This New Noise

by Charlotte Higgins

  Matheson and the other early pioneers saw no end to the possibilities of broadcasting. They were utopian in their fantasies. It is their optimism and fearlessness that our BBC needs now. It is clear-sighted and subtle political wisdom that is needed now, too, not grandstanding and playing to the gallery. Ninety years ago, Arthur Burrows asked, ‘What surprises may be in store on the other side of silence? How far will our present knowledge of music prepare us for an appreciation of nature’s eternal harmonies – the seasonal cadences of the rising and falling sap, the music of the growing grass and the love songs of butterflies?’ Lambert summed up the hopes of that eager post-war generation: ‘All kinds of petty discomforts – overcrowded rooms, long hours, arbitrary or tactless treatment – were overlooked in the general sense of adventure, progress, and public service. You felt it a privilege to be “in” at the birth of such a mighty experiment – an experiment not merely in the use of a new invention, broadcasting, but in its use for communal ends, rather than for private profit. Who could tell how far the new service would go?’

  11

  Conclusion: Welcome to the BBC

  It was a hot London day, and the U-shaped courtyard of the BBC in Portland Place was airless and sun-strafed. Light glared off pale stone. Employees crowded into a sliver of shade to eat their lunchtime sandwiches. The doors of the older, 1930s wing stood open, so that the wonky, stained little notice that sometimes hangs there bidding visitors ‘Welcome to the BBC’, was invisible. On my many visits, I had enjoyed this intimate, ad-hoc sign. It was so different from the portentous portals of its neighbour, New Broadcasting House, opened in 2013, where there was nothing so improvised and human as this. Nor yet was there any poetic challenge to the soul, no Latin inscription proclaiming this as a temple of the arts, as there was in the foyer of the older building. Instead, images of BBC personalities – a procession of men – hung above the reception desk: actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman in Sherlock guise; Idris Elba as Luther; and physicist Brian Cox staring soulfully into the horizon.

  I sat in the foyer of New Broadcasting House, watching the ebb and flow of staff as they made their exits and entrances, among the other visitors waiting to be ushered beyond a set of revolving doors into the inner chambers. Once there, suddenly illuminated by an uncanny reddish glow, you could look down into the newsroom thrumming away below you in the basement, or cast your eye upwards to the glass walls that rise above. The newsroom should have had columns like great trees supporting it, according to the original vision of the architect, Sir Richard MacCormac, but along the way – and amid acrimony – the corporation dropped this flourish on budgetary grounds. The BBC’s principal building seemed to me to resemble the institution itself – the new and the old tangled together in uncertain harmony; high artistic ambitions sometimes compromised; a certain corporate pomposity undercut by small, humane gestures.

  Broadcasting House reborn. Much enlarged, it reopened in 2013.

  How healthy is the BBC of today? Will it flourish for another hundred years, and another? As I sat in the foyer, staff passes cheeping their way through the security barriers, I considered what I had learned about this corporation over the past nine months. It was, in fact, ungraspable in its entirety: it was like a city whose streets I had only partially explored, a place whose streetscape was so circuitous and complex that a lifetime would be too short to map it. I had met many people within these labyrinthine alleys who were admirable and clever and kind. I had also found something less attractive: a subtle atmosphere that seemed to emanate from the BBC that was difficult to describe and surely unconscious. A collective sense of superiority, perhaps? The Guardian, my employer, had never felt small to me before I started writing about the BBC.

  What had surprised me was the BBC’s vulnerability. It may be great in size, but is blasted and buffeted on every side by powerful and ruthless enemies. Every move of the BBC is monitored, analysed, discussed. A cadre of Fleet Street journalists exists solely to examine it. And yet the passions roused by the BBC are so intense precisely because all of us have a relationship with it: 96 per cent of us use it, including, of course, its most vituperative detractors. It is with us in our homes, our cars, our phones, our computer screens; it is our omnipresent, intimate companion. It speaks to us benignly, amiably. Reith wrote in 1924 that the voices on the BBC were ‘the friends of the people of these islands, and have come to be so accepted …’

  Our relationship with the BBC has changed in recent years. It is not, as it once was, a cathedral in which we all gather together, but, rather, a many-roomed palace in which we are free to roam, where we will encounter others with whom to marvel at its riches, but through which we will none the less choose our own route, pace and narrative. Despite this increasingly fragmented experience, for most of us the BBC is the national institution that most powerfully touches our inner lives – working its way into our sense of ourselves as individuals and as part of a community, our convictions, our imaginations. And if the screen is a kind of mirror into which the nation gazes, we are often in sharp disagreement about the accuracy of the reflection it throws back. The BBC is a space in which the most fundamental anxieties about cultural identity and political purpose can be fought out – often bitterly.

  Arguably, the old Mail taunt that the BBC was a nest of liberals, with an institutionalised left-wing bias, looked more and more difficult to sustain during the time that I was researching the institution. Indeed there were fears on the centre left that the BBC had consciously or unconsciously drifted to the right, exhausted by the daily clamouring of its noisiest critics, and no longer quite held the impartial centre. There were fears too that, still bruised a decade on after its wrestling match with the last government over its coverage of the run-up to the Iraq war – a bout that ended with the resignation of both its director general, Greg Dyke, and its chairman, Gavyn Davies – the BBC could be pusillanimous in some of its reporting. It has feared to challenge – and when its journalists did so, as with Meirion Jones’s and Liz MacKean’s investigation into Jimmy Savile, it was capable of self-sabotage. The BBC that withstood a 36-hour raid of its Glasgow headquarters by Special Branch in the 1980s over the Zircon affair (an investigation into a £500 million spy satellite whose existence was unknown to the Public Accounts Committee) felt like a distant memory to these critics, who would adumbrate the corporation’s reaction to the revelations in 2013–14 by former NSA employee Edward Snowden.

  In the US; in Australia; in mainland Europe, especially Germany; in Asia, especially Indonesia; and in Latin America, especially Brazil and Mexico, the information leaked concerning Prism and Tempora – the secret programmes used for mass surveillance of email communication in the US and UK respectively – was treated with real seriousness and provoked urgent public debate. The New York Times and the Washington Post regarded the story as of global significance; so did Channel 4 News. But Channel 4 News is, in the words of its editor, ‘an ant versus Goliath when it comes to the BBC’, with an audience of around 650,000. The BBC – which by virtue of its sheer scale holds the ring of national debate – remained almost mute. And so it was that, of all the nations in the world, it was on its home turf that the Guardian, which had broken the Snowden story, remained virtually a lone voice. Meanwhile, its editor Alan Rusbridger was asked to prove his patriotism before a committee of MPs, and GCHQ operatives arrived at the organisation’s offices to supervise the destruction of computer hard drives.

  The charge of pusillanimity was denied by Tony Hall. ‘I don’t recognise that picture at all,’ he said. ‘The fact is – and this is one of the things I know about impartiality – when people know a lot about a story, they kick up a big fuss because we’re not reporting it as they want us to report it. But then part of our job is to stand back from the furore and say actually let’s put this in context, let’s do this properly. In that instance I don’t see any pulling back at all.’ Hall added, ‘One of the things that has always amazed me about the BBC is that it is t
he most self-questioning organisation I’ve ever worked in. It asks itself questions all the time about whether it’s doing the right thing, could we have done that better.’ In other words, his conscience was clear.

  When I asked James Harding some weeks earlier whether he would have run with the Snowden story had it come directly to him, he argued that the issue was not that it touched on such delicate matters of state – but rather that it was, he claimed, a piece of campaigning journalism that was invested in a particular outcome:

  I don’t think the issue would have been whether the BBC could have gone after a story about the behaviour of a different part of the state – of a part of the state, sorry … That’s what you do if you cover the NHS, if you cover the police, if you cover the armed forces, if you cover the intelligence services … I don’t think that’s an issue at all. I think the thing that is really tricky on Snowden is where you get yourself straddling a line between reporting a story and campaigning a story.

  Now we obviously cannot campaign. We cannot use the public’s money to make an argument. And the nature of that kind of leak and that kind of story was that the person who held the information wanted a certain story and to roll it out in a certain way. That deal, the deal between, if you like, the media organisation and the source – I’m not sure we could have done that deal … So in my last job [as editor of The Times] I ran a campaign on something as, you may think as innocuous as cycling safety. You couldn’t campaign on cycling safety at the BBC. And that’s where things are different.

  However, there was no deal between the Guardian and Snowden to give the story a particular angle or to campaign for a particular set of outcomes. Nor indeed did Snowden himself bring a particular agenda to his whistle-blowing beyond wishing to allow the public to enter a debate – as he put it, to ‘give society the chance to determine if it wanted to change itself’. The analogy drawn between the Snowden whistleblowing and the Times’s (entirely laudable) cycling campaign seemed to me to be infelicitous. The more I thought about BBC news, the more I wondered whether it really was the corporation’s impartiality or drift to the political right or left that was the central problem. Rather, in the end I began to feel that it was, in its very bones, an organisation that found it difficult to challenge the most sensitive parts of the British establishment (often despite the most vigorous attempts of its own journalists) – precisely because it was a part of the establishment.

  If journalism is at the heart of the BBC, the thing above all by which it stands or falls, its television drama is what most of us think of when we think of our own enjoyment of the BBC. When we spoke in 2014, Hall talked proudly of the commissioning of a second tranche of Shakespeare history plays, a follow-up to the highly acclaimed Hollow Crown season of 2012, for which Sam Mendes executive-produced films of Richard II, Henry IV Parts I and II, and Henry V. Sir Richard Eyre directed the two Henry IV plays. In fact, he regarded the whole episode with a certain scepticism, he told me. The commission was generated not by an enthusiastic drama department, he said, but ‘by fiat’ from the then director general Mark Thompson, who decided that a strong cultural statement ought to be made by the BBC in the year of the London Olympics. ‘It was not a popular idea [within the BBC]. I had absolutely nothing to do with the BBC at all until it was made,’ he said. ‘When I had a fine cut of my two films, I said I was going to show them on successive days at a preview theatre. And I couldn’t get anybody from the BBC to come. They asked me to send tapes over to them. I said, “No. I’ve worked for a year on these, come to a preview theatre, watch it on the screen and then we’ll discuss it afterwards.” Then much to their surprise it was very well received and people were saying, “Now we understand what the BBC does; this is the jewel in the crown of the BBC.”’ He laughed. ‘Suddenly they were running after us.’

  Michael Grade, once a controller of BBC1, later BBC chairman, told me he believed that ‘process’ had muffled the commissioning power of the old BBC impresarios, the television ‘barons’ of yesteryear who had enormous power but who stood or fell by the quality of their shows. ‘Today you don’t know who’s responsible for anything. It’s so convoluted, the system … Committees, eight signatures, e-submission, I mean what’s going on? It should be all about editorship, about somebody owning the product in each area, and having the vision, and if they’re no good, if their batting average is not up to snuff, sorry chum, we’ll get the next one in.’ I spoke to James Graham, who writes for theatre (his play This House was a major success for the National Theatre) as well as for BBC radio and television. Things were changing vastly for the better, he told me, but ‘I remember when I began a feeling of impossibility of ever getting anything on. And I knew people who’d made a living out of just developing TV that would never see the light of day and never get beyond a certain stage.’

  For example, several years previously he had spent a year developing a script for the BBC about young Western travellers in Thailand, including spending time in the country. The script went back and forth endlessly, working its way through many drafts. Finally, ‘staff were rotating, executives were moving to different places, and it lost momentum. And I don’t even know if anyone has ever turned it down’ – but it quietly died. The process was enervating: ‘I’d rather have been working in bars and writing plays that were definitely going to be made than spending all my time and energy on something that just never felt like it was going to happen.’ The development process used ‘to feel a bit like a computer game. It was as if you had to pass all these different levels and these different baddies before you get to the big baddy at the end.’

  Andrew O’Hagan, the novelist, essayist and playwright told me he felt a quiet despair at the commissioning process even for BBC radio – which operates as a structured, staged, submission process taking several months from idea to green light. ‘The relationship between the “talent” and the broadcaster has become deranged. The pitching process has the effect of killing the thing you love; and because of that the BBC is falling out of touch with a whole generation of writers,’ he said. He compared the process with that on magazines such as the New Yorker, where editors are strongly empowered curators, forging relationships with writers, constantly questing outwards for new ideas; or indeed the commissioning process in British theatre. ‘A clever commissioner should be trusted to make the programmes they want to make,’ he said.

  Bound up with the complaint of byzantine process and bureaucracy was a continued sense of disenfranchisement between the BBC’s worker class – including many of its news reporters – and its executives. ‘I think the over-remuneration of people [under former director general Mark Thompson] was a huge mistake,’ foreign correspondent Jeremy Bowen told me when we met between his trips to Syria in the spring of 2014. ‘It’s caused massive damage to the BBC. It’s caused it internally, because the vast majority of people who work at the BBC do not get brilliantly paid. But the massive salaries given to top management angered people on the shop floor, exaggerated the “them and us” feeling that there was a chauffeur-driven top of the corporation with enormous salaries and massive bonuses. And that caused a lot of resentment and still does. I resented it personally.’

  Such problems were hampering the articulation of the case to be made about the particular and precious qualities of the BBC, and indeed the whole of the public-service broadcasting system in the UK – a protective and protected arena in the public realm, a space where the intangible collective experience was prized for its own sake and in which there was a different value system in play than that of the vast, and growing, American conglomerates. Dennis Potter, in his 1993 MacTaggart lecture, said, remembering his childhood relationship with the BBC:

  More than the coming of the bus and the train or even the daily newspaper, it was the voices out of the air which, as though by magic, pushed out [the] constricting boundaries [of my childhood]. You could hear a play that made the back of your neck tingle as well as a dance band that made your foot tap, a brow-furr
owing talk about something I’d never heard of as well as an I-say I-say I-say music-hall routine, or even (and how bizarre) a ventriloquist’s dummy as well as a not wholly dissimilar newsreader. And none of it was trying to sell you anything.

  I began to think of the BBC as if it were a church: supported by high ideals, feeding our inner lives, sustained by the goodwill of the faithful, and, sometimes – like all large institutions – infuriating in its internal workings. ‘Sustained by the goodwill of the faithful’ is the most important part of that: the licence fee is remarkably well tolerated because the British public still recognises the BBC as one of the greatest institutions of Britain, something that almost defines Britishness both at home and abroad, a national broadcaster that is still the envy of the world, an institution that, for all its problems and peccadilloes, is part of us, the shining, hypnotic screen into which we look and see ourselves, the collector of our memories and the gleaner of our experience. It is a survivor from another age – it is hard for me not to betray myself and write a better age – when the notion of a technological advancement being harnessed for the democratic benefit of the commonweal was not a fanciful one, when calling the BBC templum artium, a temple of the arts, was not faintly embarrassing. As Michael Grade put it: ‘You wouldn’t invent a hereditary monarchy today; you wouldn’t invent the House of Lords; you wouldn’t invent the BBC in a dynamic market. You either believe in it or you don’t. You can’t intellectually – in a modern sense with a modern mindset – justify it. But it is part of what makes this country different from anywhere else in the world. And you either believe in the BBC or you don’t: the BBC is essentially an idea.’