Inside the bonker's BBC
Meetings in the ‘Del Boy’ room. £25m payoffs for useless bosses. Fact-finding trips to American shampoo factories. And Fiona Bruce starring in EVERYTHING!
BIGWIGS at the BBC did very well out of Jimmy Savile. After the disc jockey’s death, a Newsnight investigation into his horrifying sex attacks was blocked and lavish tributes broadcast instead.
When that scandal broke, resignations and ‘re- structurings’ ensued — but the pay- offs were like winning the National Lottery.
‘The BBC was in danger of eating itself alive,’ says Roger Mosey, former head of BBC TV News, but such were the contractual entitlements of those at the top, being made redundant meant trebles all round.
George Entwistle — whom Roger Mosey calls ‘ kinder and more emotionally intelligent than the average broadcasting executive’ — received £450,000 after 58 days in the job as director- General. others at senior levels pocketed cheques for £949,000 and £670,000. In total, the bill foror departing bosses was £25 million.
The other day I paid myy licence fee of £145.50, and was s cast into a bad mood.
Like everyone else, I havee discovered that I seldom watch television. I buy boxsets of American and Scandinavian dramas.
I relax with old DVDS of Les dawson or Tommy Cooper. I get the news from the daily paper or online. Plus I resent contributing to the fees supporting a channel that thinks comedy means two boring men in a field with a metal detector.
As Mosey shows, in this painful and gripping book, W1A is tantamount to being a fly-on-the-wall documentary.
At broadcasting House thee offices really are open-plan, to ‘increase interaction between different teams’, and chairs have been replaced with chummy sofas.
Glass doors don’t reach the ceiling, so there’s no privacy or sound-proofing. Meetings are convened in The del boy Room or The Nice To See you Suite (no, I’m not making this up).
Meanwhile, there continue to be heaps of executives on whopping salaries. Mosey was paid £270,000 a year, with the option of retirement and a pension at 55.
The director of Television takes home £517,000 and the sinister persons in Human Resources make £320,000. What did they do to earn this windfall? Not a lot. (Is there a Not A Lot Lounge?) Mosey says he was in charge of ‘knowledge building around factual content’ — eh? Perhaps this was why he went business Class with Greg dyke to inspect a shampoo factory in Chicago. He wasn’t with just Greg dyke, either.
A whole platoon of BBC senior management on a ‘Make It Happen’ taskforce excursion had convened at Heathrow to visit companies in the United States, inspect the JFK Museum and the grassy knoll in dallas, and take tea in a restaurant run by former convicts in California.
Throughout this bout of (Mosey’s words, not mine) ‘BBC profligacy’, Mosey and his mates were terrified that ‘the daily Mail were on our case’, and that they would all be photographed and named and shamed by reporters. ‘An in- flight emergency conference decided that we
would split up when we got to San Francisco to avoid the photo that would make the story complete: a luxury bus-load of BBC executives metaphorically shredding dozens of licence fees.’ Something called Digital Media Technology, which much excited the bigwigs, ‘just did not work’, so £98.4 million of licencepayers’ money went down the drain. Little wonder there is no money to make actual programmes any longer, hence all these ‘talent’ shows involving members of the public who don’t have to be paid — no scripts, costumes, scenery. I believe that as of just over halfway through 2015, the only person the BBC can scrape together the coppers to pay is Fiona Bruce, who is on absolutely everything, from reading the news and looking at antiques to presenting quiz shows. I am convinced that, wearing a fat suit and adopting an Irish accent, she even tells jokes on Mock The Week. As in the old Soviet Union or Red China, the upshot of the bureaucracy and over-manning was a kind of paralysis. People were so busy deflecting any negativity away from themselves, protecting their status and non-jobs, the BBC couldn’t cope with reality.
When the QueenQ Mother died,, for example, ‘we had no warning signals,’ says Mosey, even though Her Late Majesty was 101 years of age. (The BBC needs scream- ing ambulances and hospital spokespersons before the penny drops.) Peter Sissons’ red tie ‘became notorious as the emblem of the BBC’s disrespect’.
Ill-prepared as ever, credence was once briefly given to rumours that Prince Charles ‘was said to have been trampled to death during a polo match in the Middle East.’ One gets to see how the Savile crisis, an ‘enormous cock-up in which there was miscommunication and misunderstanding,’ occurred.
Buck-passing, incompetence, denial, inertia, frenzy, suspiciousness, evasiveness: these are the characteristics of the BBC, both personally (in its executives) and intellectually (in its ethos).
There were always too many executives and managers and foot-soldiers at the BBC for there to be any agreement on the basic facts about the Savile case, and the numerous ‘inquiries’ only made matters worse.
THE Human Resources department warned potential witnesses that any testimony might be regarded as part of a disciplinary process. The Corporation was threatening to investigate the people investigating. The Politburo used to operate exactly like this, by instilling fear.
The BBC quickly fell into a state of corporate paranoia and Mosey resigned (‘I got out alive’) to run a Cambridge college, where the dons hoped he’d use his influence to cast Joanna Lumley as the next Doctor Who. The other hot topic at High Table was how and why Hungarians are permitted on Britain’s Got Talent.
I much enjoyed the chapters about Mosey’s early career in local radio, where he learned how to devise a running order, create an appealing mix of items, book guests, play music, and report on fire engine strikes or the arrival of the Queen at Kettering Railway Station. His finest hour was asking the husband of the Prime Minister, ‘ ‘Do Do you like Weetabix, Mr Thatcher?’
Mosey moved to London and was put in charge of deleting the coughs and splutters from the recordings of chain-smoker Alistair Cooke’s Letter From America.
He then edited Today, where the presenter was the increasingly eccentric Brian Redhead.
Denis Healey tiresomely kept putting on a comical char-lady’s voice when on the other end of the phone, and Edward Heath loved being interviewed if he could be disobliging about Maggie.
I laughed at the account of John Prescott arriving at the studio covered in foam because his can of shaving cream had exploded, and I am sure Mosey was correct to have doubts from the outset about Tony Blair, because here was a man who, at home in Islington and perhaps elsewhere besides, wore white jeans.