Post by Teddy Bear on Aug 13, 2008 21:04:05 GMT
Great article that really hits the nail on the head for perspective showing the decline in quality from the BBC that was - to the BBC that is. Unfortunately a great man had to die to hammer it home.
Wogan's right. Today's BBC bosses care more about their pay than quality - and one man's legacy proves it
By Philip Norman
Last updated at 12:16 AM on 13th August 2008
Sir Bill Cotton, who has died aged 80, was unquestionably one of the giants of the BBC as we used to know it.
Giant in vision, in imagination, in comprehension of what the British wanted from the broadcasting service they finance. Giant in every respect, indeed, but his salary.
As the Corporation's head of light entertainment through most of the Seventies, the then plain Bill Cotton (always known in the American style as 'Junior' to distinguish him from his bandleader father) largely created what has come to be known as British TV's 'Golden Age', through classic series like Dad's Army, The Morecambe And Wise Show, Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Two Ronnies and Bruce Forsyth's Generation Game.
These shows, watched by tens of millions at a time, drew Britons of all ages and classes together to share innocent enjoyment, lavish glamour and (almost) smut-free laughter in a way that modern TV audiences will never know.
It might be said of Bill Cotton, as it was of Sir Christopher Wren: 'If you seek his monument, look around you.'
For many of the shows he commissioned 30 and more years ago are still being repeated, not only on mainstream BBC channels but on digital ones too.
Far from being dated, these shows seem more belligerently alive and original than ever, viewed against today's limp sitcoms and foulmouthed, characterless young comics.
One digital channel I regularly visit seems to present The Two Ronnies around the clock, while Dad's Army was recently the subject of an entire 'tribute' show.
No one is suggesting, of course, that the benign Sir Bill was short of a bob or two.
As light entertainment chief, then controller of BBC1 and managing director of television before retiring in 1987, he would have been on a decent rate, with a no doubt bottomless expense account for wooing the likes of Eric, Ernie and Brucie over extravagant lunches.
But in all the years that Bill Cotton was doing his job so magnificently at the Beeb - giving the country a common culture when it was otherwise socially rent apart by industrial strife and hyper-inflation - there was never so much as a whisper of adverse comment in the media about his salary, let alone whether or not he deserved it.
That was because he was a true BBC man in the Lord Reith tradition, who put public service over personal gain and found his greatest reward in working for the world's finest broadcasting service.
'Cotton's loyalty to the BBC was unshakeable', says ITV executive chairman Michael Grade, one of numerous younger talents who proudly called themselves 'Uncle Bill's apprentices'.
'He turned down multiple offers of riches from ITV companies to stay with the Corporation.'
How poignant, then, that Cotton's death should come just as the insatiable greed and irredeemable mediocrity of today's BBC mandarins come under scrutiny yet again.
Even for some of its highest paid 'talent', apparently, the executive snouts in the trough have become too much.
Sir Terry Wogan - who earns a reputed £800,000 per year from the Corporation, including £150,000 for presenting the Eurovision Song Contest - has lambasted its senior management in an interview with Radio Times to mark his 70th birthday.
According to the usually emollient Sir Terry, today's BBC bosses are more concerned with their pay packets than with the 'old-fashioned thoroughness and commitment' that oversaw his own rise from radio DJ to television superstardom during the later Bill Cotton years.
Sir Terry Wogan: BBC bosses are more concerned with their pay packets than 'commitment'
There has been no let-up in the money-grubbing even after a year that has seen the Corporation's once peerless reputation plunge to an all-time low with a series of scandals over fakery and rigged phone-voting involving 'national treasure' shows such as Blue Peter and even Comic Relief.
To keep the ghosts of great documentary-makers like Richard Dimbleby and James Mossman spinning in their graves, some film footage of the Queen was edited to make it appear as if she was walking out of a photographic session in a hissy-fit.
Yet this season of disaster and ignominy has seen the BBC's director general, Mark Thompson, and nine senior colleagues boost their pay way above inflation, by an average 11 per cent.
Jana Bennett, the pretentiously titled 'director of vision' - on whose watch the damaging TV fakery scandals happened - has seen her salary rise by 24 per cent to £536,000 per year. Jenny Abramsky, the 'director of audio', has received a 27 per cent rise at £419,000, and is set to retire with an annual pension of £190,000.
To be fair, the D-G himself has nobly refrained from taking a bonus of £60,000 - but on his own £816,000 a year, you might think, he can afford to.
In the same public spirit, Bennett and Abramsky are sacrificing 40per cent of their bonuses, or £16,000 and £13,000 respectively.
In Bennett's case, at least, it has to be asked: why in thunder is she still in her job at all, let alone taking a bonus?
Had an old-time BBC executive of Bill Cotton's stature presided over such a dismal catalogue of chicanery - inconceivable though the thought is - he would instantly have fallen on his own sword.
But Bennett's regime in 'vision' anyway seems to me of doubtful distinction.
In BBC handouts, her two main achievements are said to have been 'reclaiming' Saturday nights for BBC1 by putting on ballroom dancing, and Bill Oddie's Springwatch.
To an old-style TV supremo like Bill Cotton, these would merely have been notes in the margin.
BBC management has also been castigated for offering ludicrously lucrative contracts to 'stars' like Jonathan Ross and Jeremy Clarkson (a reputed £18 million over three years in Ross's case) to prevent them being lured away by rival networks.
The rationale for rewarding Ross on this gargantuan scale is the same as for paying the BBC's own bosses their whacking salaries, bonuses and pensions.
Whether the commodity be creative or managerial talent, so the mantra goes, you have to pay the 'market' rate for the very best.
This is surely a fallacy. While there may be a market rate for senior executives in industry or aviation, the BBC is an organisation - an organism - unique unto itself.
With its unlimited access into our homes, and influence over our tastes and trends, it dictates what the market is.
If it were to decide that the market rate for a long-haired, foul-mouthed chat-show presenter with borderline attention deficit syndrome is not £18million but £1,800, the market would adjust accordingly.
Bill Cotton, of course, operated in a privileged era when a head of light entertainment could have an idea for a show, then talk some star like Bruce Forsyth into fronting it, without any of the dreadful modern apparatus of committees and management speak.
The BBC in those days was not afraid of the Government, nor terrified of stereotyping (remember the Black and White Minstrels?).
Yet Cotton was no stranger to the ratings war that dictates the modern BBC's every move.
The great regret of his career was losing Morecambe and Wise to ITV in 1978 after Eric and Ernie decided that the privilege of serving Auntie was no longer reward enough.
What made Cotton great was his willingness to gamble on new, untried talent. Dad's Army, Monty Python and The Two Ronnies all made stars out of virtual unknowns.
If the managerial pygmies of today's BBC would take just one small leaf out of his book, they might start to earn their money.
By Philip Norman
Last updated at 12:16 AM on 13th August 2008
Sir Bill Cotton, who has died aged 80, was unquestionably one of the giants of the BBC as we used to know it.
Giant in vision, in imagination, in comprehension of what the British wanted from the broadcasting service they finance. Giant in every respect, indeed, but his salary.
As the Corporation's head of light entertainment through most of the Seventies, the then plain Bill Cotton (always known in the American style as 'Junior' to distinguish him from his bandleader father) largely created what has come to be known as British TV's 'Golden Age', through classic series like Dad's Army, The Morecambe And Wise Show, Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Two Ronnies and Bruce Forsyth's Generation Game.
These shows, watched by tens of millions at a time, drew Britons of all ages and classes together to share innocent enjoyment, lavish glamour and (almost) smut-free laughter in a way that modern TV audiences will never know.
It might be said of Bill Cotton, as it was of Sir Christopher Wren: 'If you seek his monument, look around you.'
For many of the shows he commissioned 30 and more years ago are still being repeated, not only on mainstream BBC channels but on digital ones too.
Far from being dated, these shows seem more belligerently alive and original than ever, viewed against today's limp sitcoms and foulmouthed, characterless young comics.
One digital channel I regularly visit seems to present The Two Ronnies around the clock, while Dad's Army was recently the subject of an entire 'tribute' show.
No one is suggesting, of course, that the benign Sir Bill was short of a bob or two.
As light entertainment chief, then controller of BBC1 and managing director of television before retiring in 1987, he would have been on a decent rate, with a no doubt bottomless expense account for wooing the likes of Eric, Ernie and Brucie over extravagant lunches.
But in all the years that Bill Cotton was doing his job so magnificently at the Beeb - giving the country a common culture when it was otherwise socially rent apart by industrial strife and hyper-inflation - there was never so much as a whisper of adverse comment in the media about his salary, let alone whether or not he deserved it.
That was because he was a true BBC man in the Lord Reith tradition, who put public service over personal gain and found his greatest reward in working for the world's finest broadcasting service.
'Cotton's loyalty to the BBC was unshakeable', says ITV executive chairman Michael Grade, one of numerous younger talents who proudly called themselves 'Uncle Bill's apprentices'.
'He turned down multiple offers of riches from ITV companies to stay with the Corporation.'
How poignant, then, that Cotton's death should come just as the insatiable greed and irredeemable mediocrity of today's BBC mandarins come under scrutiny yet again.
Even for some of its highest paid 'talent', apparently, the executive snouts in the trough have become too much.
Sir Terry Wogan - who earns a reputed £800,000 per year from the Corporation, including £150,000 for presenting the Eurovision Song Contest - has lambasted its senior management in an interview with Radio Times to mark his 70th birthday.
According to the usually emollient Sir Terry, today's BBC bosses are more concerned with their pay packets than with the 'old-fashioned thoroughness and commitment' that oversaw his own rise from radio DJ to television superstardom during the later Bill Cotton years.
Sir Terry Wogan: BBC bosses are more concerned with their pay packets than 'commitment'
There has been no let-up in the money-grubbing even after a year that has seen the Corporation's once peerless reputation plunge to an all-time low with a series of scandals over fakery and rigged phone-voting involving 'national treasure' shows such as Blue Peter and even Comic Relief.
To keep the ghosts of great documentary-makers like Richard Dimbleby and James Mossman spinning in their graves, some film footage of the Queen was edited to make it appear as if she was walking out of a photographic session in a hissy-fit.
Yet this season of disaster and ignominy has seen the BBC's director general, Mark Thompson, and nine senior colleagues boost their pay way above inflation, by an average 11 per cent.
Jana Bennett, the pretentiously titled 'director of vision' - on whose watch the damaging TV fakery scandals happened - has seen her salary rise by 24 per cent to £536,000 per year. Jenny Abramsky, the 'director of audio', has received a 27 per cent rise at £419,000, and is set to retire with an annual pension of £190,000.
To be fair, the D-G himself has nobly refrained from taking a bonus of £60,000 - but on his own £816,000 a year, you might think, he can afford to.
In the same public spirit, Bennett and Abramsky are sacrificing 40per cent of their bonuses, or £16,000 and £13,000 respectively.
In Bennett's case, at least, it has to be asked: why in thunder is she still in her job at all, let alone taking a bonus?
Had an old-time BBC executive of Bill Cotton's stature presided over such a dismal catalogue of chicanery - inconceivable though the thought is - he would instantly have fallen on his own sword.
But Bennett's regime in 'vision' anyway seems to me of doubtful distinction.
In BBC handouts, her two main achievements are said to have been 'reclaiming' Saturday nights for BBC1 by putting on ballroom dancing, and Bill Oddie's Springwatch.
To an old-style TV supremo like Bill Cotton, these would merely have been notes in the margin.
BBC management has also been castigated for offering ludicrously lucrative contracts to 'stars' like Jonathan Ross and Jeremy Clarkson (a reputed £18 million over three years in Ross's case) to prevent them being lured away by rival networks.
The rationale for rewarding Ross on this gargantuan scale is the same as for paying the BBC's own bosses their whacking salaries, bonuses and pensions.
Whether the commodity be creative or managerial talent, so the mantra goes, you have to pay the 'market' rate for the very best.
This is surely a fallacy. While there may be a market rate for senior executives in industry or aviation, the BBC is an organisation - an organism - unique unto itself.
With its unlimited access into our homes, and influence over our tastes and trends, it dictates what the market is.
If it were to decide that the market rate for a long-haired, foul-mouthed chat-show presenter with borderline attention deficit syndrome is not £18million but £1,800, the market would adjust accordingly.
Bill Cotton, of course, operated in a privileged era when a head of light entertainment could have an idea for a show, then talk some star like Bruce Forsyth into fronting it, without any of the dreadful modern apparatus of committees and management speak.
The BBC in those days was not afraid of the Government, nor terrified of stereotyping (remember the Black and White Minstrels?).
Yet Cotton was no stranger to the ratings war that dictates the modern BBC's every move.
The great regret of his career was losing Morecambe and Wise to ITV in 1978 after Eric and Ernie decided that the privilege of serving Auntie was no longer reward enough.
What made Cotton great was his willingness to gamble on new, untried talent. Dad's Army, Monty Python and The Two Ronnies all made stars out of virtual unknowns.
If the managerial pygmies of today's BBC would take just one small leaf out of his book, they might start to earn their money.