MEDIA STUDIES
The BBC's washing is hung out for all to see —
not a pretty sight
STEPHEN GLOVER
What has been true of former senior employees has also held good for those still working for the Corporation. It made little or no difference that the BBC is a public institution, in the end answerable to Parlia- ment, and dependent on the licence fee. Many of its senior employees might spend their lives attempting to ferret out and analyse information which public figures would often prefer to keep secret, but those same BBC journalists, indefatigable in reporting the inner convulsions of other institutions, would clam up like members of the Ku-Klux Klan when questions were asked about what was going on within their own organisation.
Almost for the first time, several private BBC rows have now erupted in public. This unusual development tells us something about the present state of the BBC. The first row may seem a petty one, concerning as it does a puerile Radio One DJ called Chris Evans, who recently spent two weeks broadcasting his morning show from Inver- ness rather than London. Not all the natives took to him, or his childish jokes about local lassies and what Scotsmen do with sheep. Tom Morton, who 'hosts' BBC Radio Scotland's morning show, described his colleague Mr Evans as 'a repulsive, strutting little self-promoter'. He was talk- ing about BBC Radio's most famous and most highly paid star.
Then, last Sunday, Colin Cameron, head of television for BBC Scotland, criticised as 'forensic' the reporting of the BBC's Kate Adie after the Dunblane massacre. Her clipped delivery had been unsuitable. Ms Adie was then quoted in the Guardian as saying it would be improper 'to comment on remarks made by a member of BBC staff. The paper added that 'insiders said
yesterday that she was "not happy".' I take this to mean that Ms Adie observed Krem- linological discretion on the record but off the record told the Guardian's reporter what she really felt. No such restraint was displayed by Esther Rantzen, whose BBC programme The Rantzen Report was criti- cised last Sunday in a long Sunday Tele- graph article by a BBC reportercalled John Ware for 'sloppy and misleading journal- ism'. Mr Ware disliked an episode of The Rantzen Report which he believes was wrong in claiming that a patient at the British Home and Hospital for Incurables in south London was mistreated. Ms Rant- zen defended herself in an article in the Independent.
Mr Cameron's remarks, and more obvi- ously Mr Morton's, betray a resentment against know-all English interlopers. John Ware's criticisms seem to be part of an old- guard resentment against 'tabloid televi- sion'. (Perhaps Mr Morton was making a dig at 'tabloid radio'.) My sympathies are certainly with Ware and Morton, but the rights and wrongs of these spats are really beside the point. The interesting thing is that they took place. It is not, we may be sure, because there is a new culture of openness at the BBC promoted by its direc- tor-general. John Birt is the most clandes- tine of men. When he announced in June that the World Service was to become part of a general television and radio news oper- ation he had not even informed the Ser- vice's managing director.
One must always beware of saying that an institution is unhappy, for many of us work in a state of perpetual grumpiness directed at our employers. No doubt it is also true that there are some happy and fulfilled people working at the BBC. But there is a general malaise which is probably as bad as at any time since Mr Bin's long march began. At the Edinburgh Television Festival last weekend, former BBC execu- tives were virtually queuing up, like people at a group therapy session, to explain why they left the Corporation. Their complaints about the organisation may have been dif- fering and sometimes even conflicting, but it is extraordinary that they should have been made.
In the old days, BBC employees for the Classifieds —pages 43 and 46 most part resolved their differences in pri- vate. Mr Dirt's reforms seemed to have undermined that old sense of freemasonry which precluded employees from having a swing at one another in public. This new glasnost may appear welcome, and would be so were it a result of a new policy to pro- mote greater openness. In fact it is a reac- tion against the director-general's unfriend- ly and insanely bureaucratic regime, an indication more of institutional decline than rebirth.
Next week Punch is relaunched. Hav- ing been involved in a launch or two, and knowing several of the characters involved in this one, I wish the enterprise well. It also seems to me — contrary to general media opinion — that the new Punch has a good chance of succeeding, though I would like to see the first issue before having this prediction quoted against me. The idea is to create a sort of British New Yorker — which magazine, it is claimed, originally modelled itself on Punch. There is no doubt that a great deal hangs upon the out- come so far as Mohamed Al Fayed, the magazine's proprietor, is concerned.
Established publishing tycoons may mock, but Mr Al Fayed is anxious to join their number. Apart from the purchase Of Viva, an obscure radio station, Punch is his first media venture. Earlier this year, Mr Al Fayed made an unsuccessful bid to buy the Observer. He and Stewart Steven, chairman of Liberty Publishing, Mr Al Fayed's nmy company, are on the prowl for other publi- cations. But if Punch should fail, Mr Al Fayed's credibility as a publisher would be damaged, and his new-found enthusiasm for publishing might wane.
All this explains why he is pouring so much money into its relaunch. Some 1,500 people have been invited to a party next Wednesday in Harrods, the store owned by Mr Al Fayed. There will be a television advertising campaign, and Harrods' and other credit card holders will receive free copies of the magazine for up to foul weeks. Nearly a million copies of the first issue will be printed. Peter McKay, Punch s new editor (actually its 14th), is receiving the kind of boost most editors only dream of though of course it won't be of any tise to him unless he produces a brilliant magazine.
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