One slip from the Beeb’s new chief could destroy it for ever
IT’LL probably be May before we know who’s got the job of the BBC’s next director-general. Whoever it is, they’ll have the BBC’s future in their hands. And a single slip could see the entire, seemingly tough – yet actually rather fragile – outfit crash to the ground in a thousand pieces.
Would it matter? A lot of people, more now than ever before, will say ‘no’. But as a BBC lifer – I joined as a junior sub-editor in 1966, and have worked in the news department ever since – you’ll forgive me if I say I think it does matter immensely.
For almost a century it has done a pretty good job of enlightening us, informing us and entertaining us. The BBC has helped to make us who we are as a nation.
It has provided us with a daily, hourly picture of ourselves and our world. There can scarcely be a man, woman or child in the entire United Kingdom who hasn’t been affected by its broadcasting.
It enrages all of us from time to time (me included), but those who can see the wider picture tend to support it as an institution, even when there are aspects of it that they don’t like.
The new BBC boss will be faced with a variety of problems greater than any previous DG has had to deal with. One of them is the undeniable fact that the widespread support the BBC has always relied on has been affected by the two hugely divisive issues we’ve faced over the past few years: Scottish independence and Brexit.
The middle ground which the BBC had always inhabited suddenly disappeared; where, after all, is the middle ground between independence or remaining in the United Kingdom, or between staying in the EU or leaving it?
People who had previously been perfectly rational started to detect bias in everything, from the tone of voice in a news bulletin to the audiences for Question Time. It didn’t seem to matter that roughly similar numbers of people were detecting exactly the opposite bias at exactly the same time.
Last month’s election made it even worse. Corbynistas were certain the BBC was obeying the instructions of the Conservative Campaign headquarters (CCHQ) to destroy their man, at the very moment when CCHQ was incandescent at the BBC for what it saw as the Corporation’s antiTory bias.
Again and again, our presenters were accused of being unfair to one side or another, and we were regularly told we had failed to question the claims of the various parties. That was demonstrably untrue, since after the 2016 referendum the BBC set up a highly effective fact- checking department which broadcast its conclusions on a regular basis, and published them on the BBC’s hugely popular website.
But if people want to believe something, reality doesn’t seem to stop them.
Personally, I’m not a great supporter of the argument that if you’re upsetting everyone you must be getting it about right.
All the same, you might hope that people who believe the BBC is cravenly obeying the will of the government might notice that other people are just as loud in claiming that the BBC is totally biased against the government.
So the first thing the next director-general will have to do is to rebuild its reputation for balance and neutrality. But there will be other pressing problems. Lord hall is standing aside because he thinks the same person should negotiate the next BBC Charter, from 2027 onwards, and the upcoming licence fee deal. THOSE
are going to be two very difficult subjects, and there’s no doubt that Boris Johnson, with his chief of staff Dominic Cummings whispering in his ear, is going to want to seem ultra-tough on the licence fee in particular. Many of the new Tory MPs taking their seats at Westminster are likely to be more populist and hard-line than their predecessors, and public support for the licencefee has been dropping fast.
There will be a great deal of horse- trading, playing off the licence fee against details of the next Charter, and the new director-general will have to keep his or her nerve. But what sort of BBC should emerge from all this? I suspect it will have to concentrate on its core activities – news, current affairs, factual programming, music for all tastes, high-quality series like The Trial of Christine Keeler and Fleabag – while letting Netflix and the other British channels concentrate on other entertainment.
My guess is that the licence fee will continue at a lower level – most other european countries have something like it, after all – but that people who want more than the basics will have to pay a top-up fee to watch them, much as they do with Sky or Netflix.
The ace in the new director-general’s hand will surely be that no government will want to go down in history as the one that destroyed the BBC. REMEMBER,
2022 will be the hundredth anniversary of the Corporation’s establishment, and any incoming director-general can be expected to play this up for all it’s worth, showcasing for months on end how good the BBC has genuinely been over the years, and reminding us all how much we’ve got from it.
Around the world, the BBC’s reputation has rarely been higher – its audiences are just under half a billion now, and growing fast. It would be very foolish indeed to do too much damage to something as valuable as this.
In the years when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, it was my job to follow her around the world. She would often sound off against the BBC, at press conferences or when I interviewed her. But she never forgot that most British people supported it.
Immediately after her third election victory in 1987, I doorstepped her in front of a crowd of young Tories chanting: ‘Privatise the BBC!’ After asking her a couple of questions, I said: ‘ These people want you to privatise the BBC. You can do it now. Will you?’
‘Well, I think –’ she began, then said: ‘ Oh look, there’s Dennis. I must go and join him.’ That’s it, I thought – she won’t do it, and she never really intended to.
however radical Dominic Cummings wants to be now, I suspect that Boris Johnson’s gut political instincts will mean he stops short of doing anything too damaging to the BBC. But that doesn’t mean the next director-general won’t have a pretty torrid time.
And I’m pretty sure that the BBC which takes shape after 2027 will be different – and quite a lot smaller – than the one all of us have known, all our lives.