Good riddance to the BBC's destroyer

THERE is a neat symmetry about seeing Neil Hamilton and John Birt bowing out of public life within a month of one another. For Hamilton played a critical if indirect - role in Birt's arrival at the BBC, which he joined in 1987 as Deputy to the then director-general, Michael Checkland. Those with long memories will recall that Checkland became DG after his predecessor, Alasdair Milne, had been brutally sacked. A key factor in the decision to unhorse Milne was his approval of a Panorama documentary entitled Maggie's Militant Tendency which alleged that Neil Hamilton and some of his mates had crypto-fascist leanings.

Hamilton and Co sued for libel, and the BBC prepared a vigorous defence.

But the corporation's vice-chairman, Joel Barnett, forced the corporation to concede the case - and Milne paid the price. The"victory" launched Hamilton on his chequered career.

Checkland was appointed DG with the brief of slimming down the BBC.

Sir John, soon to be Lord-Birt, was plucked from the well-paid obscurity of LWT, a part-time broadcasting station, and given a special remit: to "sort out" BBC journalism. This he did with positively Stalinist efficiency, sidelining or firing awkward journalists, installing trusted lackeys like Tony Hall and Samir Shah in key positions, enforcing strict editorial control and demanding that not a foot of documentary film should be shot before detailed scripts had been worked out beforehand.

It was all part of the "mission to explain" that Birt and his friend Peter Jay had outlined years earlier and which grizzled BBC hacks ridiculed as "A-level current affairs".

THE result was devastating. BBC news and current affairs were transformed from outfits where "an instruction was treated as the basis for a discussion" to organisations where control-freakery reigned supreme.

Suddenly everything controversial - and especially anything likely to offend the susceptibilities of the Thatcher government - had to be "referred up" the hierarchy. Asked why a Panorama investigation of sex and violence on television was being delayed right down to the transmission wire, the exasperated presenter, Kate Adie, explained that "it still has an unre-ferred 'fuck'".

Birt's thoroughness in bringing BBC journalists to heel contrasted with his boss's manifest inability to downsize the corporation, so it was a racing certainty that Birt would be chosen to succeed the hapless Checkland.

Fortunately for the Birt camp, it was arranged that there should be no other candidates for the job and a supine Board of Governors meekly acquiesced in his elevation.

From then on, Birt was free to indulge his obsession with structural reform - to play with the BBC as if it were a giant Meccano set. It was a nightmare era of management by consultants, of downsizing and outsourcing and internal markets and strategic planning and interminable workshops - of what, in another context, became known as "re-engineering the corporation".

Bewildered and disillusioned BBC programme-makers, most of them on short-term contracts, stood haplessly by as hordes of accountants, managers and executives were recruited to implement various Birtist Big Ideas. It was, many said, like living in an occupied country, and the reactions were much the same. There were pockets of resistance, but in the main people collaborated reluctantly or enthusiastically, depending on their career aspirations.

One wag said that Birt "made a deep depression on the BBC". It's not clear that the BBC made much impression on Birt. At any rate, many of his employees felt that he never really understood the organisation.

Of course, he always denied this, and often made speeches declaring his undying commitment to "BBC values", public service and the like. But the more he protested the more unconvincing he became. One reporter memorably remarked that listening to Birt declare his admiration for the BBC was like hearing a member of Breznev's Politburo describing his commitment to free enterprise.

He uttered the words, but failed to persuade. The same reporter claimed to have overheard a conversation at a social event in which Birt, having been asked how he was finding the BBC, said that "it was like being an American in Vietnam".

The abiding mystery of Birt's reign is why a man who is allegedly warm and charming in private could be so remote and stolid in public. This was partly due to his fanatical adherence to managerial convention.

He believed, for example, that if he were to go around talking to junior staff it would undermine the authority of their managers.

But this cannot alone explain why he was, by common consent, a disaster at the hearts-and-minds stuff.

He never seemed to understand that leading the BBC required more than iron discipline.

CREATIVE people crave approval.

They love to be recognised, appreciated, celebrated. They need to be stroked, as it were. They need to be inspired. But something in Birt made him unable to reach out to them. His personality, like the wings of the ostrich, enabled him to run but not to soar. He was once castigated by a celebrated radio critic because he had not attended the Sony awards ceremony (at which the BBC, as usual, had swept the board). Why had he not been there?

"Oh," he said, "we had an important strategy meeting." He seemed genuinely baffled to learn that his staff had been hurt by the fact that their Director-General had not been there to witness their moment of professional triumph.

What will be his legacy?

It's clear that his beloved bureaucratic structures will not long survive him, for Greg Dyke is already rushing round the BBC promising to dismantle many of them. We can only pray that Dyke will have the wisdom at least to preserve BBC Online, the one genuinely creative outcome of his predecessor's reign.

Taking the longer view, I suppose people will say that by securing the renewal of its Royal Charter, Birt saved the BBC. The pity is that he had to destroy it in order to do so. Which, come to think of it, is what the Americans used to say about Vietnam.

John Naughton was the Observer's award-winning television critic for much of the Birt era and has been working on his biography.

Copyright 2000
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