UNCERTAIN VISION
One aim of this book is to address the question: How did the BBC reach this nadir, at a time of
otherwise considerable success? It does this by taking the long view. The central part of the book
consists in an analysis of John Birt's controversial tenure in the 1990s as director-general of the
BBC, for it is the Birt period that gives the clue to current developments. Birt instituted a series of
radical reforms, responding first to political attacks in the period of the Thatcher governments and
subsequently to New Labour's highly interventionist style and its continuation of a neo-liberal
economic agenda. A central concern of the book is to uncover how the major organisational and
structural changes brought in by Birt impacted on the BBC's capacity for programme making. It
therefore dwells at length on the elements and effects of Birt's reforms. The argument is that Birtist
management was responsible for eroding the BBC's creativity. In short, the Birt period represents
the political subordination of the BBC, a subordination more pervasive and damaging than is
apparent from a focus solely on clashes over political journalism, as well as exemplifying New
Labour's wider attempts to rein in the public sector. Birt's intimate identification with New Labour
was concretised following his departure from the BBC when he gained a Labour peerage and
became Prime Minister Blair's strategy adviser. When Dyke succeeded Birt in 2000, he found a
demoralised and over-managed organisation. The last chapter examines Dyke's period as directorgeneral, arguing that his determination to supersede Birt's policies and withstand political pressure
was necessary, well judged and highly productive. Dyke's changes made the BBC less inhibited and
more risk taking, including in its dealings with the government.
If Birt's tenure as director-general is at the root of the present rupture, it must be placed firmly in
context. Well before the current events, a series of longer-term factors converged to create a chronic
sense of crisis for the BBC. Among them were the intensifying competition caused by the growth of
satellite, cable and digital television and the increasing power of media conglomerates seeking a
share of Britain's lucrative media markets. At the same time the corporation came under sustained
attack from several sides. Under Margaret Thatcher's Conservative governments the BBC was
treated with contempt. Thatcher's visceral dislike for the corporation was compounded by the drive
to retaliate against its sometimes outspoken criticisms of her policies, and by a determination to
bring it under the iron 'deregulatory' controls demanded by her vision of a strong liberal state.
Influenced by the ideas of American right-wing think tanks, Thatcher and her advisers sought to
submit British broadcasting to US-style deregulation. Weakened by political criticisms in the 1980s
and 1990s, the BBC has also been subject to escalating complaints from rival commercial
broadcasters who stand to profit greatly if the BBC falters in responding to new conditions. These
rivals have naturally been among the most vocal of the corporation's critics and, with increasing
ferocity, they question the BBC's right to exist.
Two further factors fuel the crisis. The philosophy of public service broadcasting, which served
the BBC well for most of its existence, evolving to meet the times, has reached a critical juncture. For
many, in an era of globalisation and digitalisation, with the decline of national broadcasting systems,
it serves no future purpose. Each term in the phrase - 'public', 'service' and 'broadcasting' - has been
cast in doubt, undermined by social and technological changes. The BBC is outmoded, our relations
with it as drenched in nostalgia and sentimentality as they are with the monarchy or the Church of
England. Even if one dissents from this view, there is clearly a need for the values of public service
broadcasting to be renewed so as better to meet the demands of a diverse and increasingly fragmented
society. Such a change of ethos must be reflected in practice: in the programmes made, the networks
and services delivered, but also in the BBC's organisation and its employment practices. Public
service broadcasting is a concept larger than the BBC, with a complex institutional expression. Yet
the BBC has a special place in the history and the imagining of public service broadcasting. It was
founded when there was still a British Empire and when the wireless relied on the thermionic valve.
It developed during the period before and after the Second World War when large sections of
industry - from the railways to the mines - were under public ownership. What should public service
mean and what role should the BBC play in the age of broad band, flexible labour markets,
multiculturalism and the 'war on terror'? The BBC's fate, its capacity to reinvent public service broadcasting in testing conditions, is emblematic of the fate of the ideal itself.
The final dimension in the crisis of the BBC is more nebulous; yet it lies behind the previous
factors. It is the installation of the language and practice of free-market economics at the heart of
public life. Today in government, in the pronouncements of social commentators and influential think
tanks, the default position is a profound suspicion of any kind of public intervention. When
government looks for models, it looks to private enterprise. A belief in the primacy of markets and
their association with competition, efficiency and entrepreneurialism has become widespread. The
tenets of neo-liberalism have coalesced into a new common sense. In Britain, the imperatives of
markets and enterprise were established during the Thatcher governments. The legacy of that period
is clear in the efforts made by New Labour, when preparing for government and since coming to
power in 1997, to reshape its former ideological foundations. In its desire to emulate the strengths of
Thatcherism, New Labour found it difficult to articulate any positive image of the public sector.
While it espoused values of community and social responsibility, New Labour conceived of public
institutions only as a variant of business. In this take, when the public sector acts it must always be as
if it were a business or in partnership with business; and if it is not working, the cure is to subject it to
the disciplines of private management and the market.
But there is an additional destructive aspect to relations between government and the BBC: their
entanglement in the disabling disease of spin. In power, New Labour committed escalating resources
to managing relations with the media and particularly the popular press. As a leading commentator
puts it, 'No previous government had dedicated so much talent and energy to trying to rule through
the media.' 1 The media varied in their reaction. In the BBC, given the routing of the Conservative
opposition after 1997, there grew a determination to take on the effective role of opposition, to match
aggressive spin with aggressive journalistic scrutiny of government. But the result of inflated spin
was that after three years in power, 'The spin was spun out' . 2 The seeds of scepticism had grown; the
public was now encouraged by the same press that had enthusiastically published the Downing Street
Strategic Communications Unit's 'confected articles' to look on New Labour as manipulators and
autocrats. The effect was to reduce public trust in government, politicians and journalists, fuelling a
wider public disengagement from the democratic process evident in declining participation in local
and general elections. The BBC's journalism was to become increasingly troublesome for the New
Labour government in the Dyke years; the Kelly affair saw that journalism shift from being engaged
with the mechanisms of spin to itself coming under the spotlight as an object of negative spin.
In relations between the Labour government and the broadcasting industry, the continuing
dominance of the market model is signalled in a characteristic contradiction in media policy: in the
primacy given to competition law, set against New Labour's laissez-faire attitude towards
concentrations of media ownership. The tension was plain in the simultaneous roll-out of the 2003
Communications Bill and its centrepiece, the competition-oriented regulator, Of co m, at the same
time as the government exhibited a lack of will to tackle Rupert Murdoch' s market dominance in the
British press and digital television. Although many Labour politicians remain committed to public
service media as the kernel of Britain' s civil society, they have found it difficult to disentangle the
concept from the carping interests stacking up against it. This was evident in the position taken by
Chris Smith, the Labour government's first Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. Despite
being unequivocally for public service broadcasting, because of the conundrums thrown up by the
coexistence of a globally successful public media giant alongside powerful private media interests,
Smith was driven constantly to intervene. At times his actions seemed guided by the principle that the
BBC must be reined in to allow the private sector space to secure its expanded profitability, with issues
of competition and fair trading given more weight than the continuing viability of the BBC. Lacking
confidence in past values, the Labour government appears unable to conceive of a revivified public
media model that would transcend the prevailing neo-liberal terms.
Despite the threatening climate, the BBC continues to attract the affection and esteem of much of
the British public and of international opinion. Throughout the 1990s and in the new millennium it has
achieved significant success, whether measured in audience figures, awards, entry into new markets or
export earnings. The corporation regularly takes the lion's share of the annual professional awards in
television and radio. The BBC's Internet and new media activities were launched to almost universal
acclaim; 45 per cent of all British Internet users visit the BBC web site regularly. It has rapidly become
the most used non-portal web site outside the United States and is the leading content site in Europe.
The BBC's commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, is expanding its operations in the USA and around the
world. It ploughs back into programme-making over £120 million a year in earnings. BBC World
Service radio reaches 150 million people worldwide and broadcasts in forty three languages; it
continues to play a vital role globally as a source of impartial international news. For all the fierce
competition, the BBC's combined share of television viewing is almost 40 per cent of the audience, and
its reach - the percentage of the national audience using the BBC each week - is 92 per cent. 3 In 2001,
BBCl overtook ITV 1 for the first time since competition began in 1 955. Despite the inroads made by
new media and multichannel television, the BBC appears to be manoeuvring adeptly in response to
rampant competition and technological change.
In light of these achievements, two startling paradoxes face anyone tracking the status of the BBC
in the public eye. The first arises when we pose the manifest success of the corporation against the
campaign of vilification begun in the Thatcher era, which has intensified in the past decade. Recent
years have seen a constant war of words in Parliament and the press concerning the BBC's
management and governance, the legitimacy of its funding mechanism, the licence fee, and its right to
compete in new markets. Queries are voiced constantly, whether couched in the cool language of
business realism or in jingoistic terms of right-wing populism. Boris ]ohnson, Conservative MP and
editor of the Spectator, exemplifies the populist position in almost parodic form. David Elstein,
formerly chief executive of Channel 5 and head of programmes for Sky Television, represents
business realism. Elstein has been vocal on the contentious issue of broadcasting rights in sport.
Disregarding the anticompetitive tactics employed by Murdoch and the anti-democratic effects of the
migration of first-class football to subscription television, he portrays their exponential rise as a
natural consequence of the unleashing of competition by deregulation. Whatever insane heights are
reached by footballers' salaries, whatever the cost of rights to the Premier League, since they are set
by market competition they must be for the best. Even left-wing periodicals offer their share of
polemic. David Cox in the New Statesman, assessing Dyke's- first year in office, weighed in with a
jaundiced version of the market-based concerns to the fore in New Labour thinking. The impact of
the campaign against the BBC by its rivals and political antagonists cannot be underestimated, nor
can its cumulative capacity to influence the industrial and regulatory context in which the BBC has to
operate.
The second paradox takes us to the BBC's democratic responsibilities. For all the competitive
ratings and the range of output, the BBC's services have marginalised the interests and social
experience of many of Britain's minority groups. The lack of representation on screen has been
matched by the BBC's reluctance as an employer to redress its poor record on equal employment and
promotion for staff from ethnic minorities. These linked failures undermine public belief in the
BBC's commitment to representing Britain's component cultures and peoples and the mature
cosmopolitanism of its urban life. As in previous periods in its history, when criticisms of class and
regional bias were to the fore, there are sections of the public profoundly alienated from the BBC.
That alienation is in itself a force that turns some audiences towards commercial radio and satellite
television - services that appear untainted by alienation since they are based on a simple consumer
relation rather than the expectations of citizenship. It is precisely because the BBC claims
universality - the right to speak to and for the 'nation' - that it needs urgently to address these issues.
The paradoxes matter in themselves. But they matter also because together they come to the heart
of the BBC's struggle. The first paradox is parasitic on the second. The favoured rhetoric used by
those - politicians, rivals, pundits hostile to the BBC is one of consumer choice and diversity, a form
of words in which the BBC's failure adequately to respond to the cultural interests of Britain's
working class, its youth, its black and Asian populations is dressed up in the now common-sense
terms of market-based consumer sovereignty. The cleverness of the campaign waged by the likes of
Murdoch and his political allies is to exploit the BBC's cultural-democratic weaknesses to denounce
its very existence. The market solution is posed as though it alone can solve the 'democratic deficit'
in Britain's media culture.
For all the BBC's genuine achievements, including, most simply, the continued production of a
stream of good programmes across a spectrum of genres, the last decade has seen a general
degradation in the output of Britain's television system. Such a degradation is also characteristic of
some BBC programming, but it is neither led by the BBC nor limited to it. Indeed the reduction in
quality is more advanced among its commercial rivals. There are two linked arguments to support
the view that the BBC is not leading this trend. First, to justify its licence fee funding, the BBC has
to make popular television and it has to show that it is popular among the majority of viewers and
listeners by competing, in these shows, for ratings. It has to make popular television in order to win
the hearts as well as the minds of the viewing public. This was understood from the outset by Reith;
entertainment has always been a vital part of the BBC's broadcast mix, as much as information and
education. Second, the BBC has to respond to its rivals, since the popular broadcasters together set
the tone of output across British broadcasting as a whole. They create together a broadcasting culture
or ecology. The intense competition caused by the proliferation of new channels in Britain has had
two overall negative effects. It has caused declining budgets and a blossoming of cheap
programming. As importantly, it has caused a rush for the centre-ground of programming, producing
a risk-averse broadcast culture in which imitation, populism and sensationalism have become rife.
The BBC, which of necessity must follow as well as court public tastes, has been impelled to join
the rush downmarket. While these entirely exogenous forces have made their destructive mark,
internal pressures during the nineties exacerbated these trends.
Given these problems it is tempting either to consign the BBC to being a relic, or to defend it
wholesale against the destructive forces ranged against it. I chose a different route. As an
anthropologist I decided to study the BBC from the inside. Was it as inefficient and elitist as its
critics maintained? How did it come to make some programmes and not others? Was it more like a
bureaucracy or a business? Was it dominated by 'producer interests' or by accountants and
management consultants? Above all, how was this old institution meeting the challenge of
reinventing itself in uncertain and inauspicious new times?
*
Meet the secretary: It's early days in my negotiations with the BBC before the study begins. Through a friend, my
first move has been to contact the secretary of the BBC, the top bureaucrat, whose role is to liaise between the
governors and the director-general. We talk, he seems reasonably open, and he asks me to send him my first book.
This is a critical study of a well-known Parisian avant-garde computer music institution, in which I employ psychoanalysis and other esoteric intellectual aids. When we next speak, he exhibits the kind of artful understatement
that must be a prerequisite forthe job. He comments that my book is 'very interesting - perhaps too interesting for the
BBC'. He says he perceives there may be an openness to my study; in fact the MD of Television has suggestions.
Why don't I focus on science programming and the Community Programme Unit? I reply evenly that I had other
departments in mind - possibly Drama and somewhere in News. He skips a beat, which tells me I'm on to something,
and advises that while he can't encourage me, nothing can prevent me approaching these areas on my own. I do,
and in due course, six months later in the case of news, they fall into place. I reflect later on their attribution to me of
an extraordinary naivety in thinking I would be confined to two minor, quintessentially 'public service' genres. Instead,
I do my best to wade in and feel the currents in the cultural turmoil that is the BBC.
Diary, 1995.
*
The excited eye
'Charles Denton, the BBC's head of Drama, is in a lather of excitement at the impending arrival of Dr Georgina Born,
a London University academic who has been commissioned to undertake an "anthropologically based study" of his
department. "I have invited her to sit in on any meeting in which I am involved, with free access to any and all
paperwork," he announces in a memo to his staff. "I am fascinated by the potential of dealing with Drama as a
unique tribe within the Corporation.'''
Private Eye, 6 October 1995.
*
'Is that anthropologist woman here?'
I have come to one of the regular Offers meetings in which Drama Group exhibits its wares before the television
channel controllers. This one is with Alan Yentob, the charismatic controller of BBC I , considered by some the
artistic heart of BBC Television. To me, Yentob has been both wary and friendly; encouraged by the head of
Drama Group, Charles, to go along with my study, he has allowed me to observe these and other meetings.
Today some thirty people are sitting around a giant table in an anonymous executive suite in Television
Centre. Yentob walks in late followed by an entourage of four women. The usual rhythm of pitch and
discussion begins. Karl Francis, head of drama in BBC Wales, talks up Panama Row, a potential long-running
series at 05k per episode, of which Wales is willing to put up t.:25k. Yentob muses: 'Because of the price
range, and the setting in Wales, I'm prepared to look at it very seriously. But there's no point in patronising
anyone. The scripts have to be good. We'll look at the schedule. It will have to compete with the successor to
Crown Prosecutor, currently being reworked - there's only one 30-minute slot available pre-watershed on weekdays.' Yentob adds, of Crown Prosecutor, The public's still hot for it.' Next up, The Lakes:
Yentob is very keen, it's almost certain for 'greenlighting'. 'Is Charlie [Pattinson - producer of recent hit Our
Friends in the North] on board?' George Faber, head of single drama, confirms. Yentob says how pleasing it is
that the next Jimmy McGovern drama will be with the BBC: 'It'll be good to have a writer saying nice things for
once about the BBC!', a sore spot for Drama Group, and they titter nervously. Discussion centres on the
format: what will suit the schedule, six times fifty minutes or one times seventy-five plus four times fifty? This is
left hanging and they move to cost. Using the slipstream of good humour, Charles adds casually, 'It's £:550k
per episode.' Yentob quietly replies, 'I remember when it was £: 150k per thirty minutes.' But the tension
rapidly diffuses and we laugh: Yentob has been reeled in.
Half an hour later, my attention has drifted as I jot rapid notes on a telling exchange that has just occurred.
Suddenly I notice a lull; as in a dream, I hear Yentob say belligerently, 'Is that anthropologist woman here?'
He fixes me with a stare: 'Look, I don't mind you being here - really - as long as I have copyright in everything
I say, OK?' The room is hushed; all eyes are on me. Taken aback, I grin and shrug reassurance, saying
nothing. The meeting resumes.
A few days later I meet Yentob. With warmth and an air of vague complicity, he credits my study with
weight and credibility. But to start, we fence on issues of permission and control. I remind him of the Offers
meeting. Archly, smiling, I say, 'You didn't mean "hard" editorial control, did you?', to which preposterous
suggestion Yentob, also smiling, demurs.
Diary.1996.
*
The invisible anthropologist
I'm sitting in on a BBC I branding meeting. Michael Jackson, now controller of BBC I , smiled at me when I arrived
and invited me in. My stock is up. As the meeting closes the head of marketing, Sue Farr, drifts out and pauses in
passing, curious, to say hello. I explain who I am and what I do. 'How fascinating! We must meet ... I'd love to talk,'
she purrs. Days later I pick up the thread and phone her office. Can I come and see Sue Farr? We met at a branding
meeting, she was keen to talk, I explain. The secretary insists she must check with Sue. Later that day she comes
back: could I submit some questions? Sue is very busy, it may be some time. Each week in the following months I
fax or phone again. August comes and goes, the summer break. Sue's secretary has changed her tune: she is
peremptory and dismissive. Sue wants to find out who I am and who has authorised this study. I say that Will Wyatt,
chief of Broadcast, signed off the study. I phone again two weeks later. The secretary says: 'We spoke to several
people; no one knows who you are.' I don't get an interview with Sue Farr.
Diary, 1997.
*
I am an unusual social anthropologist, one who works on western cultural institutions. In 1995, I began to
research the BBC in the context of the wider television industry. Between 1996 and 1998, with follow-up
studies in 2001 and 2003, I carried out fieldwork inside the corporation, the most sustained study of this kind
for over twenty years. The fieldwork provides the basis for the analysis that follows. The focus is the mid to
late nineties, the mature years of the Birt regime, a period that, even following Dyke's tenure, remains decisive for the state of the contemporary BBC. Sometimes called 'participant observation' or ethnography,
anthropological fieldwork is a method that involves living among or hanging out with the people being
studied. In earlier times anthropologists were almost entirely concerned with the study of nonwestern
societies, which were often conceived as exotic or 'primitive'. Attention was given to how they were similar
to and different from ourselves - in rationality and beliefs, social and economic organisation. Now, most
anthropologists recognise that even the most apparently familiar aspects of western culture are susceptible to
the same kinds of analysis and are equally strange when given sufficient scrutiny. Whatever the setting, the
aim of the anthropologist is to become immersed in the everyday culture, language and thought of the
natives, so as to become sensitive to unspoken assumptions and implicit forms of knowledge and belief.
Fieldwork is uniquely good at generating two other kinds of insight. It is a sharp tool for
discerning not just the unifying features but the divisions, boundaries and conflicts of the society being
studied - conflicts so charged that they may be suppressed, or alluded to only in throwaway remarks,
or in humour. Fieldwork makes it possible to explore the differences between what is said in publicit y
or in the boardroom and what happens on the ground in the studio, office or cleaning station. It is by
probing the gaps between principles and practice, management claims and ordinary working lives between what is explicit and implicit - that a fuller grasp of reality can be gleaned. One of the marks of
social power is how it enables those who hold it to determine the very framework of what can be said
and even thought in a given social space. To understand any organisation, it is therefore imperative t o
uncover not only what is insistently present, but the characteristic absences and rigidities - what cannot
be thought, or what is systematically' outside' .
These fieldwork tools have been essential in understanding the BBC. Any large organisation, with
its internal divisions, its rituals of self-justification, its management pretensions and disgruntled
workforce, will yield up at least some of its internal complexities and secrets to anthropological study.
The BBC, undergoing permanent revolution and extraordinarily volatile during the later nineties,
seemed a good place for an anthropologist to set up camp. My fieldwork focused primarily on two
sites in BBC Television. I spent more than a year in and around Drama Group, the largest and most
costly production outfit. Drama Group was notorious within the BBC in the later nineties, a troubled
place in which many of the BBC's key structural problems surfaced. Drama output is critical for the
popularity of the BBC as well as for its cultural aspirations. Increasingly, television schedules are built
around popular drama, and the battle between channels is often played out on the territory of popular
series and soaps. Drama is also a locus of broadcasters' most ambitious and high-cost programming,
so-called 'landmarks' or 'events'. But it has another kind of symbolic importance, since debates over
the relative quality of British and American television often focus on drama. In this sense British
television drama, and BBC Drama centrally within this, frequently bears the burden of justifying the
British system of public service broadcasting as a whole. The state of Drama Group was therefore a
prime concern of BBC management.
I also spent several months around the time of the 1997 general election observing the fla gship
programme Newsnight, a hybrid of news and current affairs often considered exemplary of the BBC's
journalistic ideals. Famed for its powers of analysis and energetic political interviews, this was a good
period in which to trace the programme's political stance and to take stock of shifts within the BBC's
journalism of impartiality. Developments around Drama and Newsnight provide many of the
examples in what follows.
Less intensive fieldwork took in parts of BBC News and factual programming including
Documentaries, Current Affairs, the Community Programme Unit (CPU), and the 1 997-8 News
Programme Strategy Review. Through Drama and Documentaries I had some access to the channel
controllers and their offices of strategists, schedulers and broadcast analysts. In each place, fieldwork
involved observing and talking to people from all levels of the hierarchy, from script readers,
researchers, secretaries and receptionists to the many tiers of BBC creatives and bosses. To gain a
broader view of common developments across the corporation I interviewed executives and producers
from other parts of the BBC including Entertainments Group, the World Service, Radios 1 and 3,
Worldwide and the major regional centres. Occasionally, I did some broadcasting for Radio 3 and so
became a full participant. A high point was when I presented, with Geoffrey Smith and Roderick
Swanston, Radio 3's Millennium Eve show, an eighteen-hour overview of two thousand years of
western music. I kept my parallel selves - anthropologist and broadcaster - pretty much apart. But I
also experienced the arbitrary treatment dished out to freelancers - a kind of master/slave relationship when I presented another show a few years earlier. I thought it was good, but, without explanation, I
was never asked back. Such are the travails of the freelancer, and to be able to re -enter the doors of
Broadcasting House wearing my anthropologist's hat provided - I admit - a kind of solace.
The research also took a wider perspective, examining the BBC's place in the television industry. I
interviewed independent producers working with the BBC as well as representatives from other
broadcasters, the regulators, trade unions and trade organisations, and some television critics. I
attended industry and policy events, keeping a close eye on the drift of politics and ideas. All in all the
study generated some 220 interviews, eight large field diaries, and many files of documents and
cuttings.
The task of the anthropologist is to experience the culture from within. But gaining access to the
BBC was onerous from the outset and remained taxing throughout the fieldwork. The process of
gaining agreement to the study was like waging a military campaign. I planned assaults on several
fronts, and finally broke through the defences. The resulting agreement was initially on rather loose
terms; 'the lawyers' had been mentioned in an early phone call, but reference to this intimidating totem
never recurred. Yet in the Birt period I had no official aid whatsoever from the BBC and repeatedly
met barriers; any cooperation I did receive was limited and uneven, and access had continually to be
renegotiated. What seemed open to observation often in practice became closed from view. A thread
running through the book is my exclusion from a number of places that I wanted to observe. It signals
the closure, secrecy and paranoia that suffuses the BBC and its operations, a degree of which may be
understandable given the unceasing criticism faced by the corporation. However, with this in mind I
had agreed not to publish and to abstain from journalism for some years after the study. The closure
reeked of an arrogance often noted by observers of the BBC, and one that belies its rhetoric of
accountability. Inside the corporation the closure was acknowledged, and it resonated with the
experience of many staff. As an executive assistant charged with tightening control over my study said
to me in amazement, 'I can't understand how you ever got in here. This is the most secretive
organisation.' While frustrating in the extreme, there was a bleak humour in all of this: the ironies of
studying a public institution apparently committed to accountability, but reluctant to have its
operations scrutinised; of doing a fly-on-the-wall study of those who make fly-on-the-wall
documentaries.
At the same time, I was fortunate in gaining an extraordinary amount of cooperation from people
at all levels of the BBC. BBC Scotland, to name one location, made me completely welcome and gave
me astonishingly open access. I became a kind of psychoanalyst of the institution, in whom individuals entrusted private thoughts, theories and anxieties. The BBC was an unhappy place for many staff
in the nineties, and knowing that I was interviewing numerous others across the corporation, they
hoped I would piece together the larger picture - or, at least, a more integrated account than they felt
capable of. Thanks to their trust and the requisite persistence of the anthropologist, the fieldwork
proved rich.
*
Openness
I'm meeting Stephen Lambert, editor of Modem Times and a rising star in the Documentaries department. We sit in
his glass-walled office having coffee and he puts me at ease. I am going to spend time observing his section in the
coming weeks. Casually, he looks at his watch and says he has a meeting to go to. Would I like to come? We set off
down the endless corridors of the White City building and emerge at the office of his boss, the head of
Documentaries, Paul Hamann. We go in and Paul greets us and bids us sit down. Glancing at some papers he
launches into a discussion of Stephen's year: what has gone well, what routinely, what spectacularly. Stephen's first
act has been to bring me - the fly on the wall - along to his annual staff appraisal meeting.
Diary, 1997.
*
Thriller
I have hit a slow period. Trying to make the shift from Drama Group to watching the controllers and their
teams of commissioners and strategists, things have got sticky and little cooperation is forthcoming. A letter
suddenly arrives, apparently from five senior figures with whom I have had contact, although one - the head of
Drama Group - denies any knowledge of the letter or its demands. The senders require tighter control over my
study. My morale is low and I panic. I read about a woman who made an inside study of the Royal Court
Theatre and was prevented from publishing when the theatre management slapped an injunction on her. I
decide to take advice. Through a friend, I am put in touch with a civil liberties barrister who gives me his time
for free, for which I am enormously grateful. However, in the face of many grey areas, in my eyes he is unable
to give me black-and-white advice. It takes me an anxious month to write a four-page reply to the BBC letter,
yielding on some issues and reasoning why I should not on others. I never receive an acknowledgement or
reply to this letter.
I also contact a senior ex-BBC executive, no friend of the current regime, who almost made it to directorgeneral and will be able to tell me what kinds of tactics BBC management employ to deal with unwanted
attention. I meet this man, now running a large cultural organisation, in his plush office. Believing him to be an
intellectual, I have brought him one of my books as a gift. With aching condescension, he asks what I am
doing. Following my explanation, he smiles in an avuncular fashion and tells me to give up the study. Getting
into his stride, he says that BBC management are utterly ruthless, that 'if they don't like what you are doing,
they'll do anything to stop you publishing short of running you down in the street'. Dazed, and for all his
hyperbole, I find I am the victim of a genre deception! I had thought I was an anthropologist studying a
privileged and powerful tribe. Imperceptibly, the ground has shifted under my feet. I am in fact the protagonist
in a contemporary thriller set in the media world. Satisfied that he has accomplished a result - warning me off -
he bids me goodbye. I've had no offer to intercede, no discussion of the issues; it is hard to believe that he
has taken me seriously. Does this indicate, I reflect as I leave, the lack of respect in which acadernia is held by
the cultural establishment?
Diary, 1996.
*
The fieldwork dream
Mid-fieldwork, my access to observe the controller of BBC I, Michael Jackson, and team had come and gone without
clear reason. Jackson and I had met, warmly, seve times to discuss terms: yes, I could watch, he could well
understand the interest ethnographic work on scheduling and other controller activities; but could he wielc blue pencil
to my writings?, etc. Suddenly his secretary wouldn't answer my calls. I r a dream one night: I am meeting Michael in
his office on the sixth floor of T elevisi Centre, where he was famous for having stylish toys - vintage toy cars,
juggling ball on his coffee table, with which he played, walking around, while thinking and talking. \; are seated in
large sofas talking with several other people; it is an amiable, apparer informal occasion. Suddenly I notice he has
five darts in his hand with which he is pI; ing. One by one, he lobs the darts my way in a parabolic arc and they lodge
themseh in my ankle - my Achilles heel? It hurts and bleeds. I am shocked. He continues to chatting amiably to
people. I wake feeling terrified of the subtexts. Am I being toy with? What vulnerability of mine is he playing on?
Diary, IS
*
The book begins with an overview of the history of the BBC from Reith to the ascension of Labour to
government in 1997. Chapters 2 to 9 give a portrait the BBC's functioning in the Birt era, analysing a series
of cumulative challenges and obstacles thrown up in the path of programme-making a: consequence of the
structural changes introduced by the government and B management. These include the internal markets and
accounting procedures associated with Producer Choice; the rise of independent production, new business
operations and a culture of entrepreneurialism; the effects casualised employment and of contractual
relations between creative staff a the corporation; the introduction of the 'new public management' styled the
private sector, with its habitual recourse to auditing and management consultancy; and the relentless rise of
audience research within the BE Chapters 8 and 9 detail the impact of the changes on production, focusing
respectively on drama and on news, current affairs and documentaries, wit] case study of Newsnight.
Although aspects of BBC radio are included in t analysis, indicating developments across the corporation,
the focus of t book is primarily on television; and the BBC story gives wider insight into the enormous
changes that occurred in the later nineties in how British television is made. If the book does not
summarise the programme highlights of the Birt and Dyke periods, that remains for the historians.
Instead, in later chapters I probe selected areas of programming to exemplify larger issues. The last
chapter brings the story to the present. It outlines the changes made by Dyke as director-general and
assesses the first phase of the BBC's digital strategies. It considers the conditions that lay behind and
the impact of the Hutton crisis. It reflects on the dangers inherent in accelerating government
interventions in relation to the BBC. Finally, in the context of the rampant commercialisation and
globalisation of broadcasting, the Epilogue addresses the uncertain outlook for the BBC and the
future role of public service broadcasting in the twenty-first century.
Throughout the book I make lavish use of the wealth of ethnographic materials. Each chapter is
filled with 'stories': interviews, dialogues and meetings, scenes observed, anecdotes and revelations,
and excerpts from broadcasts and from other people's writings. Occasionally, I have provided a
fictional document based loosely on a real original. The stories can be lengthy, always with
illustrative point. They are often allusive or allegorical, and sometimes vaguely confessional. The
interviews and field diaries provide a vivid and eloquent counterpoint to the main analytical
narrative, but they also carry the narrative forward. More often than not they provide concrete
manifestations of the themes discussed; but some are only indirectly related and are intended to give
a broader sense of context and of the flavour of the times. Sometimes the stories clash and contradict
one another, conveying a sense of debate and disagreement; at other times they confirm one another.
There is no temporal unity to the stories: they range from 1995 to the present, although the majority
come from 1996 to 1998 and 2001. Interviews have been lightly edited, and to protect my sources
they are usually attributed generally via an individual's occupational status or location. Individuals
mentioned are sometimes disguised, except when the identity of the person in question is so obvious
as to make this meaningless.