The BBC is doing well, as far as I can see: no thanks to MichaelGrade
Rod Liddle says that the departing BBC chairman has no understanding of or interest in public-service broadcasting, and that the Corporation’s progress under his watch was achieved in spite of rather than because of him According to recent news reports, a vision of Jesus Christ has appeared on a dog’s bottom in the Midlands. I have seen the photos and the similarity to those familiar representations of Our Lord — arms outstretched, beard, noble countenance — is, one has to concede, quite uncanny. But in reality it is nothing more than a trick of the brain, a simulacrum, which, through a fortunate confluence of fur and propitious wrinkles of the skin, is able to convince some hugely gullible or deluded people that He has returned, or has sent notice of His imminent return. The sensible among us would most likely counter that were Jesus to return, as He once famously promised, He would most likely not do so via the medium of a whippet’s backside. But such cold logic is not enough for some. In a desolate and apparently Godless world, these people will continue to kid themselves, all the while hoping, yearning, for the best.
Much as will the staff of ITV, it would seem, given the return to the fold of Michael Ian Grade, CBE. Grade has been ‘poached’ from the BBC, where he resided in the role of chairman and pulled in a salary of £150,000 per year, by the catastrophically beleaguered ITV, where — as executive chairman — he will trouser at least £825,000 per year, double that with bonuses. If you are Michael Grade, then, the decision was, on salary matters alone — as they say — a ‘no brainer’. When I say ‘return’ to the fold, I am firstly quoting Grade himself — ‘I have come home to ITV’ — and partly using poetic licence. ITV is not merely his means of raking in vast amounts of cash it is his spiritual home, too.
Needless to say, ITV is absolutely delighted by this and the BBC dutifully, predictably, distraught. On either count, I am slightly at a loss to understand why this should be so. It seems to me that we are dealing with another whippet’s backside. The BBC’s media correspondent, the excellent Nick Higham, insisted that the Corporation was damaged by the defection, but without, at any point, telling us what it was that Grade achieved for the Corporation. A little later he told us that this was astonishingly good news for ITV, without explaining which of Grade’s qualities, as evidenced by his track record, would lift our premier commercial terrestrial channel from the continual, spiralling, descent to eventual oblivion.
Well, let us begin with the BBC. I have yet to hear a single instance of anything Grade has done in his (highly remunerative, by most people’s standards) job as chairman of the BBC. It was, in a sense, the perfect counter-intuitive appointment for the Corporation — someone whose job spec was to preserve and even (God forbid) enhance the Corporation’s publicservice ethos and, in the final analysis, its raison d’être, but who plainly did not give a monkey’s about, nor even understand, the notion of a public-service ethos. Nor, as a private-sector buccaneer, should one expect him to have such an understanding; in which case, why appoint him to the job of chairman?
There were plenty of important jobs within the BBC at which Grade would have excelled — controller of BBC3, for example — but not one which required him to understand, and accept, why the BBC still existed, with its licence fee. As one top Corporation executive put it to me (after Grade had gone, natch), ‘He was utterly and totally unsuited to the job of chairman, whatever his talents.’ His instincts were always utilitarian and, on occasion, downright cowardly. When, for example, the Today presenter John Humphrys apparently was rude about members of the Cabinet during a lucrative after-dinner speech, Grade’s response was not to say ‘I don’t care, he can say what he likes’. Nor even, ‘Well, I think he’s wrong but who cares?’ Instead, he tried to force the Corporation’s most talented journalist out of the BBC through underhand means and then deny, all along, that he’d done anything of the sort. You felt at that moment, instinctively, that Grade had more in common — morally, intellectually, politically — with the filthy little PR weasel Tim Allan (a perpetual, professional, bag carrier to the rich and powerful and devoid of an ounce of indigenous talent), the man who engineered the whole antiHumphrys storm, than with the Corporation’s journalists. Grade’s instincts then were to cut and run, to drop Humphrys in it and then deny it all afterwards, when it became clear that public support was on the side of the Today presenter and not with Tim Allan and the government. All this in those feverish postHutton years, when the BBC could have done with a strong voice in the role of chairman to mop up the slime laid down by self-interested people like Allan.
The BBC is in less bad shape than many might have predicted two or three years ago. For a start, it seems to be much better value than many of those extra-terrestrial channels which constantly seek to undermine its funding. We may tire of the fatuous advertising campaigns insisting ‘This is what we do!’ when, in fact, we cannot but know what they do because we’re forced to pay for it. We could do without the political correctness which seemingly infests every programme, the tired and timorous news and current affairs documentaries and its obeisance every so often to the lowest common denominator of popular taste. We could do without the corporate bureaucracy, too. But set against this is the fact that the BBC’s news coverage is still way ahead of the pack — Newsnight (on excellent form of late) and Today, particularly, are still indispensable; it has read sport dead right and now knows when to bid and when to leave well alone. Its digital output is fine; its online presence — at one time relentlessly criticised merely for existing, if you remember — a match for all competitors. And there are parents who would pay the licence fee just for CBeebies alone. In corporate terms the BBC has scrapped the board of governors and replaced it with a board of trustees; quite what the difference is between these two incarnations eludes me entirely, but my overall point holds, I think: the BBC has done well enough just recently — but none of that, so far as I can see, is down to Mike Grade, CBE.
So what will he bring to ITV? He has, now, a more fitting role, you have to say. He has latitude, he has room for manoeuvre. His brief, though, is to rescue the perhaps unrescuable. It may be that ITV is short of ideas, that it fails to nurture its major talent — but that is not the extent, nor indeed the most manifest, of its failings. Advertising revenues and core audience will fall much more quickly during 2007 than they have done in the preceding two years — not because ITV is doing anything ‘wrong’, per se, but because time has caught up with it. There is a new kind of viewing experience these days, to be viewed, free of charge, online and uninterrupted by adverts. YouTube, for example, streams more than 100 million videos per day; meanwhile the traditional sitcoms and the comedy shows and the game shows seem in perpetual decline. As Chris Anderson put it in the Economist: ‘Each year advertisers collectively pay more and more for a smaller and smaller audience. This phenomenon has defied economic gravity for so many years now that few even comment on the absurdity of the whole thing.’ He predicts that sooner or later the ‘house of cards’ that is the economics of the broadcasting industry will come crashing down.
To fight this apparent inevitability, ITV has a man renowned for wearing braces, slicked-back hair and smoking a large cigar, whose painful reciting of anecdotes to those executives beneath him at the BBC were rooted entirely in that horrible and half-forgotten decade from which he took his fashion tips and in which he made his name: the 1980s. Is there any evidence, anywhere, that Michael Grade has progressed from those years when Bros were at the top of the Singles chart? Since those halcyon days as Controller of BBC1 (when, incidentally, he axed Doctor Who and scrapped BlackAdder — this is a man who does not recognise stuff from leftfield, ever) and chief executive of Channel 4, Michael Grade’s most prominent roles have been supporting Charlton Athletic and deciding what to do with the benighted Millennium Dome. Good luck, Michael, and good luck ITV. Messiah or whippet’s bottom? Watch this space.
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