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.”