Getting Out Alive: News, Sport and Politics at the BBC Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Preface

  Chapter 1: 2012

  Chapter 2: Bradford

  Chapter 3: Local Radio

  Chapter 4: Starting in London

  Chapter 5: The Afternoon Sequences

  Chapter 6: Back to Today

  Chapter 7: Radio 5 Live

  Chapter 8: Television

  Chapter 9: Sport

  Chapter 10: Olympics

  Chapter 11: Directors-General

  Chapter 12: Transition

  Chapter 13: Cambridge

  Index

  Copyright

  PREFACE

  I WAS JAMMED INTO a Tube train on my way home one night in 2009 when I saw my face in the paper being read by the man next to me. A little further along the District Line, the crowd thinned enough for me to open my own copy of the Evening Standard and read the story. It was accusing BBC executives of being overpaid, which was true, and aboard a gravy train, which was not an accurate description of my working day and my journey that evening. But the item was fair game: the BBC and its employees should be accountable. Those tend to be the introductions that most people, like my fellow Tube travellers, have to BBC executives; and in recent years the stories have been supplemented by the periodic crises that the corporation has endured. We became used to the idea that we might become the target of the moment as we watched colleagues becoming embroiled in controversies and sometimes defenestrated. Yet many of the commuters alongside me would be going home to watch BBC programmes, which mostly they would enjoy. The BBC has thrived in the digital age in a way that its critics didn’t expect, and it remains one of the world’s most successful public service broadcasters.

  I first thought about writing this book when I myself experienced so vividly this contrast between the glories of the BBC and its profound lows. In 2012, I led the BBC’s coverage of the London Olympics, which was praised to the highest of heavens, and then I was one of the executive team during the Savile crisis as we saw our reputation plummet and the director-general obliged to resign. George Entwistle’s departure was marked on the front page of The Sun by the initials BBC spelling out ‘Bye Bye Chump’. With the passing of the years, which included my leaving the BBC and moving to become the head of a college in Cambridge, I wanted to give a sense of what it had been like in those times. Of course, BBC executives have written previously about what it’s like inside the corporation, but that was some years ago. I liked the idea of updating the narrative – taking in more recent developments in news and sport, along with an account of the experience of working on the Olympic Games. I hope I can best do that by telling my own story, and offering snapshots of the people I met, not only in my thirty-three years as a servant of the corporation but also before and after the BBC.

  This is not, therefore, a treatise on BBC Charter renewal or the future of the licence fee. Those are matters for the new Conservative majority government and the corporation’s current leadership team. I trust that this book has some pointers about when the BBC is at its best, and I owe a lot myself to mentors who were evangelistic about journalistic rigour and a spirit of independence and intellectual challenge. I was inspired as an employee, and I continue to be captivated as a consumer, by programming with soaring ambition. I shy away from the mass-produced ‘stuff’ that merely fills a schedule; and I believe the BBC is most effective when it frees its staff to be creative, and resists the itch to control even more from the centre.

  These are personal opinions, just as the book is my own narrative. There is consequently a health warning. You cannot get to the level I reached in the BBC without having detractors as well as supporters. Not everyone will agree with my view of events. But I was always cheered up when I was being criticised, internally or externally, by the realisation that it was my opponents who would sometimes portray me as unknowable or too much of a corporate politician. My friends, however, would always know precisely what I was up to, and they reprimanded me if I threw myself over-enthusiastically into the gamesmanship of BBC power. The news presenter Huw Edwards, for instance, had the uncanny ability to read my mood of the day without any contact with me. I would receive texts from him correctly analysing what I was thinking about a topic that he knew, by instinct, was on my mind. And this must surely be the right way round: imagine if you were transparent to your detractors but unreadable to your allies. So I am grateful every day for the profound friendships I have made in the BBC, and to the three godchildren I have acquired from colleagues, along with shared trips and holidays, food and drink. I couldn’t have kept going during the bad times without the comradeship and humour of friends and colleagues, and they were the people with whom I shared the proud moments too.

  Many of those individuals have helped me in the writing of this book. I’d like to thank Les Sheehan, Michael Forte, Chris Rybczynski, Conrad and Annabel Walker, my agent Alex Armitage, George Entwistle, Dominic Coles, my cousins Brenda Hunter and Lucy Pilkington, Anthony Lewis, Michael Tilby the Vice-Master of Selwyn College, Simon Heffer, Joanna Manning-Cooper, Jackie Brock-Doyle, James and Eleanor Naughtie, John Humphrys, Dave Gordon, Mark Thompson, Mark Byford, Amanda Farnsworth, Lorraine Heggessey, Paul Reynolds and many more who read sections of the book and helped sharpen my memory of events. Memoirs by Kevin Marsh, Greg Dyke and John Birt were useful accounts of BBC times that I lived through, as was All Our Todays by Paul Donovan. Finally, I’m grateful to Iain Dale, my editor Olivia Beattie, and the team at Biteback for encouraging me to write the book I wanted to write, for which freedom I am deeply appreciative.

  CHAPTER 1

  2012

  FOR SEVEN YEARS I had known that 2012 would be the biggest year in my professional life. For the three years that I spent as the BBC’s director of London 2012, I was working towards just one goal: delivering a successful year of events for the BBC. What I could never have envisaged was that it would turn out to be such a combination of elation and dejection. In 2012 there were the proudest moments of my BBC career but also the ghastliest lows, during which I became certain that I needed to get out of the corporation.

  When the New Year’s Eve fireworks signalled the start of London 2012, forming Olympic rings above the crowds lining the Thames, I felt a sense of relief that it was finally here. The story that had begun with the IOC making its choice of London seven years earlier was entering its final and most exciting stage. There was trepidation, too, about what lay ahead. Many of the public believed the Games would be a national embarrassment, and the easiest way of getting a laugh in a comedy show at that time was to predict what a dud London 2012 would be. Those of us involved in the planning realised the scale of what was being attempted in the intermittent chaos of our capital city, and I doubted that we would get through the summer without terrorism or transport chaos or public derision. So it was one of life’s most joyous surprises when London surpassed all expectations with the triumphs of its Olympic year, and the BBC shared the plaudits too. But only a few weeks later, BBC executives were clambering from the wreckage of one of the corporation’s worst crises.

  One of the pleasures of being the director of London 2012 in the run-up to the Games was that I had little to do with BBC politics. There was more than enough real politics with the government, the mayor, the IOC and the rest. But through the first half of 2012 there was the background of the search for a new director-general, after the BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten had – unhelpfully for the incumbent Mark Thompson – signalled the start of the process in January. He had used a Times interview to reveal that headhunters were being employed to develop ‘a succession plan’, and he to
ld the paper that the successful candidate would need ‘renaissance talents … It’s a big management job, it’s an editorial job, it’s a creative job and it’s an important part of our national culture. When the time comes, some people will crawl over broken glass to get the chance of doing it.’ Few of us on the management side had any doubt that this was Patten pushing the idea that it was time for Mark to go, and for himself as the new chairman to install his own man or woman. The curiosity was that we had always expected that Mark would leave after the Olympics anyway, and in March he confirmed that was his plan.

  There was some amusing campaigning by the papabili. Caroline Thomson got herself profiled in The Guardian, cheerily telling colleagues at a management meeting that her mother loved the photo – while unprofiled colleagues seethed quietly. Caroline later made a rare visit to the BBC Olympics team to commune with the workers. ‘Supporters’ and ‘friends’ of Caroline and of Helen Boaden spoke to The Times about the case for a woman DG: one of the friends talked about men having ‘a game plan’ and ‘being ambitious’, which were apparently not characteristics of BBC women applying for the top job. George Entwistle did what BBC blokes do and announced an eye-catching restructuring of his division, while the sounds of whirring activity floated in as usual from Tim Davie. External candidates were beneath the radar, with only the Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards a fixture in the media speculation. It was predominantly long-standing staff members of the BBC who risked the broken glass.

  After the first round of interviews, the only candidates we knew to be definitely still in the process were the internal duo of Thomson and Entwistle. In the early summer I shared a car back from an Olympic launch at Westminster with Mark Thompson, who was in relaxed and gossipy mode. He said he knew little about what was going on in the DG process but asked me who I favoured. ‘George’ was the unequivocal answer – because, I said, I thought he was clever and utterly decent and got the BBC, whereas Caroline had never struck me as being as commanding editorially. I had been George’s boss when he was editor of Newsnight, and we had kept in touch over the years as he moved between news, science and arts into ever more senior roles.

  ‘Any doubts about George?’ asked Mark, as we sat in a traffic jam in Piccadilly.

  ‘Only that he’s never been through a real storm,’ I said. This was not, in fact, entirely true: George had been caught up in the aftermath of the Hutton Inquiry in 2004 in a way I knew had been thoroughly unpleasant. But he had not been one of the main public characters to the extent that Greg Dyke or Richard Sambrook had, and the question was a real one: how would he, or anyone else, cope with the kind of mega-row that is pretty much inevitable in a BBC DG’s career? Mark Thompson was known for having the thickest of skins, and John Birt similarly. But George was kinder and more emotionally intelligent than the average broadcasting executive, and this was always my niggling doubt about his candidature for the top job.

  It was reinforced while the DG race was still unresolved by the furore around the Diamond Jubilee pageant. In a weekend of generally very good coverage of the Jubilee – church service, concert and beacons – the Sunday river pageant broadcast was very bad indeed. It was not really anyone’s fault. The weather was terrible, causing technical problems for the outside broadcast. The mood of the programme, which might have worked on a sunny day, felt wrong from the start. The casting of the talent was not right. There were unforced errors in the presentation and commentary. This happens, and it was a collective failure for which I, as one of the members of the Jubilee steering group, will accept my share of blame. But since George was director of television, he was more obviously in the firing line and, from whatever inside sources, there was a repeated and ludicrous effort to get his name into the papers as the ‘Guilty Man’ who had ruined the Queen’s big day. This did need careful handling, but in the scale of BBC crises it was no more than ‘medium’. George, however, was unsettled by it – and from our conversations at the time I got the sense that he even considered pulling out of the DG race because of his sense of responsibility as the overall man in charge. This was noble but also way out of proportion for the offence, and he did not go through with it. But it confirmed my unease about George’s decency and the danger of the inevitable storms, even before the hurricane that hit us in the autumn.

  The summer, though, was golden, and not just in Olympic Park. In early July, George got the job. To most of us inside he was so obviously the best candidate that there was rejoicing in the sane choice that Patten had made. I had not been making any calculations about my personal advantage because I had not been expecting to stay in the BBC after the Olympics. I didn’t have a job once 2012 was over, and anyone at my level of seniority is at the mercy of a new DG, who could have been from anywhere in the broadcasting spectrum. But I was delighted to be asked by George to act in his place as director of television – the biggest job apart from DG – until a permanent appointment was made, and it felt like the BBC was going to be run by ‘people like us’, which was a comforting thought as we took up residence in east London for the Olympics.

  I could not have been happier in Games time about our brace of DGs. Mark had a whiff of freedom in his nostrils, and was the perfect supportive editor-in-chief, with the bounce and humour that represented him at his best. George was not taking over until September, so he was able to stick with big thoughts for the future rather than the daily agenda – and we also had a bit of fun going to watch the hockey, which is a sport he played as a teenager, and wandering through the crowds of the Olympic Park. I was proud to introduce him as our DG-designate to the sporting bigwigs and to our staff, without any hesitation about him being the right leader for the BBC after 2012. And everything went right for us: every day we got a sense of the marvellous legacy from leader Thompson and the gilded inheritance for leader Entwistle. The BBC game plan had worked. Our approval levels reached unimagined heights: more than 90 per cent of the population watched our coverage, and more than 90 per cent of those viewers said we had met or exceeded their expectations. The newspapers were universal in their praise. The sound of purring was to be heard from Broadcasting House.

  I started in television headquarters on 20 August, just a week after the Olympics. I busied myself with familiarisation visits around the country, and I had occasional exchanges with George, who had taken his family to the United States on his final break before becoming DG in mid-September. During this period there was a steady reshaping at the top of the BBC: Caroline Thomson left with a large pay-off, to which she was contractually entitled and which was not seen at the time as controversial, and George thinned out the senior management team in the hope of making it less diffuse and more empowered than it had been under Mark. With hindsight, this created gaps when the crisis hit us. At the time, it seemed like a sensible reorganisation, and the first meeting of George’s management board was one of those heartening moments in the BBC when it felt like we had the right leadership, the right team and a determination to take the organisation forward.

  The first warning we had in BBC television that something potentially nasty was about to break was when we received a request from ITV for the use of some footage of the BBC star Jimmy Savile for a documentary they were preparing. It was referred to television HQ because there was some question at a lower level about how any pictures might be used – a routine concern when content is being handed over to another broadcaster to use as they will. We decided to make available whatever ITV wanted because the approach appeared to be for a proper documentary programme, though we had no idea how serious it was going to be. The scale of what they had uncovered became apparent in the following days when the drumbeat of publicity for the programme signalled that they had a very important story indeed – and one that would rattle the foundations of the BBC.

  As the transmission date for the ITV programme approached, the headlines agreed: Jimmy Savile would be revealed as a sex offender on a horrifying scale, and he had abused children, including ones he encountere
d during his work. But what brought the story up-to-date, and caused the crisis to centre around George and senior colleagues, was the revelation that Newsnight had been working on this story for the BBC in the autumn of 2011 – and it had failed to make the air. Worse still for our corporate reputation, we had broadcast tribute programmes to Jimmy Savile in the Christmas 2011 schedule. It was easy to write the narrative. Historically, the BBC had put a paedophile onto its most popular children’s show. Recently, the BBC had blocked its own story revealing the true Savile in the interests of protecting his reputation and that of the corporation – and went ahead with tributes despite knowing the worst. Most acutely for George, he had been the director of television when the Christmas programmes were broadcast; and now here he was as DG.

  That narrative did, indeed, seize hold of the press with a ferocious intensity. It was what the public came to believe too, for perfectly understandable reasons. But internally we knew the linkage was simply not right; and I never for one moment believed that George, as director of television, or Helen Boaden, as director of news, or any of the other contemporary figures, had done anything significantly wrong. I, like them, had been in the BBC for decades and had never had any knowledge that Jimmy Savile was a paedophile. Was it credible that those people would know for certain that Savile was involved in paedophilia and suppress it? From a television point of view, was an archive clip programme of Jimmy Savile at the BBC really a reason to kill a Newsnight investigation? The idea was ludicrous to me and others, which may explain why we were slow off the mark in rebutting it; and in any case the most likely true reason about the events of 2011 – that this was an enormous cock-up in which there was miscommunication and misunderstanding – was not exactly one you could roll out with aplomb on the Today programme.