[A-List] UK ideological state apparatus: the BBC & Birt

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Here's a pile of self-serving misleading drivel. David Aaronovitch used to
work at London Weekend Television under John Birt (he doesn't explain this),
and both brought his old buddy from Communist Party days Peter Mandelson in
to work on the awful "Weekend World" programme fronted by a succession of
Labour Party rightwinger born-again Thatcherites (Peter Jay, son of cabinet
minister Douglas, and Brian Walden, Gaitskellite and one-time leader of the
Campaign for Democratic Socialism within the Labour Party during the 1960s).
Aaronovitch himself is the son of the uncompromisingly radical Sam who, like
his contemporary Ralph Miliband, seems to have spawned offspring very much
more attuned to New Labour and its New Britain (David and Ed Miliband, both
New Labour MPs). And whatever John Tusa's faults (including fronting the SDP
infomercial "Newsnight" on BBC2 during its earlier years), he is absolutely
right about Birt's approach to news gathering and reporting.


The Media Column: Come back, John Birt - we need current affairs, after all
David Aaronovitch
The Independent, 05 November 2002

In July 1987, one of the most rancorous meetings in the history of
television was held in studio B of the old BBC Lime Grove building. The
staff of BBC TV current affairs were there to listen to the new deputy
director general, John Birt, outlining his plans for their department.

I wasn't at that meeting. I arrived at the BBC five months later to set up
the new political programme that was part of Birt's vision for the BBC, but
the lava from the July eruption was still molten. I do not think I have ever
encountered so much real hatred in my life as I did from some of the BBC old
hands that year. There was real psychic damage there. Perhaps it was the
experience of watching the hated Thatcher win her third term just two months
earlier.

All this was brought back to me by watching Nick Fraser's witty profile of
John Birt (shown on BBC 4 and BBC 2), transmitted to coincide with the
publication of Birt's autobiography, The Harder Path. In this film some
attacked Birt and some defended him (I incline toward the defence), but most
participants spoke of those times with a degree of detachment. Not so the
man who was once my favourite Newsnight presenter, John Tusa, who later
himself became a grand panjandrum at the Beeb. In the film Tusa said of
Birt: "His theory of journalism is almost total rubbish... It has no
intellectual curiosity. Everything I always heard about the programmes he
made was that he was only interested in his pre-ordained theory. They were
either bad, or misdirected and were always completely unviewable."

Listening to that I was suddenly back in Lime Grove, part of a collision of
arrogances - the arrogance of the new man with the mission, and the
arrogance of the old BBC, which could not see how it was heading for
oblivion. And how strange the debate about the "mission to explain" vs
"discovering the truth on the ground" now seems. Those ancient convulsions
were like a civil war among Atlanteans, conducted as - far away - the great
wave grew.

Tusa was quite wrong about intellectual curiosity, and he (and I) didn't
realise that we were all about to be condemned as being unviewable. The
others - the entertainers, the documentarists, daily news bods and regional
day-time schlock-makers, hated us equally. We filled their schedules with
stuff they weren't interested in, which pulled down their ratings and which
we defended on the basis of its transcending "importance". When competition
in the schedules - and especially competition for younger viewers became
really intense - they consulted the marketing experts and then swept us all,
Birtists and Tusa-ites, away. The cleverest of us became channel controllers
ourselves and colluded in the destruction.

But a hole was left behind. Since history failed to end after 1989 (though
it has taken nearly a decade for some to realise it), British TV has been
struggling with a problem. It has marginalised current affairs, dispersed
its best practitioners and spent the money on other things. For the BBC this
is a huge existential problem. Better financed and more en-channelled than
ever, the BBC nevertheless has no major programme that could - for
instance - follow the big question of the week, whether it's Should We
Invade Iraq? or Should We Subsidise Farming?

I am told that, far from leading a charge towards triviality, John Birt's
successor, Greg Dyke, appreciates this. A populist himself, he may have been
expecting his senior staff to push him in the direction of ambitious and
difficult programming. That hasn't happened. Now he find himself trying to
pull levers to get current affairs back into prominence, only to discover -
like Birt did - that some levers have no wires attached to them.

Interestingly, in a report for the Independent Television Commission,
published this week, the director of programmes of Channel 4, Tim Gardam
(himself present at the Lime Grove debacle), is quoted as calling for the
reinvention of the Birt programme, Weekend World. Gardam, with whom I worked
at the BBC, is one of the most intelligent and radical executives in TV.

I agree. It's time to give viewers the option of well-funded, well-made,
demanding and conclusive current affairs. And sod the demographics - let
people make up their own minds. Bring back Birt and Tusa.