Radio boss: I hated BBC’s entitled posh boys
THE BBC’s female former director of radio has publicly criticised a culture where male broadcasters behave as though they were “born to rule”.
After announcing her resignation last week, following 33 years at the corporation, Helen Boaden, 60, said she had been infuriated by “young men” there with “a massive sense of entitlement”.
“I found the intensity of the competition between the blokes really baffling, there’s a lot of tedious rhetoric that goes on in BBC meetings,” she said in a radio interview with an independent station.
“I see a lot of young men who have a massive sense of entitlement and it drives me bloody bonkers. They’re usually posh young men, they’re nor- mally quite attractive, and they don’t deserve it most of the time.
“I see the born to rule, very entitled people in the BBC, there’s not many of them and they’re mainly near the top, and I’m glad I’m not like them.” The veteran broadcaster, who quit her £340,000 role last week, said that it had been a “culture shock” when she first started at the corporation in 1983.
“There was a lot of underlying pomposity that I found very difficult. In fact I remember someone at Radio Leeds saying, ‘I’m not really sure you’re BBC’. What he meant by that was that you were too irreverent. I think pompous men are very hilarious.
“It wasn’t a very comfortable experience to be so marginalised. It was just very challenging.
“I talk to women now who have that experience – that experience of when you say something and it doesn’t land, and then three men further down say exactly the same thing and the chair goes ‘yeah that’s a good point’. It happens to men too, but it happens even more to women.”
Boaden, who was educated at grammar schools and the University of Sussex, said her former colleagues during her time on were men “who hated management” and had “all been to boarding school and were slightly baffled as to what you did with a woman boss.”
During her time running BBC News, Boaden said being accused of suppressing reporting on the Jimmy Savile scandal had been “brutal”. “It was very difficult to be accused of having a lack of integrity,” she said.
“There’s this thing of the BBC putting you on trial. So you have this situation where the organisation you’ve loved turns on you, and it’s really frightening. They say, ‘you’ve got to have a lawyer, we’ll pay for the lawyer, but it’s your lawyer – not the BBC’s’.”
A subsequent internal investigation by Nick Pollard cleared Boaden of any wrongdoing, but she believes the criticisms made against her were “unfair”.