Why a job at the Beeb is a slow death by flipchart
MEMOIR GREG DYKE: MY PART IN HIS DOWNFALL by Chris Moore (Universe Press £10.99)
There are two sorts of people who are obsessed with the BBC: those who truly hate the corporation, and those who work for it. Just occasionally, in the great Venn diagram of life, you will encounter people who fall into both groups.
Chris Moore left the Beeb in 2012 after more than 30 years of loyal service, but these scabrous and often hilarious diaries suggest that, along the way, it had driven him halfway round the bend with rage and frustration. The diaries cover the glory days of Greg Dyke, the most blokeish of all Directors-General.
Moore worked as a senior journalist in the newsroom of the World Service, that ancient redoubt which maintained reithian rigour and standards long after the rest of the corporation had abandoned them as old, fusty and irrelevant.
But for all its good intentions, the World Service was no less vulnerable to pointless organisational change, time- wasting executive ‘ i nitiatives’ and managers promoted so far above their skill level they must have lived with permanent vertigo. The rot began, as far as Moore is concerned, when the News and Current Affairs functions were merged to save money. ‘Since then the friendly rivalry that used to exist has curdled into a less friendly one.’
In short this is W1A (the BBC comedy about itself), except that it’s real.
People send mad memos. ‘Yesterday, Sunday 11, at 0730 hours, there was green mould on the bread in the canteen but no coffee and no eggs. Later, when I went back for a cup of tea, the milk came out of its carton in a solid lump. Thanks for a great start to the day.’ And there are meetings,
so many meetings. Moore’s immediate boss retires and tells the senior journalists how wonderful they are.
His farewell speech ‘ sounds like something drafted for a far more exalted audience than us lot, sitting with our arms folded, gasping for the coffee to arrive . . . He was sent to turn our world upside down and now that’s done, he’s galloping for the hills like a bandido with his saddlebags full of swag bouncing behind him’.
One colleague ‘is shaping up to be the type of boss known in BBC News as a “strong personality”.’ We’ve all met a few of those.
another new boss has grey hair, a leather jacket and funky spectacles. ‘Call me Phil,’ he says, getting us off to a flying start.’
Phil wants ‘to aim for a much warmer sound, something with a more modern texture, news that’s a lot more userfriendly.’ Moore hates him on sight.
Too busy working to show ‘leadership’ skills, he is sent on endless leadership courses. One of them he calls ‘death by flipchart’.
Back at the office, he writes critical comments in the log designed expressly for this purpose and is informed that this is a ‘career-limiting move’.
and lurking above all this activity is Greg Dyke, who ‘looks and talks like a top geezer whose vocation is selling dodgy Taiwanese hairdryers from the back of a van in a Walthamstow car park.’ Moore and a colleague listen to him being i nterviewed on radio, effing and blinding before going live. Not that he was cross or anything; he’s just a sweary kind of guy.
‘ “You know, Chris,” s ays t he producer, taking the cans [headphones] from his ears with a perplexed look, “I really think Dyke is a bit thick . . . How the f*** can they let a man who talks l i ke that become Director-General, for f***’s sake?”’
How much of this was written at the time and how much has been tickled up for publication isn’t clear. This book ends with Dyke’s defenestration after the Hutton report into the death of weapons inspector David Kelly and the allegedly ‘sexed-up’ dossier.
Moore writes: ‘My only contribution to his downfall was to survive it.’
as he stayed with the corporation for another eight years, I’m hoping that there are more volumes of these wonderful diaries to come.
all human life is here. Well, all BBC life, anyway.
One day, Moore is summoned to a meeting with Human resources.
‘“It suggests here,” says Pam, “that your priority areas f or develop - ment might include ‘collaborating across boundaries’ and ‘ usi ng external thinking.”
‘ She peeks a t me through her mascara.
‘ “How does that resonate with you?” ’
It doesn’t, of course. But he is far too nice to tell her outright. Perhaps he was saving it all up for the book.