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http://www.ex-bbc.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl >> News and Comment >> Tusa at BBCPA http://www.ex-bbc.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1429636906 Message started by Administrator on Apr 21^st, 2015, 5:22pm

Title: Tusa at BBCPA
Post by Administrator on Apr 21^st, 2015, 5:22pm

John Tusa was the guest speaker at the annual meeting of the BBC Pensioners' Association. He has made the text of his speech available to this forum:

LIVING WITH THE BBC
Speech by Sir John Tusa
Delivered at the BBC Pensioners’ Association Annual General Meeting
Friends House, Euston Road, London – April 16, 2015

Chairman, Colleagues, fellow BBC people –

It is a great pleasure to be with you today. I cannot greet you as “Fellow BBC Pensioners” because I am not one. I joined the BBC in September 1960 as a fully paid up and pensionable member of the BBC for life – pending good behaviour. When I resigned late in 1965, my decision was greeted with horror. Among the remarks made was “but you’re walking away from the BBC pension!” At the age of 29, the thought that keeping your pension should be the first idea in your mind when career seemed – and was – ludicrous. I ignored it. Soon after my independent pension adviser urged me to cash in my BBC pension earned over those first five years – “We will do far better for you elsewhere!” I wonder if he did? That is why I cannot greet you as “Fellow BBC Pensioners!”

It is good to be with you nevertheless. Because we are all BBC people, believers, I would guess, in public service broadcasting, in the amazing validity of the Reithian prescription of the BBC’s duty to “Inform, educate and entertain”. A former Newsnight colleague observed once that we and others broadcast as we did because we had been “sheep-dipped” in Reithian values – not, you understand, literally but metaphorically. For myself, I feel as if public service broadcasting runs through my spinal cord, supports it even. Another way of putting it is that such fundamental beliefs run in the DNA of many.

That does not mean that we all think alike, act alike, make the same programmes, vote the same way. But the existence of a shared approach, a common understanding represents a key part of my work in the BBC, and my lifetime career in and around it. When I resigned from the BBC staff in 1966, that did not mean that I was not a “BBC man”. Rather it meant that I was, but would be one in my own way.

In speaking this afternoon about where I think – and hope - the BBC stands today with post election charter renewal looming, I have taken a fresh look at things I said and wrote about the BBC over the past five years, They came in a variety of forms. I do this as a form of personal framework, a series of milestones for my own thoughts. Some may strike a chord with you; others may sound out of date; some you may judge will be just wrong. Nevertheless I offer them as one person’s running debate with the BBC and with himself, about one of the great defining British national institutions. That is why I call it Living with the BBC.

In this opening to a public lecture at Newcastle University in October 2011 looking back at fifty years in and around broadcasting and the BBC, I set down some personal markers and posed what I saw as some current questions.

QUOTE 1 2011 Newcastle University:

“I start from the firm belief, validated by evidence, that the BBC has not only been the most valuable cultural and informational institution of the entire nation over the last three quarters of a century but were it to cease performing this role then the nation would be immeasurably impoverished. That is my given. “

I then posed the questions that seemed particularly alive at the time. I hoped the BBC would address them for its own good but most importantly, for the good of us, its listeners and viewers. I made – and make - no apology for asking them.

QUOTE: “Why did the previous BBC Trust refuse to act on the public disquiet at the size of BBC senior salaries and the number of directors supposedly earning them? After all it took the incoming Trust Chairman, Lord Patten, just a few weeks to act on what he called a “toxic” issue and slash salaries and top staff at a stroke?

“When the BBC decided to move so much of its programme production making to Salford, was that based on programming and editorial considerations or on a wish to assist governmental regional policy? And is it part of the national broadcaster’s core purpose to be an instrument of regional policy?

“Why was the licence fee settlement, normally a process taking months, compressed into a few days during the comprehensive spending review? Why was the decision to absorb the BBC World Service into the licence fee for funding also taken in a matter of days and without assurances about the position of the World Service within the BBC?”

Now to ask such questions is not, as some occasionally allege, a sign of disloyalty – how can you be disloyal to an idea, to a principle? Being critical of, questioning about, an institution is quite another matter. This falls into the category of necessary public debate, public scrutiny.

I had tried to be part of this debate more directly in March 2011 when I submitted an aide memoire to the House of Lords Governance Committee. They were examining the way the BBC would be run once the BBC World Service became part of domestic licence fee funding. This was no slight matter of internal bureaucratic tinkering. It was radical, fundamental, important. I thought it needed challenging and scrutinising.

QUOTE 2 March 2011 House of Lords:

“In its comparatively short history, the BBC Trust, either in its composition or its inclination, has shown no ability to understand BBCWS, to assess or value its place within the BBC, or to defend its interests in a funding scrap with the government as the latest funding settlement demonstrates. It has not continued the sub-committee set up by BBC Governors after John Birt removed BBCWS programme making independence in 1995.

“How will the BBC Trust and BBC Management change their governance and membership to meet the new situation? Will the former special sub-committee to oversee BBCWS programming integrity be re-constituted? Will new specialist Trust members be recruited?

“Will the existing BBC WS budget – even after severe reductions imposed by the FCO – be ring fenced within the overall BBC budget. The Director General of the BBC has spoken of “modest investment” in BBCWS once it becomes a charge on the licence fee but will he admit that this will go no way to filling the gap created by the latest cuts? He has also spoken of “flexibility” over the future BBCWS budget which suggests anything but a ring-fenced provision.

“How will the Chairman of the BBC Trust and the Director General of the BBC explain to the domestic licence payers that the arrival of BBCWS in the portfolio of services is not a convenient milch cow from which funding can be diverted to domestic programming but a service with its own legitimate claims on the licence fee budget?

“How will the BBC Trust and BBC Executive Board guarantee and protect the distinctive voice of BBCWS journalism which has always been about a ‘view of the world for the world’ rather than ‘a view of the world as it affects Britain?’

“There are pressing issues facing the BBCWS’s ability to present Britain’s voice to the world and to play its part in the UK’s panoply of “soft power” instruments. Both are threatened by the latest FCO cuts. Should the BBC Trust, even now, take up the question of the damage done to Britain’s external voice by these cuts?”

I received a formal acknowledgement of my missive but could find no sign that it was taken into account. Nor could I find any evidence in the final report that the questions I identified had been recognised and addressed. That’s life. But does thus amount to good scrutiny? I am sure of one thing. The questions I identified are real questions, pressing questions, questions that deserved and deserve – no, need! – to be answered. Why were they ignored? My strong instinct is that they were just inconvenient, and inconvenient because they were too difficult and swam counter to prevailing assumptions.

Soon after, I asked for a meeting with the-then Chairman of the BBC Trust, Lord Patten, to discuss these matters. We met in his office in Great Portland Street on June 16, 2011. He began like a good politician with flattery. He had been looking back at the BBC tv coverage of the departure from Hong Kong which I had anchored and how good it was. We then moved on to my reasons for wanting the meeting. I was pretty sure that what I said was not what he usually heard from BBC executives. I thought he should hear it from somebody. Patten was in listening mode; there was no discussion as such. I had not expected much. So at the end of the meeting I left behind a different aide memoire from that I had sent to the Lords committee. It covered rather different ground. First was the speed of the decision – mentioned above - to merge BBCWS and domestic funding. This is how it went:

QUOTE 3 PATTEN Memoire June 2011

“It is still not clear how and why the decision to transfer funding of BBCWS from the FCO to the BBC was taken and taken so quickly. Normally such a profound and historic change would have been the subject of proposal, discussion, consultation, review and conclusion lasting months possibly years. In fact it was taken in days or possibly hours. Why? It is the classic case of the “dog that did not bark in the night”.

“The severe cuts visited on BBCWS by the FCO were rapidly condemned by the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in April. They even called on the government to reverse the cuts. Other Commons committees threw their weight behind the FAC. During the FAC hearing, several leading members urged the BBC to make a rallying cry for support to which, MPs made very clear, they would respond as they invariably had in the past. But, MPs emphasised, the BBC had to take the lead in its own defence.

“The BBC’s response to this very strong offer of political support was strange. Peter Horrocks couched it by repeating the need for BBCWS to make cuts like everyone else although the FAC had just said the BBC WS should be exempted from the cuts. This was hardly the rallying cry that MPs had asked for. Mark Thompson, asked to agree that BBCWS cuts could be made good by transferring “governance and capacity building” funds from the Department for International Development budget, made his lack of enthusiasm for such a solution, or his readiness to pursue it, very clear.

“No-one thinks such an intra-Whitehall budgetary transfer would be easy but it has logic and reality on its side and many MPs thought - and think - that it is winnable. The BBC’s apparent reluctance even to engage in the battle at any level was regarded as at least puzzling and within Bush House as incomprehensible.”

That decision, its speed its ruthlessness, still has to be explained. Was the BBC steam-rollered? Was it ambushed? Was it threatened? We still don’t know. Whatever the explanation, the consequence of merger raised deep questions about the nature of the BBCWS’s international news agendas. Did the BBC understand what they were? I explained my view to Lord Patten and I hoped not only to him.

QUOTE 4 PATTEN:

“Put simply, the editorial and programming mindset possessed and developed over decades by BBCWS is subtly but practically distinct from customary BBC domestic news and programming considerations. BBCWS news programming is not just a glorified, obsessive and possibly quirky foreign page of the news agenda. For the BBCWS, the globe is its enduring focus; for the domestic BBC the focus is, was and will be the UK and such parts of the global agenda as may impinge on domestic awareness from time to time. The difference between having the world as your first point of reference and having UK as the first is total and fundamental.

“Yet BBCWS editorial priorities and needs will now be addressed – sympathetically no doubt – from within a set of editorial and funding priorities that will and must in practice and in reality be driven by the domestic news agendas. This puts BBCWS editorial independence – and ultimately its entire effectiveness and relevance - at huge risk.

“It is grossly optimistic to believe that the very presence of BBCWS editorial thinking will have a leavening, broadening, beneficent effect on the hard core domestic agenda. Past experience speaks only of a determined resistance - or at best reluctance - to accept even parts of the BBCWS world view into the domestic way of looking at things. This should not be surprising, the agendas are distinct, the priorities are different, the knowledge, the awareness, the sensibility is different. To believe – to hope- that the former can flourish under the wings of a far more limited, domestic- based world view and news agenda flies in the face of long experience”.

I summed up for the Chairman’s benefit what I saw and continue to see as the key questions about BBC actions that deserve an answer:

QUOTE 5 PATTEN:

“How can the BBC Trust expand its horizons to be an active and informed partner in the regulation of BBCWS and the protection of its historic international standing?

“How can the distinctiveness and global relevance of BBCWS news and programming be protected within an otherwise all domestic editorial set of priorities?

Those questions in my mind await adequate answer. Another encounter with the “BBC Question” had taken place rather earlier – in May 2009 – and in very different circumstances. Those who win “Harkness Fellowships” for high level study in the United States at the end of their university years are deemed to be high flyers of the high flyers. Would I talk to their alumni club? This was an invitation I could not refuse as my diary entry of the time explains.

QUOTE 6 HARKNESS May 2009

“Later in the month, I was asked by alumni of the prestigious Harkness Fellowships – conferring on recent university graduates a two year travel and study fellowship to the United States – to talk to them about ‘BBC Values’. I was delighted to agree, not so much because of the subject, but because I would be the only person in the room who had been turned down for a Harkness fifty years ago. (Quite rightly as – apart from any other deficiencies – I appeared at the interview wearing my skiing clothes before catching the ski-train.) I suggested to the Harkness alumni that there were distinct periods of BBC internal policy that needed to be understood:

“There are four eras of BBC values associated with three BBC Directors General,” which I call simply ‘Reithian, Birtian, Dyke-ian and the present’. Lord Reith defined public service broadcasting; John Birt’s managerialism imposed business processes on broadcasting values; and Greg Dyke’s commercialism set a different direction. With Birt and Dyke in their different ways overlaying or ignoring core BBC public service beliefs, the result was confusion, contradiction whose resolution seemed to lie in internal regulation, compliance and rule making.

“Each of the current crises that became crises could be laid at the door of too much formal regulation, rigid and ineffective compliance and total lack of common sense. The BBC is still a public service-driven organisation with audience responsibilities – that needs stating and re-stating – and a belief in exceptional programmes about things that matter. As things stand, staff are confused and contemptuous. And the public is impressed neither by ‘neo-Birtian’ systems nor by rampant and inconsistent commercialism.”

My diary of May 2009 recalled another public occasion when BBC matters reared their head. At the Bushmen, the political documentary maker, Michael Cockerell, recalled the mood of the Birt-ite years: “If someone referred to ‘John’, you watched your words; if they said ‘Birt’ you knew you were safe; if it was ’John Birt’ you thought twice!” Then he challenged – what sort of Director General would I have been? I replied in the spirit of the moment, “more pragmatic, less managerially driven, far more people oriented, with a clearer articulation of values that would explain what the BBC was and why it did what it did”. Would that have been good enough? Who knows?”

BBC matters were seldom far from the news in 2011 whether the running sore of BBC top salaries - far too high;– the more immediate issue of the cuts being forced on the BBC World Service - too large; and BBC management’s response to those cuts - too feeble. I found myself thinking that if BBC leaders used words honestly and properly and turned those words into actions some problems might be. In those dark days of late 2011, I offered “Fourteen Antitheses” for the BBC to consider as it stood surrounded by inevitable challenge and often self-generated controversy. How might it think and behave?

QUOTE 7 2011:

“The BBC should:
• Restore the notion of trust in its working relationships. Instead it demands accountability.
• Rediscover and celebrate its long held values; organisations will run on values; they are straitjacketed by systems.
• Insist on programmes as programmes; they are not products, not technical composites of units of resource that are bundled up as products.
• Rely on ideas as the yardstick for accepting programmes rather than judging them by genres, categories or even quotas.
• Demand curiosity as the impulse for programmes rather than formulae.
• Search for originality rather than mere distinctiveness, a lesser notion.
• Believe in your audiences; they are demeaned by being treated as customers or consumers.
• Be confident in publicity for your programmes; beware of the domination and rigidities of marketing.
• Have ambitions rather than targets; have a strong sense of purpose rather than lists of objectives.
• Know where you want to go; ignore the direction of travel.
• Accept responsibility; do not take refuge in compliance.
• Use judgement in making decisions; it is far better than lists of risk analysis.
• Cling to quality; be suspicious of bench marking.”

And I concluded:

“If the true, human, rich, vocabulary of trust, values, programmes, ideas, curiosity, originality, audiences, publicity, beliefs, ambitions, purpose, responsibility, judgement, and quality was allowed to elbow out the dead, mechanical, reductive vocabulary of accountability, systems, process, genres, formulae, consumers, marketing, targets, objectives, distinctiveness, compliance, bench marking and risk analysis, what a great organisation the BBC could be. I believe such a shift of thinking and vocabulary would lead to a huge upsurge of energy, originality and creativity the staff would welcome and audiences would notice, respond to and love”.

More than three years on, I see no reason to alter one word of that assessment. Three years on after the complex editorial and managerial disaster of Newsnight and the Jimmy Savile affair; after the deepening opprobrium over BBC top salaries, proliferation of management posts and unjustified so-called “redundancy “ payoffs, questions about behaviour and values remain more rather than less relevant.

I talked the other day to an old friend who had worked in the great Radio Drama and Features department from 1960 onwards. It was a time of vast creativity originality and innovation. How, I asked, had he and his colleagues dealt with the matter of risk? “We were expected to take risks. How could you be original if you weren’t taking risks? Did we assess risk before starting to create a play or documentary? Of course not! First, we wouldn’t have known what it meant! Second, it would have been a creative nonsense!”

Has over careful management, planning and definition of programme ideas squeezed originality out of so much BBC Programme making? I wonder. I will watch and listen. I will continue my own debate and discussion about and with the BBC. That’s what “Living with the BBC” involves. After all it is in my DNA.

Title: Re: Tusa at BBCPA
Post by Annual Increment on Apr 22^nd, 2015, 10:53am

An excellent speech. The BBCPA were honoured?