This New Noise

by Charlotte Higgins

  I arranged to meet Lord Birt in the House of Lords. When he met me at the peers’ entrance I was momentarily flustered – a tall man, he none the less seemed to materialise silently behind me – and when, after walking a great distance through the corridors of the Lords, we reached the room he had reserved, a resplendent chamber decked in elaborate Pugin wallpaper, I realised I could not find my digital recorder. Birt politely but firmly instructed me: ‘Be systematic. Empty your handbag.’ He might as well have asked me to remove my clothes as turn out that intimate cavern of scuffed paperbacks, topless Biros, dubious tissues and worse. But it struck me that this is precisely the approach he has adopted in professional life; and if it seems a bathetically domestic metaphor, then he himself in his own memoir twice described his work at London Weekend Television (LWT) – where he worked before the BBC – as ‘tidying the drawer’.

  Birt was born into a working-class family in 1944 and raised in Bootle and Formby; his autobiography conjures a world of whippets and terriers, football and redtops, polished doorknobs and scrubbed front doorsteps. He was educated a Catholic, was a bouncer at an early Beatles concert, and was the first member of his family to study at university when he went up to Oxford in 1963.

  At Oxford, he was, by his own account, an unenthusiastic student of engineering. He fell in love with a glamorous American art student who would become his first wife, and became entranced by the cinema. He made an experimental film called The Little Donkey – in which a young man, having been taunted by various vampish and virginal women, turns into a toy donkey when a girl begins to touch him. ‘The Little Donkey was not an enduring masterpiece,’ he acknowledged in his autobiography. But he had worked out what really caught his imagination – and it was not thermodynamics. After Oxford, he became a trainee at Granada, where, at twenty-two, he persuaded Mick Jagger, fresh from the quashing of a drug conviction, to be flown by helicopter into the grounds of a stately home to join a World in Action discussion about youth culture with a row of besuited establishment figures.

  He moved to LWT and rose through the ranks, via its high-end current affairs programme Weekend World, to become director of programmes – having also taken leave to produce the famous interviews of the former US president Richard Nixon by David Frost. He operated at LWT in a labour-relations ‘war zone’ that made him ‘hard-hearted about unionism’, he recalled in his memoir. Restrictive practices and crew sizes grew. Despite his instinctive belief that the trades union movement was a progressive force, the TV unions were, he concluded, ‘destructive … greedy for money, frustrating creativity, raising costs and reducing the number of programmes made’. As he prepared to join the BBC, he had, he wrote, ‘become a convert to the value of markets, while maintaining a strong commitment to public service. I was hostile to vested interests. I had fostered my instinctive desire for reform and improvement, for tidying the drawer …’

  If the BBC is in some ways a metonym for Britain itself, the tribally Labourite Birt – who would end up as strategy adviser to Tony Blair – was now ready to put it through a bloody, Thatcher-tinged process of marketisation and reform. You could see him as a kind of perfect personification of Blairism.

  The stakes were high, Birt said. We were sitting at a dark-wood Gothic table. In front of him he precisely aligned his pen with a blank sheet of House of Lords writing paper. Politicians on both sides of the house ‘had the evidence of their own eyes’ that there were efficiency problems: the crews that turned up to film them were vast, he said. ‘The BBC was wasting the public’s money on a massive scale.’ In his memoir, he called the BBC ‘a vast organisation with no governing brain or nervous system, which had expanded and grown and multiplied organically … [it] was unmanaged and undisciplined in a way I would not, from the outside, have thought possible.’

  Most important, he told me, ‘the Tory right was on the march. Plainly we had a rarity: instead of having a government of the centre left or a centre right we had a government of the right, and there was a strong group of people on the right of the Conservative party who had real free-market conviction that the BBC was too dominant. There was nobody, as far as I know, who ever wanted to abandon the BBC and see it disappear, but they did want to see it massively reduced in size. And they were a strong and confident government with a big majority.’

  John Birt: He had ‘an absolutist cast of mind’, according to one former colleague.

  Margaret Thatcher, with her ‘huge capacity for work and fantastic intelligence network’ was ‘really well informed and really interested in’ the BBC – much more engaged than either John Major or Blair, he said. ‘Although I was subsequently to meet every prime minister, generally one on one, in Number 10, she was the one who sought you out and wanted to have a dialogue and a debate with you,’ he added. He found her ‘radically minded, but by temperament much more cautious and careful than many of her advisers’.

  He continued, ‘I think what happened at the BBC made it easier for her not to do anything. In other words the introduction of Producer Choice [the BBC’s internal market], the radicalism of that, the fact that ten thousand people left the BBC or were made redundant – plainly the BBC was taking efficiency seriously. That was only one of the things on her agenda – only one – but because one thing had been taken very seriously, I think that satisfied her radical urge.’ He added, ‘I’m not saying it was as devious and calculating as that makes it sound, but in general my view of such things is get ahead of the game. In other walks of life as well. Don’t let things happen to you.’

  Birt remains a deeply divisive figure. He was the man who walked the corridors with a clipboard silently taking notes before presenting his finding in bullet-pointed presentations; the man who employed phalanxes of management consultants and swat teams of accountants; who commissioned paper after paper on every issue to which his gaze swerved. He presided over the rise of the focus group, of branding, of concept-pitching, of distended pay for those at the top. In this way the internal travails of the BBC were a mirror for the times: similar changes were occurring in all parts of British life. Through Producer Choice the costs of many in-house BBC services, such as the record library and pronunciation unit, were made plain to programme-makers. Those units that did not offer value for money were allowed to wither. Costs were cut, and treasured outfits such as the BBC’s radiophonic workshop – that radical locus for electronic music and experimental sound design – closed down. It was Birt’s belief that, from greater efficiency, better programmes would inevitably flow.

  At the same time, the 1990 Broadcasting Act meant that 25 per cent of programmes would have to be made by the independent sector. Producers left the corporation and sold back their programmes: Peter Bazalgette was given the popular show Food and Drink to make independently. Broadcasters who had started out as public servants were transformed into entrepreneurs. They forged small businesses that sometimes became very big businesses indeed. Fortunes were made. Often these production companies were eventually subsumed into the giant, international independents we know today. The BBC’s culture – and the culture of the country – changed irreversibly.

  There are those who say Birt saved the BBC. One of his achievements was without doubt an early embrace of the possibilities of digital – and persuading the government of the necessity of funding it. In contrast to the early directors general who had only barely, or only reluctantly, foreseen the importance of television, Birt grasped early that BBC online could and should be of vast importance to the corporation. The launch of BBC iPlayer itself might have lain over seven years ahead, but Birt anticipated in 1999, in his last speech as DG, that the future would be one of on-demand TV services; that great power would be held by those who control the ‘gateways’ into the digital world; that the BBC’s audiences would want services on demand and on the move. On his watch, the BBC had established its website and by 1999 was already publishing three hundred stories a day on it, way ahead of most other news organisations, many of whom still rega
rded the Internet with suspicion. Bland summed up Birt’s qualities: ‘He is very determined. Very analytical. Good grasp of technology. Very good at handling the board of governors, at handling the interface of government and Whitehall. Thoroughly numerate.’

  According to an old friend and colleague of Birt, ‘He has an amazing capacity to get to the bottom of things and to work out how the engine works. His ability to diagnose a situation and to identify the fault lines and the weaknesses in it is considerable. He will dig, dig, dig until he gets to the thing.’ The journalist and Labour peer Joan Bakewell said drily, ‘I’ve always thought he was very good at joining the pipes. He structured the BBC like a piece of central heating.’

  But there are plenty who believe that the BBC could have been reformed without Birt’s approach of outpacing Thatcher – or, as he put it when we spoke, ‘drawing the sting’. Sir John Tusa, who ran the World Service from 1986 to 1993 and then served as a newsreader in the mid-1990s, made a speech in 1993 in which he spoke of a ‘climate of fear’ at the BBC: you were either for Birt’s reforms or against; the ancien régime had been discredited in its entirety; morale was pitifully low. The public-service ethos of the BBC was being savagely and carelessly dismembered. Potter, in his MacTaggart lecture delivered that same year, spoke of the ‘fear and loathing’ that swirled ‘jugular high’ at Birt’s BBC. His was a vicious tour d’horizon without a hint of nostalgia, for he also remembered the 1960s when ‘there was a bureaucrat in every cupboard and smugness waiting with a practised simper on the far side of every door’. But the sin of Birt’s regime was ‘management culture’. ‘Management of what? Management for what? Management. Management. Management. The word sticks in one’s interface,’ he said.

  Remembering the period, Tusa said, ‘It’s incredibly dangerous to have somebody leading an organisation whose first starting point is that he disapproves of all the values of the organisation. It doesn’t work, and it didn’t work. People went into a sort of internal exile, or a state of internal resistance … I don’t say that he was a totalitarian, but I think he had an absolutist cast of mind.’

  Birt’s inability to find the language to bring the BBC with him was his failing, many of those around him felt. Grade put it bluntly in his autobiography: ‘More charm in the train announcer’s voice at Victoria.’ Bland was kinder, telling me, ‘John was unlucky enough to be Olympian in his style. His great weakness is, was, that he could never embrace the people who make the BBC what it is and make them feel loved and valued. He just didn’t have the knack, whereas Greg [Dyke] had it in spades.’ Even those sympathetic to him felt that though he could talk privately with passion and understanding about the creative process of programme-making, he lacked a warm and inspiring public rhetoric. A former senior executive recalled, ‘There is a real dichotomy, because I think he was both a great DG and a disastrous manager. I think strategically he was remarkable. There’s no doubt about it, he dragged the BBC kicking and screaming into the late twentieth century … I just don’t think the BBC would have recognised the importance of digital without John.’ But by the end of Birt’s reign, there was an almost expressionistic sense of research papers piling on top of research papers, said the executive. ‘He sometimes took far too long to take decisions, I mean to the extent that you would be tearing your hair out. So you’d do a paper on something and he’d say, “That’s a very good thing, now the next iteration …” What you wanted was a decision, whereas he wanted process, you had to constantly do this process of more and more evidence, more and more evidence.’

  *

  One morning in 2014 I waited outside the office of the incumbent director general, Tony Hall. The panopticon-like New Broadcasting House in Portland Place, London, which had opened the previous year, was designed without offices with individual executives, but Hall insisted on having one when he arrived from his previous job running the Royal Opera House. As he came out to greet me he gestured darkly to the spot where Entwistle’s reign had disintegrated, at a desk indistinguishable from those allotted to the junior ranks, in the full glare of open plan. Inside Hall’s glazed lair – improvised from a meeting room – was a glass table on which lay his spectacles case and iPad (no computers for ranking BBC execs). It was surrounded by seats rescued from an old kitchen, and next to a window stood a pair of swivel chairs salvaged from Television Centre, which looked as if they might once have done service on a chat show. Hall described this recycling unprompted, perhaps keen to convey an impression of parsimony. On the wall was a series of photographs that I recognised as images from an old advertising campaign for the Royal Opera House, showing stars from the ballet and opera photographed in dramatic landscapes.

  We settled ourselves into the swivel chairs. The BBC, said Hall, ‘is Britain’s voice, both to the world but also to ourselves. If you look, for example, at what is happening in local media, although we’ve been criticised for killing off local newspapers, when I go round local radio stations and regional television stations, and I see what is being done, we are reflecting parts of Britain to itself in a way that others simply do not do. So that is hugely important from the point of democratic debate.’ The BBC is, he added, a kind of mirror through which Britain reflects itself to the world and the world to itself. Or a port: a conduit through which influences depart and arrive:

  I love ports because they’re very open, they’re places where different currents and different ideas come together; that’s what makes them so exciting and so inventive … I think the original view of inform, educate, entertain is right, but now through a lens of what we’re doing for Britain and the UK. And in truth, when I started off in the BBC, the counter-arguments about the BBC, which is that you’re huge and you are 40 per cent or more of media revenues in this country – well we’re now 25 per cent and if you look to the Googles and the Amazons and all the non-British firms that control our media usage, the BBC becomes more important, not less.

  The frame of reference is changing, and the BBC must be more focused, he says:

  I think we are at the end of a period of, as it were, unbridled expansion of the BBC. We’re now in a period when we have to define much, much more carefully what it is the BBC offers and what it is the BBC can do, and recognise that we have to spend our money carefully, and around our priorities. That is why arts matter, our music coverage matters – I want those to be things you recognise in the BBC, up there with news. Drama matters. I think we have to be more constrained in terms of our ambition.

  When Hall and I spoke about leadership, we discussed whether one person was capable of being at the head of the city-state that is the BBC – both as editor of that deluge of content, and its chief executive – or whether the role ought to be split. He pointed out the obvious fact that ‘you can’t be across all the output’. (Even the early DGs could barely have been, certainly once the Empire Service, the precursor of the World Service, got going in the 1930s.) ‘In extremis, being editor-in-chief means this runs or doesn’t run,’ he said. But more generally ‘it means that you have to think about the quality of your drama, the quality of your music, the quality of your radio services, the quality of your local radio stations. That’s how I take editor-in-chief. You are a one-person quality control.’

  Tony Hall: ‘We are at the end of a period of unbridled expansion of the BBC.’

  Being DG is also importantly about setting the tone, about selecting the rhetoric. ‘I for example want things that are bold and feel that we’re really pushing boundaries, I don’t want things which are safe and dull and placid, I really do want things that make you feel, “bloody hell, the BBC did that, that’s fantastic” … I’m spending at least a day a week out with programme-makers because I feel they’re the important, the frontline troops, the people that matter, the people that make the decisions and have the ideas that people pay their licence fee for,’ said Hall.

  Hugh Carleton Greene: DG 1960–69 and ‘psychological warrior’ (portrait by Ruskin Spear)

  As we spoke,
I realised that Hall’s office was filled with images of his predecessors. Its glass walls were imprinted with oversize, multiple portraits of the first director general: I counted eight giant Reiths bearing ferociously down on him. On a wall was a painting of Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, director general 1960–69, which once hung with the others in the council chamber. Hall said that he used to find it comforting when he was called in for ‘a bollocking’ by the board when he was the BBC’s head of news. This is the image that Hall has chosen – this is the ancestor he has elected as his own.