow head of house asked me: ‘Don’t you miss the phone constantly ringing?’ and I was happy to say that was precisely what I did not miss. It was a joy to live life as a normal human being, away from the maelstrom of broadcasting. Having spent so many years scouring the papers every day and obsessively watching and listening to bulletins, it was a blessed relief to tune in to a music breakfast show and to catch only the occasional Ten O’Clock News. This has its risks, of course, in the jibes about ivory-tower detachment, but the global connections of people in the college and university, supplemented by a stream of visitors from London and beyond, has kept things in balance. The former colleagues who jumped on a train to Cambridge ranged from John Humphrys and Jim Naughtie to Bridget Kendall and Jeremy Vine. Jeremy went punting with his family, disdaining the offer of a professional puntsman. To our collective disappointment, and despite some wobbles, he stayed upright and avoided creating a Radio 2 talking point out of a fall into the Cam.
In my first year I also acquired an unusual animal: a basset cat. I had long wanted a dog, but it had never been an idea that was compatible with my BBC commuting lifestyle. Now, with a flat above the shop, it was achievable. Since animals are banned in the college, save for the Master being allowed to keep a cat, I asked the permission of the college council for a dog to move in – and it was readily granted. It was remembered that Owen Chadwick had kept dogs when he was Master half a century ago. The council secretary, Rupert Thompson, wrote a jokey minute: ‘College Animal. Noting precedent under the mastership of Professor Chadwick, Council approved the Master’s request to adopt a Very Large Cat in the Master’s Lodge.’ I duly acquired a sweet-natured basset hound named YoYo, who needed to be rehomed from a pack in Hertfordshire. She moved into the Lodge in January 2014, took over the most comfortable sofa for her personal use and immediately became a favourite with students and the wider college community.
Later in the year, I wrote a New Statesman diary which included a few lines revealing her feline secret – and we were astonished by the interest this generated. The story was picked up by British newspapers and then by websites and broadcasters around the world. As correspondents to The Times noted, there was nothing new in the dog-cat concept. The Dean of Worcester College, Oxford, had been granted this kind of permission in the 1960s, and the memory in Cambridge was that Rab Butler had been given the same privilege at Trinity College even before that. But proving that there is no such thing as an old story, the YoYo publicity machine steamed on. She was featured by the official Chinese news agency, by websites in Brazil, and was named ‘Woof of the Week’ on Sky News. I was interviewed about her on an American radio station, which did a protracted and deeply unfunny probe about what YoYo herself was thinking about all this. I played along gamely, and resisted the temptation to shout, ‘She has no idea – she’s a sodding dog.’
Aside from canine diversions, the more serious corrective to being captured within ‘the bubble’ is the mission we as a college and as a university have set ourselves of breaking down the myths about Cambridge and doing our best to ensure it is open to all. One of the most persistent erroneous beliefs is that we are dominated in our intake by independent schools, and at a recent Department for Education event I asked teachers from academies what percentage of state school pupils they believe we take. The estimates were mainly around the 20 or 25 per cent mark, and only one teacher guessed it might be 60 per cent. In fact, in autumn 2014, Selwyn’s new intake from the UK was 70 per cent from state schools. The college has official outreach areas in West Yorkshire and East Berkshire, and a great deal of work goes on there and across the country on broadening access: telling every school student who is bright enough that they can get to Cambridge if they put in the effort. I saw this for myself in a lively session at Greenhead College in Huddersfield where I talked about life in the media and in Cambridge to a group from Years 11 and 12. As well as going out to see them, we welcome thousands of prospective students to Cambridge every year at open days and in school visits.
It was one of those school trips that brought home the connection between my old world and my new. We hosted a group that was younger than usual: largely nine- and ten-year-olds from the London borough of Newham, the site of the Olympic Park. They were predominantly from ethnic minorities. We gave them drinks and cakes, and I did my standard short talk about the college. This is intended to show that we are welcoming and friendly, and that it is a place where they might like to be in a few years’ time. But there is a tough message too: they need to work hard and stick with education. For this group, who were still full of the enthusiasm of the Olympics, I was able to underline that almost all the people running the Games and the coverage of it had degrees, and that academic success opens doors that failure does not. They fired more questions at me than many groups, and their interest and engagement were uplifting. I remembered the spirit of the summer of 2012. I fervently hope that they and their teachers will keep at it, because we need more schools that set the standards high and tell their students that this and the other higher education institutions can be for them.
When we get this right, every year we take people at an exciting stage of their development, and we give them the teaching they need and seek to burnish their intellectual ambitions. Just as important, we want them to be suffused with the values of the college and to share those in their future lives with their families, their friends and their communities. As I meet the eighteen-year-olds who come here each year, experiencing their first time away from home and nervous about their new environment, I am full of anticipation about what they can achieve and how they might shape their own future and ours.
Broadcasting at its best is about social good and – at the heart of John Reith’s mission – educating as well as informing and entertaining. That was the BBC in which I believed. To be able now to immerse myself in education at one of the world’s greatest universities is a privilege for which I give thanks every day. It is not a life I expected to have, but it is one that education has enabled. I am proud to be in that world. I want every child in Britain, born in Warrington or Bradford or anywhere else, to believe they can be part of it, too.
INDEX
7/7 bombings 1
9/11 attacks 1, 2, 3
Abramsky, Jenny 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
and continuous news 1
and Radio 5 Live 1, 2, 3, 4
Adams, Gerry 1
Adams, Lucy 1, 2, 3
adoption 1
Afghanistan 1
Aitken, Jonathan 1
Alagiah, George 1, 2
Albert, Prince of Monaco 1
alcohol 1, 2
Allen, Peter 1, 2
Anderson, Linda 1
Andrew, HRH Duke of York 1
Arafat, Yasser 1
Ariel (magazine) 1, 2
Artists Taking the Lead 1
Ashdown, Paddy 1, 2
asylum seekers 1, 2
Atkinson, Rowan 1
Attwell, Rachel 1
Ausden, Lisa 1
Australia 1
Ayre, Richard 1
Baker, Danny 1
Baker & Kelly Upfront (radio show) 1
Bakhurst, Kevin 1
Balding, Clare 1, 2, 3
Balls, Ed 1, 2, 3
Barker, Sue 1, 2
Barwick, Brian 1
Bates, Ken 1
Baxter, Anthony 1
Bazalgette, Peter 1
BBC 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
and Conservatives 1
and directors-general 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
and McAlpine 1, 2, 3
and news coverage 1
and radio 1
and reform debate 1
and salaries 1
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and Savile 1, 2
and USA 1
see also London 2012; PM; Today; World at One, The; World This Weekend, The
BBC Direction Group (BDG) 1
BBC Drama 1
BBC News 1, 2, 3, 4
and Birt 1, 2
and Dyke 1
News 1 2, 3, 4, 5
News Online 1, 2
BBC Radio Lincolnshire 1, 2, 3
BBC Radio Northampton 1
BBC Scotland 1
BBC Sport 1, 2, 3
and Beijing Olympics 1, 2
and cricket 1, 2
and football 1, 2
and Formula 1
and golf 1
and horseracing 1
and rights 1
BBC Trust 1, 2, 3, 4
and editorial standards 1
and immigration 1
and London 2012–219
and McAlpine crisis 1, 2, 3, 4
and reform debate 1
and severance payments 1, 2, 3
BBC Wales 1
Beijing Olympics 1, 2, 3
Benedict XVI, Pope 1
Benn, Tony 1