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http://www.ex-bbc.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl >> News and Comment >> Tusa's angry letter http://www.ex-bbc.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1254046738 Message started by Administrator on Sep 27^th, 2009, 10:19am

Title: Tusa's angry letter
Post by Administrator on Sep 27^th, 2009, 10:19am

This is taken from the Times, September 26, 2009:

Letter to the BBC

Dear Sir Michael Lyons, Dear Mark Thompson

I will not pretend that this is an easy letter to write still less an enjoyable one. I have worked for the BBC for almost 50 years in one form or another. The BBC is in my DNA. Criticising the BBC — one of the great shapers of British culture and identity in the 20th Century — especially when it is under fire, is not something I would go out of my way to do.

I am also aware that someone who has once filled senior roles in an organisation has to be very careful when commenting on his successors. I risk appearing nostalgic — “it was better in our time!” which is not a position I adopt. I risk appearing out of date — after all, as a former Director General said of his critics, “They are just old soldiers polishing their medals!”

Why then write at all? Because I believe that the BBC is falling into a fundamental trap as it negotiates its way through critics and enemies of many stripes. You concentrate too much on what the BBC does for its audiences — and it does a lot too much, say your critics. I believe you pay too little attention to what listeners and viewers feel about how the BBC behaves. I can’t tell you how often people say of some BBC corporate action, “I didn’t expect the BBC to behave like that?”

This is not a wet, “touchy-feely” reaction to a great broadcaster. It’s about programmes, isn’t it? Yes, but because the BBC relates to so many parts of national life, it is not just about programmes, it is about the way the BBC acts as an institution. You may have made great strides in programme-making and the creation of new channels — though we all have our gripes about particular bits of the schedules — you may be in control of the “effective” side of your relationship with audiences, but I feel strongly that you have lost control — if you ever had it — over the “affective” side of your relationship with licence fee payers.

These feelings are important.

You must be aware that the reaction to issues such as BBC Worldwide’s purchase of “Lonely Planet”, Mark’s salary, BBC senior salaries in general, Jonathan Ross’s contract to name but a few, is not a shallow one. The intensity, and the constancy with which they are felt, suggest to me that these are bellwether issues, which the public expects you to address. I beg you, don’t kid yourselves that they will go away. They won’t because they strike to the heart of how the public believes the BBC — as a publicly funded broadcaster — ought to be behave. Failure to address them complicates and threatens to undermine the defence of the BBC that we all want you to continue making.

You will disagree with all or most of that. But don’t stop reading. I have some suggestions to help the BBC to re-connect to the way people would like to feel about it as an institution. Some are for you to do as Chairman of the BBC Trust, Michael; some for you, Mark, as Director General.

So here are some suggested action points for the Chairman of the BBC Trust. First, announce that Mark Thompson’s successor as Director General will be paid just half of the DG’s present salary. You will have no difficulty in recruiting at a “mere” £400k per annum. Second, announce that future recruitment to all other BBC senior posts will be scaled down pro-rata. While you are about it, get the remuneration committee to look at the scale of BBC pension provision. These actions are not (just) about saving cash; they are about the key public perception of how the BBC uses public money. At present, it doesn’t look too good. Should any would-be candidate pray in aid salaries in the private sector, tell them you will watch their march towards the glittering private sector prizes with huge interest.

Third, patch up your public quarrel with the Culture Secretary, Ben Bradshaw, very quickly. I know his own speech attacking you and calling for the abolition of the BBC Trust was spectacularly ill-judged; I know his department is holding its head in dismay; but the BBC cannot afford a row with its funding department. Help Ben Bradshaw out of his hole. You can help him to stop digging.

Fourth, sooner or later, the BBC will face external regulation. You are probably right to avoid the intrusive attentions of Ofcom. You should consider welcoming in the National Audit Office in a more thoroughgoing way. Almost twenty years ago, the BBC Governors decided — over my objections as then Managing Director — to allow the NAO in to scrutinise World Service funding and efficiency. By co-operating with the NAO and putting the question of the effectiveness of our funding department — the Foreign and Commonwealth Office — onto the table as well, the World Service emerged from NAO scrutiny with its operations and values endorsed. Ofcom or NAO? Go for the NAO.

There is, Mark, plenty for you to do in a similar vein. First, open up the matter of artists’ salaries. Pleading commercial confidentiality no longer washes. If any artist wants to walk to the private sector, you know the answer. No artist is bigger — or better — than the BBC. Remind them of that fact.

Second, talking of which, tell Jonathan Ross’s agent that since his contract was negotiated on the basis of “market rates”, now that the market has altered, you want to re-negotiate it in the light of changed conditions. I suspect that would be hugely popular and would help to dispel the view that the BBC is in thrall to the supposed power of the “talent”.

Third, examine the costs of the “compliance” regime and slim it down or abolish it. Editors are there to edit, to think, to create, not to concentrate on “compliance” with myriad guidelines and regulations. Take an axe to the marketing — too often, concerns about the particular niche a programme might — or might not — fit into prevents the idea from being realised.

Fourth, impose a moratorium on any new internally generated guidelines. Burn most of the existing volumes. Does anyone read them, still less know what they contain?

Finally, Mark, I believe you need to think harder about re-stating and reviewing the BBC’s internal sense of the values by which it works. As things stand, my impression is that after years of Birtian “managerialism” followed by Greg Dyke’s populism, BBC staff don’t know what are the BBC’s core values. Serving the audience, distinctiveness, efficiency, just aren’t enough. I guess most BBC staff are nourished by a deep stream of rather inchoate Reithianism. But Reith was a very long time ago and we need something both visionary and contemporary. Many BBC staff know the values by which they work. But they wonder if you do? Having worked together on “Newsnight” my hunch is that you do. Please put into words for the BBC in the 21st Century.

So there you are. I think you would have fun with this agenda. You would find it liberating. I believe the licence fee payers would say “Ah, now that’s the BBC should behave!” With them behind you, you could fight the real battles with your real enemies. I know what your advisers will say. But please don’t kid yourselves. The rather noisy public issues will not go away, and unless you address them, you are fighting for the BBC’s future on the big issues with one arm tied behind your backs.

— John Tusa (founder member of BBC 2 “Newsnight” in 1980, and MD BBC World Service from 1986 to 92)

Title: Re: Tusa's angry letter
Post by Administrator on Sep 27^th, 2009, 10:26am

This is taken from The Sunday Times, September 27, 2009.

After the pips, pay cuts at the BBC
John Tusa, the former head of the World Service, has a radical solution to the corporation's secrecy and excesses
by Camilla Long

Sir John Tusa appears at the door of his house in Islington, north London, in a White Rabbitish kind of meltdown. “Hello, hello, yes, yes,” he says, ushering me in. He is needed in Sevenoaks, Kent, in an hour or two — since he stopped running the BBC World Service and managing London’s Barbican arts centre he has been rushed off his feet with chairmanships — so it’s up the stairs two at a time and into the museum quiet of his sitting room, a sanctum sanctorum in shades of biscuit and cream that is so hushed, double-glazed and decorously neat that I half expect to find typed cards under the muted prints and glass-encased sculptures that line its walls.

Instead, Tusa is looking stern and tanned. In another room I think I detect the movements of his wife, the historian Ann Tusa, but he makes little small talk and doesn’t tell me where to sit. So I dive for a sofa and hope it’s the right choice because today Tusa, 73, is not only rushed, he is irritated — irritated because he has been thinking about the BBC, his old employer, “in terms of puzzlement and regret”, he says, sitting down with an expression of pain.

“It keeps on coming up: the directorgeneral’s salary, the huge pension pots or executive salaries. These things won’t go away because they’re about people’s feelings. That’s not soggy thinking. That is absolutely real. And that’s why I’ve written an open letter to the two men at the top.”

Well, who better than Tusa to give the BBC advice? He worked for the corporation for decades, starting as a trainee in 1960, fresh out of Cambridge. He helped to set up Newsnight, ran the World Service and read the One O’Clock News. He left in 1995 to head up the Barbican, and even though he is no longer anything to do with the corporation, it pains him to see his beloved institution constantly drubbed.

In the past 10 days alone Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, the corporation’s governing body, and Mark Thompson, the director-general, have faced countless attacks: on overspending from MPs — yes, MPs! — in response to the organisation’s ill-advised acquisition of Lonely Planet, the travel guide publisher, in 2007 for a rumoured £70m; a scheduling row over Strictly Come Dancing; and a brazen dressing-down from Ben Bradshaw, the culture secretary, who claimed the BBC Trust should be abolished only a few years after Labour had created it.

Bradshaw needs to have a “double whisky” behind closed doors with Lyons, says Tusa, but really Lyons should have one with him, too, and one of the first things Tusa would say, no doubt in the brisk, sonorous, memo-dictating tone that he’s using now — peppered as it is with “number ones” and “a’s” and “b’s” — would be to get rid of Lonely Planet.

“Say, ‘Made a mistake, accept it’,” he declares. Then take a look at salaries: “At the top, all the people who are paid more than the prime minister [47 BBC executives take home as much as or more than Gordon Brown; Thompson is on £834,000]. I’d be very surprised if they were worth that. There can’t be anybody who thinks that those sorts of salaries should be paid in a public sector organisation.

“It’s not that the BBC should pay ludicrously low salaries, but to suggest some sort of parity with the private sector I always thought was crazy. People feel that none of the BBC executives are worth those salaries. That may be unfair, but it’s what people feel, so you’ve got to do something about it.”

The solution, he says, is for “Michael Lyons to regain the initiative by saying, ‘Next time round, 50% off. We’re advertising for the job of director-general and the salary’s £400,000’. I mean, that’s a decent salary — or am I missing something?”

What’s to stop a big Beeb cheese from going to Channel 4 and earning double? “Running the BBC has to be one of the best media jobs in the world. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have people queuing up.”

We’ll have to wait years for that. Why not go the whole hog and replace Thompson now? “No, no. Absolutely not. I think he’s a very good, very serious and competent director-general. I worked with him on Newsnight all those years ago and have a very high regard for him. He will think his way through these problems. The BBC’s always had to fight its corner. To have a director-general and chairman who stand up for what they say is very important. In any case, BBC staff expect that.”

Still, he would happily slash Jonathan Ross’s pay packet, rumoured to be £18m over three years. “Twenty years ago the view was that no one was bigger than the BBC,” he says. “If any talent said, ‘I’m bigger and I need X’, the answer was, of course, ‘You’re fantastically talented, feel free’,” he makes a swooshing motion with his hands. “If you feel you can only employ the best-known and therefore likely highest-paid talent, if you don’t say, ‘We will create our own talent’, then you oughtn’t to be running [a media network].”

He doesn’t know how much Ross should be paid, but he’d love to know “the reasoning. I don’t think it’s acceptable any more for the public not to know what he’s paid and what the details of the contract are. He keeps on trotting out this thing about commercial confidentiality. You can do that in the private sector, but in the public sector different things are demanded”. Ross’s salary should be brought into line with market rates. “The market’s changed,” Tusa shrugs. “Let’s have a conversation.”

After all, when he was at the World Service there was nothing special about the salaries. “It wasn’t a problem because they were in line with the public sector,” he says. Back then, “I started on £50,000-£60,000 and ended up on £80,000-£90,000.” As for the BBC’s attempts to keep its accounts secret for “commercial” reasons, ducking the scrutiny of the National Audit Office, he points out with some indignation that the World Service, which is funded by the Foreign Office, submitted to public audits and the heavens didn’t collapse.

So he thinks the BBC should be brave and open its books. As for pensions: “All I can say is that the number of times people say, with real amazement, ‘Did you see what X’s pension pot is?’,” he sighs, suggesting a remuneration committee should look at the scheme, if only to set people’s minds at rest.

“The BBC’s behaviour is almost as important as how it makes programmes. You aren’t going to impoverish anybody by doing this.” He pauses. “By the way, I don’t have a BBC pension.” Obviously not, I laugh, or would you be saying that? But, still, where to stop — should everyone’s pension and salary be reconsidered?

“Oh no,” he says. “The producers that I see are certainly not overpaid. I think they are overworked. I am constantly struck and worried by the hours and the length of time that producers have to spend making programmes. Bearing in mind they are now doing jobs that years ago were probably done by two or three people.”

He is also horrified that programming seems to be driven by marketing directives rather than proper ideas.
“I know people who make and pitch programmes and they say that far too often the decision about something is not taken on the quality of the idea, more on marketing considerations.” Such as? “I’ll be specific: particular series, good idea, want to do it. But they say it’s got to be presented by a black British woman. That’s no doubt desirable, but were they discussing the quality of the programme? No.”

Although he is generally impressed with the quality, he has no time for the arts coverage on the BBC, particularly hand-flappy presenters such as Dan Cruickshank and Adam Hart-Davis: “Where are the ideas? Telling you how they feeeeeel. What I’d like is somebody telling me what they know, like Simon Schama.”

One programme he would like to abolish altogether would be BBC2’s The Culture Show: “First of all, the word ‘culture’ is very evasive: don’t talk about the,” he whispers, “arts! We’re frightened. Almost everything about it is talking down. Now, it’s got very intelligent people on it — Mark Kermode and Andrew Graham-Dixon — but the overall frame is you have to present it in terms that the youth audience will appreciate, or which you assume will accept.”

But I quite like The Culture Show, I say. I can’t cope with a highbrow dissection of Japanese opera at teatime on a Wednesday.

“Look,” he says. “What I’m trying to say is, keep my observation at a policy level: what I like or don’t like doesn’t matter ... I’m not making a moan about programming. I’m a heavy user.”

Marketing, he says, has forced programming to become discriminatory. “What they’re doing is saying there’s a niche called age and there’s a marketing concept called a young audience, so we’ll change that. Do I want to see older people? Not as such. I want to see people as they get older, treated according to their programme-making ability.”
Curiously, Tusa himself felt “too old” when he was sounded out four years ago to run the BBC Trust. “At an early stage I was talked to by headhunters,” he says, “ but I was never asked to do it.” Were you interested? “Sure. Up to the time that I thought about it, and then I thought that this is seriously crazy. Too old.”

His age doesn’t broadly bother him, although sometimes he does think: “Should I be charging around like this? And the answer is that I’d get very bored if I didn’t.” So he loads himself up with things such as chairing the University of the Arts London, the Wigmore Hall Trust and the Clore Leadership Programme, the latter of which “takes 25 fellows every year from the middle ranks of the arts and cultural world and helps them to become better arts leaders. I’m doing a series of programmes for Radio 4 ... Actually, I have really got to go”, he says, looking distracted.

Just one last question. What will your old friend Thompson think when he reads this? “Typical Tusa,” he says. “Bit of a pain. Some of my friends say, ‘Really, why don’t you shut up?’ There you are. Bit of a pain.”

Title: Re: Tusa's angry letter
Post by Administrator on Sep 27^th, 2009, 10:32am

This is taken from The Sunday Times, September 27, 2009

BBC’s big guns turn on broadcaster over excessive pay
by Maurice Chittenden

THE BBC has come under attack over claims of mismanagement and unreasonably high salaries from three of its most loyal servants.

Sir Christopher Bland, a former chairman of governors, said the corporation should “cut its coat” to match that of its commercial rivals. Its competitors have lost millions in advertising revenues while the BBC is shored up by the licence fee, which stands at £142.50.

Peter Sissons, the veteran newsreader and former presenter of Question Time who retired in the summer to write his memoirs, says the row over executive pay has demoralised the BBC’s journalists and left many feeling nothing but contempt for its managers.

Sir John Tusa, a former Newsnight presenter and head of the BBC World Service, has written an open letter to Mark Thompson, the director-general, asking him to cut his successor’s pay and that of other future executives by half and restore the corporation’s core values Bland, who is chairman of the Royal Shakespeare Company, said: “The BBC now has to review its position in view of the turnaround in its fortunes and in the light of everybody else’s [going] in the opposite direction.

“It’s unusual historically for the BBC to be the rich kids on the block. Now they are and ... while, for a moment, they might enjoy it what actually they have got to do is cut their coat according to other people’s cloth, not according to their own.

“It is quite a tough thing to do. Normally in the commercial world if you’re doing well you enjoy it, spend the money you have earned wisely to draw ahead of your competitors.

“The BBC can’t do that. It needs to begin to recognise that the world has changed pretty radically in the last 24 months.”

The BBC has already disclosed that 27 executives earn far more than the prime minister and another 20 are paid as least as much. Next month it will be forced to reveal details of the next tier of management pay, under freedom of information laws. It is also expected to release details of salaries paid to presenters and others, although without naming individuals.

“The row over perks and salaries took the breath away of people in the BBC newsroom. Most people had no idea this was going on among the top management or the number of people who were on the big money,” Sissons said.“My initial judgment was that the executives had lost the respect of the newsroom, but I began to realise it was more serious — or worse — than that and many in the newsroom held them in contempt.”

He added: “The newsroom feels rudderless. There is nothing that you would recognise as leadership, although there are layers of management. When I left, morale was at rock bottom. If you are working for managers who have forfeited respect and you perceive to be lining their own pockets, it leaves a lot of people distinctly unmotivated.

“The BBC needs management of international calibre and instead they have got a gang of people who are not up to the job. The political answer is to break it up and sell off big chunks so it can be managed by other people.”
Tusa said in his open letter to Thompson that the public had strong feelings about his salary and those of other BBC executives.

He added: “The intensity, and the constancy with which they are felt, suggest to me that these are bellwether issues which the public expects you to address.

“I beg you, don’t kid yourselves that they will go away. They won’t because they strike to the heart of how the public believes the BBC, as a publicly funded broadcaster, ought to be behave.”

The BBC said it would reply to Tusa’s letter.