Start at the bottom for ‘top talent’

LANOTHER one bites the dust! There are excitable reports every time a familiar face or voice leaves the BBC, with wails about the loss of “top talent” – lately Dan Walker, below, following Marr, Maitlis, Neil, Pienaar, Sopel, Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Weekly rumours suggest others are teetering on the springboard.

From news channels to podcast empires, they are lured by beckoning fingers, promises of milk and honey and golden treasure.They go. Some always have.A few voices wail that the poor old corporation is being drained of talent, fatally impoverished by these fleeing renegades.

This is utter nonsense.With all respect to the departing employees, to whom I wish good luck and prosperity, a little-spoken fact is that none of them were uniquely irreplaceable.They’re not gods and goddesses, just good journalists with pleasant voices who were given long experience, backed and served by excellent production teams and made familiar by frequent exposure.

I wish the BBC well, as an unapologetic old-style Reithian who believes in public service broadcasting and spent 40 years inside it. But one of its infuriating failings in recent years has been a neurotic, cringingly anxious clinging to familiar “top talent”, without understanding that actually it created their shine: broadcasters are honed by good production, guidance and familiarity. Few leap from the egg fully fledged.

The BBC, as a big, solid, quite rich organisation, needs to remember that for every Marr or Maitlis it loses, it can make more. And that it should always be polishing up their successors.

Of course it takes time and observant attention to spot potential, and that is hard work. It grievously distracts executives from their meetings-addiction. But further down the food chain there are always reporters – and off-air staff – who could, with nurturing, rapidly step up and become familiar, polished and interesting.

Indeed the real problem right now is a drain of these people, who can feel blocked by the mighty high-earning dinosaurs up at the top.

Not everyone can be a good broadcaster, but more than you think can... if well supported. Their magic touch is not all their own property – remember TV-am in the Eighties?

The famous five – Angela Rippon,Anna Ford, Robert Kee, Michael Parkinson and David Frost – moved from BBC and ITV to the new company, and it wasn’t as professional as the homes they’d come from; within a couple of years there was a boardroom coup, a big row and a glass of wine thrown over the chief executive.

And I bet some of them at least wished they’d stayed put...