Vision Is Becoming Blurred For BBC Boss

GJ Jonny is the star of an HIV-Aids awareness video that has been made by none other than the BBC. Watching it is not recommended, but you can find it on the internet if you must, and the unsubtle visual gags and double entendres may indeed “inform, educate and entertain” the young audience to whom this message is addressed.

This is Mark Thompson’s BBC at work. As the digital revolution changes all media, the Director-General presides over a public service broadcaster that makes smutty viral videos at the same time as preparing to cut as many as 600 staff out of 3,000 in BBC News. No wonder morale at the BBC is lousy. Lord knows what viewers would make of it.

But hang on. Before this argument descends into some sort of fogeyish rant, better suited to the Daily Mail, it is important to be clear exactly what is going wrong with Mark Thompson’s leadership of Britain’s most powerful broadcaster.

When he took over from the buccaneering Greg Dyke, he inherited an organisation that was bloated on the back of above-inflation licence fee settlements. Mr Thompson’s misfortune is to preside over tougher times - the latest job cuts are required to help the BBC to live in the new world of licence fee funding at around the rate of inflation. He was never going to be as popular as his predecessor.

No organisation is immune to cutbacks either, and with more than £3 billion of guaranteed money until 2013, the BBC can and will cope. Nor is any part of the broadcaster invulnerable: there is plenty of inefficiency in BBC News, which is notorious for using ten journalists when two or three would do.

Doing what is necessary can be television online, although by the time the iPlayer was accepted by the BBC Trust, much of the corporation’s lead was lost. Since then, though, the way forward has been less clear.

Mr Thompson has allowed the BBC to become committed to projects such as moving to Salford – great for regional development but an expensive way to get Northern accents into programmes.

Yet, if the battle between GJ Jonny and the anticipated news cutbacks shows anything, it is that it is not clear what is important at the BBC at the moment.

Added to the mix is the emerging “them and us” culture, in which mid-ranking employees are sacked for phone-in misdemeanours which, while serious, hardly rank on the scale of the £35 million worth of calls not counted by GMTV. That trend has been partly reversed by the departure of Peter Fincham, who rightly took responsibility for the Queen editing fiasco, but when even the BBC Trust admits that standards are slipping, it is surprising that there has not been more of a shake-up at the top.

Of course, Mr Thompson can say: “Hang on, wait until next week, when my plans get signed off by the BBC Trust.” Then, presumably, there’ll be more about the underlying strategy. The trouble is that the Director-General is off on a corporate junket in India, and as we wait for the BBC Trust to meet on October 17, a void opens up.

The result is that the media will speculate, staff will worry, unions will agitate, and when Mr Thompson finally tells us what he is planning, the reaction is likely to be far more negative than it would have been a week earlier. If he is to reassert his leadership, and put GJ Jonny back in his place, he will have to make the speech of his life.

— Don’t forget though, that over at ITV, sometime in the next fortnight, the commercial broadcaster will publish the findings of the Deloitte inquiry into the running of phone-ins during 2005 and 2006. If the rumours are right, this could put the row over the naming of the Blue Peter cat in its proper context. It is widely expected that shows produced by ITV, such as Dancing on Ice, will be criticised. So will Michael “whiter than white” Grade look carefully at the Fincham precedent? After all, Simon Shaps, now director of television, was running ITV Productions until September 2005.

Tag Cloud

External Information

Additional Information

Where Am I?