Part 2 /The BBC: there to inform, educate, provoke and enrage?

The BBC: there to inform, educate, provoke and enrage?

The BBC has never seemed more under attack. But what provokes such passion? In the second of a series of essays on the corporation's past, present and future, Charlotte Higgins asks why the critics seem to come from within as often as from outside

Charlotte Higgins

The Guardian, Wednesday 16 April 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/apr/16/the-bbc-there-to-inform-educate-provoke-and-enrage

The BBC is like the Greeks’ Hydra: vast and many headed. The same organisation that made Sherlock frittered away £100m on a failed IT initiative; it runs five orchestras, the Today programme and the World Service; it inexplicably buys – and then sells for a much smaller sum – the Lonely Planet guides. While Kenneth Clark was pacing the streets of Italian hill towns, filming Civilisation for BBC2, Jimmy Savile was presenting Top of the Pops on BBC1, and Stuart Hall was informing, entertaining and abusing in the north of England. Whatever qualities it has, it often seems to embody the opposite, too. For most of us, there are parts of the BBC we couldn’t live without, much of it that we enjoy, vast acreages that we take for granted, and characteristics that we find irritating, infuriating – or even loathsome.

 

Jeremy Paxman: believes the BBC has got too big. Photograph: Phil Fisk/BBC

Some of the most outspoken critiques of the BBC come from within it. One cold sunny morning I visited Jeremy Paxman in his flat in west London. As he padded around filling the cafetière, he railed against the BBC’s “closed corporate culture”. He said: “It is smug. I love the BBC in many ways, but at the same time it has made me loathe aspects of it, and that’s a very odd state of affairs. When I see people being given £1m merely for walking out of the door, when I see £100m being blown on that DMI [digital media initiative] thing, a stupid technical initiative like that, I start wondering: how much longer are we going to test the public’s patience?”

On another occasion a prominent broadcaster railed passionately to me against the “corruption” of BBC management, who had “helped themselves” (he was referring to the severance payments made to executives such as former deputy director general Mark Byford’s payoff of £949,000). “The BBC’s greatest enemy,” he said, “is itself. They are handing people ammunition.”

It has been observed that the closer one gets to the centre of the citadel of the BBC the easier it is to dislike aspects of it. According to Lord Burns, the chairman of Channel 4: “I love the BBC. My life without it would be” – he pauses, and says with great emphasis – “terrible. But it is not an organisation that does very much to help itself: there is a strange situation where people love what the BBC does but the closer they get to the BBC the less attractive a place it seems.”

Paxman, like many, also believes that the BBC is too big. “There’s a pile of stuff on the BBC I can’t stand. My idea of hell is going down in one of the lifts in that ghastly new building [New Broadcasting House] in a lift which has Radio 1Xtra plumbed into it. I don’t quite understand why the BBC does Radio 1Xtra, I don’t really understand why it does Radio 1. Clearly, you can meet those needs commercially … the BBC has got an unfortunate history of never seeing an area of broadcasting, or increasingly a web presence, without feeling the need to get into it itself.”

He went on: “There’s no argument that the BBC distorts the marketplace in online [news]. Hugely distorts the marketplace. And one understands of course that the Mail and the Murdoch empire dislike a commercial rival which they are obliged to compete with on unfair terms. And I don’t think that has been really sufficiently grasped at a senior level. It just happened, in the same way as has the proliferation of extra television channels, the proliferation of extra radio channels – and, going further back, the move into local radio. These things just happened because the BBC is institutionally unable to countenance something without wanting to have it for itself … I don’t tar Tony [Hall] with this because he hasn’t been there long enough, but the great smell that comes off those pay-off scandals – and I think they are scandals – is of an organisation which became complacent, preoccupied with the conditions of its senior staff, at the expense of a strategic vision.”

These are strong words from a star BBC presenter; though you might say that one of the BBC’s strengths is that it tends to tolerate disobliging views from at least its starriest staff, and that a healthy culture of self-analysis – from John Humphrys deposing his own boss, the then director general George Entwistle, on the Today programme, to the gentle self-satire of the comedy drama W1A – is a sign of an evolved and mature institution. (Although self-satire might also be seen as a rather clever, very British way of defusing real criticism.)

Why do passions run so high?

Outside the BBC, however, lie more consistent and committed opponents of the corporation, many of whom husband their hatred of the BBC with the kind of single-minded tenacity that makes Paxman’s outburst of frustration seem mild-mannered. What makes passions against the BBC run so high? What fuels a loathing that seems for some to become almost a monomania?

One of the most prominent critics of the BBC is the Daily Mail, which rages almost daily at the corporation, while simultaneously running avalanches of articles devoted to the clothing, diets and love affairs of the stars employed by it. Paul Dacre, the paper’s editor, politely declined to be interviewed but sent instead a copy of his 2007 Cudlipp lecture, which, he said, still accurately represents his views on the BBC.

It makes for arresting reading. He begins with the traditional Daily Mail claim that the BBC is too big (the Mail has pretty consistently since the 1920s set itself against the monopolistic nature of corporation, on principle and for reasons of commercial anxiety). From there, he quickly moves on to argue that the corporation exerts a kind of “cultural Marxism”. This, he says, attempts to undermine “the values of conservatism, with a small ‘c’, which, I would argue, just happen to be the values held by millions of Britons”. He picks out for special mention what he sees as the BBC’s pig-headedly liberal stance on immigration and Europe.

The corporation, he says, though it “glories in being open-minded, is, in fact, a closed thought system operating a kind of Orwellian Newspeak … this, I would argue, is perverting political discourse and disenfranchising countless millions who don’t subscribe to the BBC’s world view.” Thus, he argues, the BBC is responsible for “the current apathy over politics”. Even the greenish-centrist stance projected at the time of the lecture by David Cameron is, argues Dacre, a result of a kind of emasculation wrought by the BBC – a “blood sacrifice to the BBC God”.

The words “world view” are key. The Daily Mail’s own world view (and, to be fair, that of all newspapers, to a greater or lesser extent) is a fabrication, a jigsawing-together of structural templates, stock narratives and character types. If one were looking for the most successful and internally consistent “closed thought system” in the British media landscape, one would have to turn to the Mail.

 

Paul Dacre: accuses the BBC of 'cultural Marxism'. Photograph: Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters

Dacre also claims in the lecture that he would “die in a ditch defending the BBC as a great civilising force” and would “pay the licence fee just for Radio 4”. For the fact is that few principled BBC critics curse the corporation entirely out of existence. (Direct commercial rivals may be another thing: Sir Christopher Bland, former chairman of the BBC and of BT, is not alone in believing that Rupert Murdoch “would be the happiest man in the world if the BBC were abolished, or even better, if he were allowed to buy it”. Quentin Letts, the Daily Mail columnist, whose articles have occasionally boiled over with fury about the BBC, has, paradoxically, applied to be its director general, twice; for he loves what the BBC in his view ought to be.

Was he serious? Well yes, up to a point. “I was so angry,” he told me. “I saw all these bloody careerist lefties prospering at the Beeb, and I thought, ‘Why should they have it? I mean some of those people are as nuttily left-wing as I am nuttily right-wing, and yet they all get bloody top executive jobs, and not a sniff of a rightie.” He smiled. There was something immensely disarming about his candour. “I knew I didn’t have a chance but I thought well I’ll try and make the point … complete failure!”

Margaret Thatcher, of course, looms large in the story of the BBC, as the avenging fury of the private sector, under whose premiership the door was opened to Murdoch’s Sky, and in whose later, hawkish cabinets were those who would have seen the BBC privatised. She herself, according to her biographer Charles Moore, the former editor of the Telegraph, lacked the appetite to raze it. She disapproved of the licence fee in particular as a regressive tax, and the BBC in general as, in Moore’s words, “left-wing, monopolistic, anti-her”. She listened to the Today programme; Denis paced the ramparts to tell her how awful the rest of the BBC was. But as for destroying the BBC, Moore said: “I think if you look at it politically it just probably wasn’t worth the effort. It was useful politically to keep on attacking it, to take the wind out of its sails and make it try to examine itself and get a bit frightened.”

I met Moore in a formal members’ club in the City, all wood-panelling and discreetly attentive service. I had asked him to tell me about his time as a licence fee “martyr”. Softly and precisely spoken, he described his antipathy towards the licence fee, comparing it to “the tithes that the Church of England used to live off. Very much the same argument was advanced for them, which is that we are doing God’s work – which is basically what the BBC says; it has broadly the same role in society. We’re doing God’s work, and so you’ve got to pay for it. And as with the licence fee so with the tithes. They (a) bore heavily on the people financially, and (b) they were being made to pay for beliefs that they didn’t necessarily share. So they were keeping Archdeacon Grantly in a style to which he was accustomed, even if they were dissenters or atheists.”

Moore reached the end of his tether, he said, in 2008 when Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand left messages on actor Andrew Sachs’s answering machine, joking that Brand had, in Ross’s words “fucked your granddaughter”. “I thought that this was an absolutely classic example of the sort of arrogance of power that organisations like the BBC get, where they think they can do what the hell they like. It seemed to me to be the BBC’s credit crunch, the equivalent of the Royal Bank of Scotland, and for quite a similar reason: hubris. And I thought it was disgusting, a remarkably disgusting thing to do by Ross and Brand personally, but in a way even more disgusting that the BBC thought they should run it.” Moore particularly disliked that the whole thing was cloaked in humour. “How did a public service organisation think that its highest paid person should be a sort of foul-mouthed comedian, and how could they think that they should pay him so much?” (Ross’s contract was reportedly worth £6m). Moore decided not to pay his licence fee until both had left the BBC; eventually he made a court appearance. “I was hoping for more publicity on the day, but then Gordon Brown called the election.” He laughed.

The Russell Brand-Jonathan Ross scandal was the result of BBC 'hubris', claims Charles Moore. Photograph: Enterprise News and Pictures/BBC

I thought about Moore’s remarks about Thatcher’s tactical abrading of the BBC when I met Rob Wilson, the Conservative MP for Reading East, who, in his single-minded pursuit of the organisation, has made a modest name for himself. We met in the canteen at Portcullis House, he – thickset and square-jawed – making a curiously Dickensian-looking couple with his tall, lanky, earnest researcher, who wore dark-rimmed hipster spectacles and took notes of our conversation. Between October 2012 and March 2014 the BBC Trust received 33 letters or emails from Wilson; the DG received 34 – or so I discovered by putting in my own freedom of information request. (“God knows what the cost of it is; and each one provides a kind of rent-a-quote for the Times or the Sun or whatever,” said the BBC’s chair, Lord Patten, of the correspondence. “It’s quite astonishing.”) I wondered privately what Wilson’s constituents made of it. “They pretty much all deal with what I would regard as significant issues in the public interest,” he said. Was the BBC a route to a certain kind of fame? “It’s certainly not about self-promotion, because there are lots of ways you can do that as an MP, and I wouldn’t say the BBC is necessarily the easiest way to do that. But I mean if you’ve got strong opinions, why shouldn’t you write to the BBC Trust?” Wilson has become the “go-to” MP for journalists seeking a swift anti-BBC quote – though he says he turns down 50% of requests for interviews.

The BBC has enormous culture problems, argued Wilson. “You could draw comparisons with the NHS, because the NHS has similar problems. Management don’t like criticism, staff don’t feel they can speak, change is very difficult to move through the organisation … the BBC has to make a decision about what it wants to be in the future, and with charter renewal coming up this is a good opportunity to do so. But the idea that it can just go on and on and on growing and stuffing people’s wallets full of money at senior level is just not on. It just can’t continue.” Wilson’s analogy with the NHS began to trouble me: I wondered whether there was a tactic at work: not to demand anything so radical as the eradication of either the health service or of the BBC, but to undermine them so that public trust might be gradually blunted. Towards the end of our interview, Ed Vaizey, the culture minister, appeared. He asked me jovially: “What are you doing talking to this right-wing loony?”

'Pride and frustration'

David Elstein, a veteran broadcaster who began his career at the BBC and now, in his late 60s, is a vocal critic of the licence fee, is a more complex figure. He believes the whole BBC structure is perverse; and its domination of news coverage simply bad for democracy. The BBC principle of universality – that it provides something for everyone, and everyone pays the same – is a false goal, he thinks, a “fraudulent piece of rhetoric” that operates simply in order to justify the licence fee. A smaller licence fee to fund a central corpus of freely available public-service broadcasting would be fairer, he believes, with subscription funding the rest and acting as an incentive to make better programmes – more like the Netflix remake of House of Cards, or indeed the BBC’s own The Fall, and less like Sherlock, which he regards as “hugely overpraised: juvenile and dismissive of the audience”.

The BBC, he said, caused him to feel a mixture of “pride and frustration”. Pride because it is a bastion of Britishness at its best. Frustration that, despite its huge level of funding, it falls short of his expectations. “I think the BBC is a fantastic institution, right up there with, you know, the monarchy, parliament; it’s less than 100 years old and we have a collective identification with it. But on the other hand I feel frustration that it doesn’t do better with such a powerful position. It does a lot of mediocre programming. Not bad programming, just mediocre programming.”

Sherlock: 'hugely overpraised', claims David Elstein. Photograph: BBC

Elstein is nothing if not a formidable mind. His parents, both brought to Britain from Poland as orphans by the Rothschild Foundation, ran a ladies’ outfitter’s in Golders Green. A scholarship boy, he emerged from Cambridge University at 19 with a double first in history and, in 1964, went straight to the BBC as a trainee. He later worked on Panorama and the Money Programme, and moved to senior positions at Thames, LWT and later, Sky, as well as working in independent production. He also applied for the director generalship of the BBC in 1999, though he didn’t get a final-round interview. But most of his first year at the BBC was spent on attachment to the newly founded centre for cultural studies at Birmingham University, where sociologists Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall were doing pioneering work. Hoggart had recently sat on the Pilkington Committee on the future of broadcasting, which had tightened regulation of commercial TV and paved the way for BBC2 and colour. This was a formative experience: Elstein wrote a paper on the effects of mass media and a mini-thesis on public-service broadcasting “which did not entirely please Richard”. Elstein found the Pilkington view “oppressively paternalistic”.

Elstein’s view that subscription should gradually take over from the licence fee was first aired in the 1980s. He is viewed in the industry by some as a prophet, by others as a broken record, harping on about his pet theories. There is perhaps something of a Cassandra about him. “People occasionally mock me and say: ‘David, it’s only been 30 years since you started this debate. How does it feel not to have succeeded so far?’ … there’s a whole parade of BBC executives, media academics and newspaper columnists who hold the licence fee as a kind of article of faith … it’s become almost more important than the BBC itself, or public service broadcasting itself, and I just feel mildly bewildered by it. It’s just a funding mechanism, it has no moral significance.” Politically, he describes himself as a “radical centrist”, and says that he has voted for everyone from the Communists to the Conservatives, via the SDP. According to Lord Burns: “I think that in the long term he is probably right about some things. David’s problem, though, is that the way he puts his arguments is not designed to build an alliance.” Another broadcasting veteran said: “He actually makes it quite difficult to agree with him: it doesn’t matter how far you go towards him, he will always move himself so that he’s at a more extreme position.”

Such heterodox thinking is as old as the BBC. Captain Peter P Eckersley was one of the most significant figures in the early history of British broadcasting. A cousin of Aldous Huxley, he had a chequered career that saw him resign from Reith’s morally unbending corporation in 1929 after it became clear he was having an affair with Dorothy Clark, the estranged wife of BBC conductor and programme organiser Edward Clark. After Dolly, whom he married, met Hitler through Unity Mitford, he became entangled with Oswald Mosley’s fascists, and was an enthusiastic pre-war tourist to Germany. By the time war broke out the couple had separated, she to work in the Reich’s English-language propaganda broadcasting,where she recruited William Joyce, the fascist known as Lord Haw-Haw; he, tarnished by his wife’s Nazism and his own dubious loyalties, to be turned down for war work.

In the years before the first world war young Peter was a schoolboy at Bedales (cold baths, wholesome food and adolescents “completely unaware of the world’s unreason”). He was also a wireless enthusiast: in 1906 he and a friend set up what they called Wavy Lodge in the school grounds – an old henhouse with benches for experiments to test the relative merits of different aerials. They would relay the results of cricket matches from distant grounds, using a mobile transmitter carried about on a soapbox fitted with pram wheels. A decade later, he was a wireless equipment officer in the Royal Flying Corps, where the possibilities of the thermionic valve – which “has the power to shrink the world to the compass of a living room” – were being explored. He was standing next to Major CE Prince, a Marconi engineer since 1907, when Prince became the first person to speak by radio to an aeroplane pilot in flight. (“Hello, Ferdy. If you can hear me now it will be the first time speech has ever been communicated to an aeroplane in flight. Dip if you are hearing me.”)

Peter Eckersley with BBC staff including William Reith and Joseph Gainsford outside No 2 Savoy Hill about 1924. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

After the war Eckersley joined Prince at Marconi at Writtle, near Chelmsford, Essex. There he continued to research wireless equipment for aircraft. The young engineers also built a transmitter and made experimental broadcasts to amateur wireless enthusiasts, tech savvy young members of the Radio Society of Great Britain who had assembled their own equipment. They played gramophone records; Nellie Melba came and sang into a microphone one day, a sensational event, sponsored by the Daily Mail, heard as far afield as Paris. “More and more people became interested in the possession of an apparatus which, fantastically, picked music out of the air,” he recalled.

The Writtle engineers broadcast from a hut in a field for half an hour a week on Wednesday evenings. One evening Eckersley went out for a pub supper before coming in to broadcast. He took charge of the microphone suitably fortified. “A certain ebullience, which often overcomes me when I have an audience, prompted a less formal attitude towards the microphone than was customary,” he remembered. “I failed to play all the records … and I went on talking and talking.” Head office was “shocked by my frivolity” but 50 or more postcards of admiration from listeners came in. Another step in the history of broadcasting: it could be funny, it could be made delightful by a clever man larking about; it could be a carrier of wit and humour. “It was all rather fun. Doubtless at times I was horrible facetious, but I did try to be friendly and talk with, rather than at, my listeners.”

'Pompously self-conscious'

Eckersley joined the BBC in 1923, its chief and only engineer. His first job was to build a London transmitter: he chose his spot by climbing to the roof of Marconi House on Kingsway, surveying the skyline, and then setting off to find the chimney of a distant electricity generating station in Marylebone. Six and a half years later, he had a team of almost 400. But his views were out of joint with Reithian ideology. The idea of the BBC as a great public institution, its values enshrined as national virtues, was regarded as bunkum by Eckersley: “Commercial broadcasting would undoubtedly have been instituted in Britain” had it not been for a shortage of wavelength, with space reserved for military use and a fear of the “chaos of the ether”, numerous stations interfering with each other, that prevailed in the US. The early ruling to avoid advertising “was only made to save trouble … if the number of listeners had been small, and the funds to run the service therefore inadequate, the [BBC] would no doubt have forgotten the sociological issue and saved itself a lot of money by getting advertisers to put on programmes … I have often thought that if there had been a world shortage of celluloid, as there is a shortage of wireless channels, we might even now be suffering the soporific of a nationalised cinema.”

He wrote of his old employer in terms that might have its current critics nodding in a agreement. The BBC, he wrote, “is such a feeble thing compared with what it might be. It is a great bore, dull and hackneyed and pompously self-conscious … issues are dodged which even a commercial press has no fear to expose. The BBC stands, either remote and dictatorial or pawky, oblivious of opportunity, hopeless in its timidity.”

The strength of his views was, no doubt, fuelled by his falling-out with Reith, and his subsequent adventures outside the BBC, building stations in continental Europe to beam offshore commercial radio into the UK. Seen through Eckersley’s eyes, the BBC looks as odd as would a British Publishing Corporation, producing the bulk of the nation’s books; or, as he suggested, a nationalised cinema industry. The corporation’s defenders could cogently argue that whatever its inherent oddnesses, whatever the historical particularities that operated at its founding, the BBC happens to work; has sinuously bent to accommodate the times; has proved itself time and again as the greatest cultural organisation our nation has known; has inserted itself into the very DNA of Britishness. But none the less, Eckersley reminds us that had the delicate mechanisms of history been only minutely adjusted, British broadcasting could have looked very different.

The licence fee itself was perfectly naturally referred to as a “subscription” in the early days, not so different from the £10 per month we might now pay for Netflix. Wireless owners paid their 10 shillings in return for a broadcasting service; it was only later that it began to morph into something tantamount to a household tax, with citizens in practice assumed to have a television unless they can show the authorities otherwise. The earliest parliamentary committee on broadcasting, the Sykes Committee of 1923, rejected funding the BBC from general taxation precisely on the grounds that not everyone used the service. “If practically every taxpayer were a ‘listener’ there might be no injustice in meeting the cost of broadcasting out of taxation. But it would not, we consider, be right that the general body of taxpayers should be required to pay for the daily service which only those possessing wireless sets can enjoy.” The licence fee, with its connection direct to the BBC’s users, is now frequently held up as a guarantor of the BBC’s independence from government; Sykes makes clear that is not how it began.

Sir William Beveridge: recommended in 1951 that the BBC's monopoly should continue. Photograph: The Guardian

In 1951 the Beveridge parliamentary committee on broadcasting made its report. The great subject was whether the BBC’s monopoly should continue. The BBC put forward evidence “with the greatest earnestness” that it was “vital to the public interest that the monopoly of both sound and television broadcasting should be preserved”. So long as broadcasting was conducted by “a single instrument, that organisation will be free … to discharge all the responsibilities to the community that broadcasting involves”. If not, “the good, in the long run, will inescapably be driven out by the bad … it would be the lower forms of mass appetite which would more and more be catered for in programmes”.

Beveridge accepted the BBC’s case. The monopoly of the BBC should continue, he concluded. One lone voice on the committee disagreed: Selwyn Lloyd, a Conservative MP who was to become foreign secretary, produced a minority report. “While acknowledging gladly the great gifts and high principles of those in authority at Broadcasting House,” he wrote, “I cannot agree that it is in the public interest that all this actual and potential influence should be vested in a public or private monopoly.” He warned of “overstaffing, centralisation and bureaucracy”, of “complacency and rigidity”; of the potential for “abuse of power”.

History took the side of the lone voice. After the breaking of the monopoly, the barbarians did not sack the city; the BBC’s fears were unrealised. The striking fact, though, is how difficult – perhaps impossible – it has always been for the BBC to argue against the interests of its own institutional power base rather than, strictly speaking, for the interests of audiences, or disinterestedly for the cause of public service broadcasting. In an era when high-­quality broadcasters are proliferating (every cultural organisation, every university, is now a broadcaster of public-service material), it may need to hone its arguments with more care: the institutional reputation of the BBC is not such, at the moment, to guarantee it the undimmed acceptance of its public.

On the other hand, for as long as we love what the BBC does, it has a powerful safeguard. The licence fee may be a regressive tax, and there may be dissenters and evaders, but there is no large-scale organised resistance – to the bafflement, one senses, of some on the right. John Whittingdale, the Conservative MP who chairs the culture select committee, and who holds free-market-inflected views on the BBC, was, in another life, Thatcher’s political secretary. When we met at Portcullis House, he reminisced about another, unhappier adventure with a poll tax. “I was in Downing Street as they rampaged up and down Whitehall throwing petrol bombs and attacking policemen when they were rioting against the poll tax. And it had a means-tested element, you know. You only paid 20% if you were on a very low income.” He added, seeming mildly incredulous that no petrol bombs are thrown in protest against the BBC’s funding regime: “The licence fee – it doesn’t matter if you haven’t got two halfpennies to rub together, you still pay £145.50.” Most of us do so uncomplainingly, even gladly. For now.

• This article was amended on 16 April 2014 to correct the spelling of Radio 1Xtra. It was further amended on 17 April 2014 to remove a suggestion that Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross left messages on Andrew Sachs's answering machine "live on air" (in fact they left the messages in a pre-recorded segment of Brand's Radio 2 show), and to change the word "diffusing" to "defusing".