Post by Teddy Bear on Oct 12, 2009 22:28:17 GMT
In a historic day for the Evening Standard, when it has become a free newspaper, one of its journalists has come out with a fine and comprehensive article on the internal state of the BBC.
(hat-tip to DB at Biased BBC Blog)
(hat-tip to DB at Biased BBC Blog)
Fear and loathing inside the BBC
Stephen Robinson
A BBC reporter, asked for his assessment of the quality of the management of the corporation, answers the question with an anecdote.
He recalls how he was walking through Television Centre a few days ago and observed Jana Bennett.
Bennett is Head of Vision, which is another way of saying she oversees the other executives who oversee television and the BBC's internet output, for which she is rewarded with a salary package of £536,000.
She is one of the 47 BBC executives who is paid more than the £197,000 earned a year by the British Prime Minister.
"She was standing surrounded by a bunch of her acolytes as she held forth. They weren't quite bowing in her presence but they were certainly fawning over her. It was ridiculous. And I thought, what does she actually do for the BBC? What is the point of her?"
The reporter is adamant that I must not use his name, or even reveal which branch of the BBC he works in for he let his anger show when his programme-making budget was slashed again and he is now cast as a member of the awkward squad.
He cannot conceal his loathing for the interlocking layers of highly paid managers, of questionable competence, who smother the programme-makers.
The irony of this culture of silence is not lost on him. "My job as a reporter is to get people to speak frankly but if it was known I was talking in what I believe is the public interest about a public institution, I would be fired," he says.
In his demand for anonymity, the reporter is certainly not being overdramatic, because his fear in talking about the institution he still just about adores, in the manner of an abused lover, is shared by numerous past and present BBC staffers interviewed for these articles. There is an institutional terror of talking publicly about the fears that have dominated the conscious hours of everyone who works there.
The BBC is currently assailed from all sides by hostile public reaction to the salaries of its executives, the remuneration of its "talent", and the awfulness of much of its output, particularly its television.
But for the people who work there, the primary cause of anxiety and alienation is rather the stifling, enervating effects of the vast BBC bureaucracy, and its militant new outrider, Compliance.
One news editor working at Millbank, newly promoted, recalls being summoned to a management away-day team-building exercise.
"Congratulations," the management trainee man told the group, "you are now part of the elite cadre of the top 2,000 BBC managers." The journalist understandably wanted to cut his own throat.
The Jana Bennett critic describes the effect of this pressure as "like a giant inverted triangle bearing down on those of us still trying to make programmes".
The number of producers and researchers has been slashed so that in many current affairs programmes the reporter is working alone, without any oversight, and no back-up in the office to check facts.
Meanwhile, reporters and editors live in fear of any sort of row which might trigger the dreaded outcome of a "Compliance Audit", which often follows a charge of bias or bad taste, when teams of officials will descend to the editorial floor to make sure that reporter, editor and producer all ticked the correct boxes.
Various seemingly unrelated factors have combined to create the current state of crisis at the BBC but the trigger for recent headlines has been the fiasco of the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand affair and their bullying of the actor Andrew Sachs.
The incident has since metastasised into a wider general bafflement over the scale of salaries which BBC executives award themselves and their stars.
A series of interviews for this investigation reveals that Bennett, a 30-year BBC lifer, is unpopular within the corporation.
But in the way all office rivalries generally relate to puny detail, BBC journalists seize on the trivia that emerged from the BBC's belated stab at transparency in publishing the expenses of its senior executives.
Bennett spent £100 of licence-payers' money in sending flowers to Jonathan Ross, claimed £35 to have her hair styled before an interview, and thought contract discussions with Jeremy Paxman should be conducted over a lunch for which she claimed £231.55.
Most bizarrely, she claimed £500 when her handbag was stolen "while on official BBC business", though it seems ultimately the cost was picked up by her insurers rather than the BBC.
Such are the financial details that are guaranteed to inflame office rivalries. Mark Byford is deputy director-general, a job title that no one inside the corporation understands, and which used not to exist.
Staffers anyway prefer to call him Mark Bypass ("as in personality", a producer explains).
As ultimate "head of all its journalisms", he presumably oversees Bennett as she oversees all the other executives.
No doubt he works extremely hard, but despite the splendid ambition of his role and his salary package of more than half a million, he files his expenses with the zeal of a cub reporter on the Ham and High rubbing along on £14,000 a year.
Last year, Byford put in claims for newspapers of £1.25 a go, and £3.60 for his train ticket to an England/Scotland international, though it is not explained on the published form why attending a rugby match at the weekend is deemed a working expense for the deputy director-general with no specific oversight role in sport.
But those who speak out against Mr Byford do not care much about these, or even his claim (£3) for withdrawing money from an Israeli cash machine during a working visit.
But they are especially cross that a man on more than half a million pounds a year charged licence payers £14.99 for a history of Queen's Park Rangers football club given to a departing colleague.
Several present and former BBC staffers lamented to the Evening Standard how the traditional camaraderie has been destroyed. Before the explosion in salaries, which gathered pace in the John Birt era but built up steam during the rule of Greg Dyke, everyone felt underpaid at the BBC.
But that was regarded as the flipside of working in public-service broadcasting.
Now vast salaries and commensurate pension allowances are justified on the grounds of stopping a drift of talent to the private sector.
This argument has disintegrated, given the advertising crash and the parlous financial state of ITV, Channel 4 and Five.
"Where on earth are these dozens of executives on more that £200,000 supposed to be going?," asks one BBC reporter. "They are literally unemployable outside the BBC."
One former executive, who has since turned freelance, was involved for a while in setting salaries. She said the entire process was bizarre.
Various pressures would be applied, and deals struck to justify specific little bundles of cash and benefits being chucked at those deemed to be stars.
There is particular fury across the news operation at the tendency of "stars" to be given salary bumps out of separate budgets for bringing glamour to the dry world of documentary and news gathering.
For instance, on top of a rumoured basic package of close to £1 million for his Radio 2 show, Jeremy Vine is understood to be paid a further £250,000 for Panorama and other work when it is clear that in some editions of Panorama he has little input beyond reading out a few sentences.
Vine and Jeremy Paxman are said by BBC colleagues to be locked into an ultra-competitive contest about their respective salaries.
Reporters of the old-school wince not just at this but at the patronising way BBC executives feel viewers of serious programmes need chewier subjects to be made more accessible to the dimmer licence-fee payers through the input of celebrities.
Recent headlines have been generated by Jonathan Ross's £6 million-a-year contract but salary inflation has gathered pace even among those who, though familiar faces, are not by any definition "stars".
For instance, blonde, Mandarin-speaking Emily Maitlis is reported by the Sunday Times to be earning £650,000 a year, even though she does not have her own broadcasting slot.
Maitlis is one of several BBC presenters who ,with the corporation's legal assistance, turned themselves into a service company to save substantial tax bills, in her case £75,000 a year.
Fiona Bruce (BBC remuneration, £800,000), Jeremy Paxman (£1 million) and James Naughtie have similar arrangements despite effectively being full-time employees, saving themselves tens of thousands of pounds a year as the 50 per cent top rate comes into view.
"When I joined the BBC everyone was underpaid, so that was fine," recalls Tracey Scoffield, who now has a private production company and is one of the few former BBC staffers still working in television who is prepared to speak on the record.
She left the corporation five years ago, shortly after her 10-year employment anniversary when she got a letter from Human Resources awarding her an extra half-day's holiday a year.
"I thought, God, I've got to get out of this place," she says, and she did, not realising how miserable she had become working there.
This is a common observation from BBC people who leave the corporation to go freelance or join independent companies.
Scoffield stresses that the BBC is still full of highly creative and talented people who work extremely hard but the overall ethos of the place she describes as soul-destroying.
"Most senior people at the BBC spend their days in meetings. There is total paralysis, no one is empowered to take decisions. It's like working in the NHS or in education - meetings, meetings."
Though the BBC speaks the modish corporate language about investing in people, Scoffield says it is a strangely bad employer. "They're just not good to their staff. You're not praised or rewarded for good work.
"They talk endlessly about empowering you but actually they keep you in your place. One is endlessly summoned for 'appraisals', which in-house are known as 'reprisals', for that is when you are put back in your box."
One veteran BBC presenter, a household name who does not want to be identified, says the central problem with the corporation now is its size. "We have become so big, so dominant, that there's nothing institutional left for us to aim at," he says, noting that when he joined the BBC many years ago bosses were still focused on staying competitive with ITN news output, or the big dramas then still made by the ITV companies.
"But that ambition has gone, and the driving institutional imperative is not to make any cock-ups like the Ross affair."
For him, Mark Thompson, the BBC's director-general, has failed to answer the central question for the 17,000 members of staff, not including thousands more freelancers.
"What is this BBC for? Mark Thompson has not communicated to us what the BBC is for, and I'm not sure he actually knows."
This presenter said he was unaware of the fact that Vine's already vast Radio 2 salary was topped up so significantly for his work on Panorama. (The BBC, following its familiar practice of declining to comment on the salaries of Talent, will not confirm the exact figure.)
Compliance is the nightmare for programme makers, the presenter agreed, for an audit can be triggered by nothing more than a polemical piece in the Daily Mail.
BBC people have huge contempt for the Mail yet they flatter its power by being terrified that one article could trigger a programme editor to having their collar felt by the corporation's Compliance people.
"I was making a programme and I had Compliance down on me fretting about language that I was using about mental illness," he said.
"The Mail had run a piece, and I said, don't you want this programme to be noticed? The word I got back was: no we don't."
John Humprhys is one of the few current BBC staff who will talk publicly about the goings-on in the corporation.
When I tell him that I have spoken to numerous utterly miserable members of BBC staff, Humphrys laughs.
"I have never known a time in my 45 years at the BBC when morale was not said to be 'rock bottom', when it has not felt from the inside that it is under attack from politicians. That's the nature of an organisation like this."
He concedes that the fiasco of Jonathan Ross's £6 million annual remuneration - which is not far off the entire budget for the Today programme - has caused damage to the BBC's standing.
But he adds that it was caused by the corporation's consistent terror of losing the younger audience, which is not an unreasonable concern.
Several other past and present BBC people emphasised that the BBC spends far too much time talking to itself, and not nearly enough engaging with the outside world, or with its paymasters, the licence-fee payers.
One of the oddest things about talking to BBC people is that they will spend half an hour sounding off about the horrors of the institution, of its bureaucratic culture, of the shameful way its senior executives reward themselves ludicrous amounts of public money.
And then those journalists will say: "I hope you're not writing a Right-wing newspaper attack on the BBC." Everyone spoken to for this series stressed that they back the principle of the BBC as a public-interest broadcaster, and uphold its licence-fee funding model.
As they grumble about the bureaucracy and poor management, most BBC people concede or stress that much of the output remains very good.
Indeed, radio output may never have been better; much of the television drama remains very good, though there is less of it.
BBC Four has done well in pioneering a new form of relatively low-budget drama, and moving away from the familiar bonnet dramas the corporation has excelled at for years.
But the problem remains of how an institution so top heavy, so weighed down by centralised management, can reform itself.
An on-air reporter says it is the second-rate programme-making staff who get shunted up the management ladder.
"It's insane," he says. "We have one of the largest media organisations in the world run by jobbing journalists who couldn't hack it.
"In any private organisation they would eventually be fired, but in the BBC they just keep on climbing up the ladder."
Oddly, though almost everyone inside the BBC, and its former staffers, back the notion of the licence fee, there is widespread pessimism over the corporation's prospects for changing itself.
"The warning here is Gorbachev. Once you start trying to reform an organisation such as the BBC, it collapses, just like the old Soviet Union," says one well-known presenter. "Who, as director-general, is going to say, let's make this place smaller, let's reduce all the salaries, including mine?"
Stephen Robinson
A BBC reporter, asked for his assessment of the quality of the management of the corporation, answers the question with an anecdote.
He recalls how he was walking through Television Centre a few days ago and observed Jana Bennett.
Bennett is Head of Vision, which is another way of saying she oversees the other executives who oversee television and the BBC's internet output, for which she is rewarded with a salary package of £536,000.
She is one of the 47 BBC executives who is paid more than the £197,000 earned a year by the British Prime Minister.
"She was standing surrounded by a bunch of her acolytes as she held forth. They weren't quite bowing in her presence but they were certainly fawning over her. It was ridiculous. And I thought, what does she actually do for the BBC? What is the point of her?"
The reporter is adamant that I must not use his name, or even reveal which branch of the BBC he works in for he let his anger show when his programme-making budget was slashed again and he is now cast as a member of the awkward squad.
He cannot conceal his loathing for the interlocking layers of highly paid managers, of questionable competence, who smother the programme-makers.
The irony of this culture of silence is not lost on him. "My job as a reporter is to get people to speak frankly but if it was known I was talking in what I believe is the public interest about a public institution, I would be fired," he says.
In his demand for anonymity, the reporter is certainly not being overdramatic, because his fear in talking about the institution he still just about adores, in the manner of an abused lover, is shared by numerous past and present BBC staffers interviewed for these articles. There is an institutional terror of talking publicly about the fears that have dominated the conscious hours of everyone who works there.
The BBC is currently assailed from all sides by hostile public reaction to the salaries of its executives, the remuneration of its "talent", and the awfulness of much of its output, particularly its television.
But for the people who work there, the primary cause of anxiety and alienation is rather the stifling, enervating effects of the vast BBC bureaucracy, and its militant new outrider, Compliance.
One news editor working at Millbank, newly promoted, recalls being summoned to a management away-day team-building exercise.
"Congratulations," the management trainee man told the group, "you are now part of the elite cadre of the top 2,000 BBC managers." The journalist understandably wanted to cut his own throat.
The Jana Bennett critic describes the effect of this pressure as "like a giant inverted triangle bearing down on those of us still trying to make programmes".
The number of producers and researchers has been slashed so that in many current affairs programmes the reporter is working alone, without any oversight, and no back-up in the office to check facts.
Meanwhile, reporters and editors live in fear of any sort of row which might trigger the dreaded outcome of a "Compliance Audit", which often follows a charge of bias or bad taste, when teams of officials will descend to the editorial floor to make sure that reporter, editor and producer all ticked the correct boxes.
Various seemingly unrelated factors have combined to create the current state of crisis at the BBC but the trigger for recent headlines has been the fiasco of the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand affair and their bullying of the actor Andrew Sachs.
The incident has since metastasised into a wider general bafflement over the scale of salaries which BBC executives award themselves and their stars.
A series of interviews for this investigation reveals that Bennett, a 30-year BBC lifer, is unpopular within the corporation.
But in the way all office rivalries generally relate to puny detail, BBC journalists seize on the trivia that emerged from the BBC's belated stab at transparency in publishing the expenses of its senior executives.
Bennett spent £100 of licence-payers' money in sending flowers to Jonathan Ross, claimed £35 to have her hair styled before an interview, and thought contract discussions with Jeremy Paxman should be conducted over a lunch for which she claimed £231.55.
Most bizarrely, she claimed £500 when her handbag was stolen "while on official BBC business", though it seems ultimately the cost was picked up by her insurers rather than the BBC.
Such are the financial details that are guaranteed to inflame office rivalries. Mark Byford is deputy director-general, a job title that no one inside the corporation understands, and which used not to exist.
Staffers anyway prefer to call him Mark Bypass ("as in personality", a producer explains).
As ultimate "head of all its journalisms", he presumably oversees Bennett as she oversees all the other executives.
No doubt he works extremely hard, but despite the splendid ambition of his role and his salary package of more than half a million, he files his expenses with the zeal of a cub reporter on the Ham and High rubbing along on £14,000 a year.
Last year, Byford put in claims for newspapers of £1.25 a go, and £3.60 for his train ticket to an England/Scotland international, though it is not explained on the published form why attending a rugby match at the weekend is deemed a working expense for the deputy director-general with no specific oversight role in sport.
But those who speak out against Mr Byford do not care much about these, or even his claim (£3) for withdrawing money from an Israeli cash machine during a working visit.
But they are especially cross that a man on more than half a million pounds a year charged licence payers £14.99 for a history of Queen's Park Rangers football club given to a departing colleague.
Several present and former BBC staffers lamented to the Evening Standard how the traditional camaraderie has been destroyed. Before the explosion in salaries, which gathered pace in the John Birt era but built up steam during the rule of Greg Dyke, everyone felt underpaid at the BBC.
But that was regarded as the flipside of working in public-service broadcasting.
Now vast salaries and commensurate pension allowances are justified on the grounds of stopping a drift of talent to the private sector.
This argument has disintegrated, given the advertising crash and the parlous financial state of ITV, Channel 4 and Five.
"Where on earth are these dozens of executives on more that £200,000 supposed to be going?," asks one BBC reporter. "They are literally unemployable outside the BBC."
One former executive, who has since turned freelance, was involved for a while in setting salaries. She said the entire process was bizarre.
Various pressures would be applied, and deals struck to justify specific little bundles of cash and benefits being chucked at those deemed to be stars.
There is particular fury across the news operation at the tendency of "stars" to be given salary bumps out of separate budgets for bringing glamour to the dry world of documentary and news gathering.
For instance, on top of a rumoured basic package of close to £1 million for his Radio 2 show, Jeremy Vine is understood to be paid a further £250,000 for Panorama and other work when it is clear that in some editions of Panorama he has little input beyond reading out a few sentences.
Vine and Jeremy Paxman are said by BBC colleagues to be locked into an ultra-competitive contest about their respective salaries.
Reporters of the old-school wince not just at this but at the patronising way BBC executives feel viewers of serious programmes need chewier subjects to be made more accessible to the dimmer licence-fee payers through the input of celebrities.
Recent headlines have been generated by Jonathan Ross's £6 million-a-year contract but salary inflation has gathered pace even among those who, though familiar faces, are not by any definition "stars".
For instance, blonde, Mandarin-speaking Emily Maitlis is reported by the Sunday Times to be earning £650,000 a year, even though she does not have her own broadcasting slot.
Maitlis is one of several BBC presenters who ,with the corporation's legal assistance, turned themselves into a service company to save substantial tax bills, in her case £75,000 a year.
Fiona Bruce (BBC remuneration, £800,000), Jeremy Paxman (£1 million) and James Naughtie have similar arrangements despite effectively being full-time employees, saving themselves tens of thousands of pounds a year as the 50 per cent top rate comes into view.
"When I joined the BBC everyone was underpaid, so that was fine," recalls Tracey Scoffield, who now has a private production company and is one of the few former BBC staffers still working in television who is prepared to speak on the record.
She left the corporation five years ago, shortly after her 10-year employment anniversary when she got a letter from Human Resources awarding her an extra half-day's holiday a year.
"I thought, God, I've got to get out of this place," she says, and she did, not realising how miserable she had become working there.
This is a common observation from BBC people who leave the corporation to go freelance or join independent companies.
Scoffield stresses that the BBC is still full of highly creative and talented people who work extremely hard but the overall ethos of the place she describes as soul-destroying.
"Most senior people at the BBC spend their days in meetings. There is total paralysis, no one is empowered to take decisions. It's like working in the NHS or in education - meetings, meetings."
Though the BBC speaks the modish corporate language about investing in people, Scoffield says it is a strangely bad employer. "They're just not good to their staff. You're not praised or rewarded for good work.
"They talk endlessly about empowering you but actually they keep you in your place. One is endlessly summoned for 'appraisals', which in-house are known as 'reprisals', for that is when you are put back in your box."
One veteran BBC presenter, a household name who does not want to be identified, says the central problem with the corporation now is its size. "We have become so big, so dominant, that there's nothing institutional left for us to aim at," he says, noting that when he joined the BBC many years ago bosses were still focused on staying competitive with ITN news output, or the big dramas then still made by the ITV companies.
"But that ambition has gone, and the driving institutional imperative is not to make any cock-ups like the Ross affair."
For him, Mark Thompson, the BBC's director-general, has failed to answer the central question for the 17,000 members of staff, not including thousands more freelancers.
"What is this BBC for? Mark Thompson has not communicated to us what the BBC is for, and I'm not sure he actually knows."
This presenter said he was unaware of the fact that Vine's already vast Radio 2 salary was topped up so significantly for his work on Panorama. (The BBC, following its familiar practice of declining to comment on the salaries of Talent, will not confirm the exact figure.)
Compliance is the nightmare for programme makers, the presenter agreed, for an audit can be triggered by nothing more than a polemical piece in the Daily Mail.
BBC people have huge contempt for the Mail yet they flatter its power by being terrified that one article could trigger a programme editor to having their collar felt by the corporation's Compliance people.
"I was making a programme and I had Compliance down on me fretting about language that I was using about mental illness," he said.
"The Mail had run a piece, and I said, don't you want this programme to be noticed? The word I got back was: no we don't."
John Humprhys is one of the few current BBC staff who will talk publicly about the goings-on in the corporation.
When I tell him that I have spoken to numerous utterly miserable members of BBC staff, Humphrys laughs.
"I have never known a time in my 45 years at the BBC when morale was not said to be 'rock bottom', when it has not felt from the inside that it is under attack from politicians. That's the nature of an organisation like this."
He concedes that the fiasco of Jonathan Ross's £6 million annual remuneration - which is not far off the entire budget for the Today programme - has caused damage to the BBC's standing.
But he adds that it was caused by the corporation's consistent terror of losing the younger audience, which is not an unreasonable concern.
Several other past and present BBC people emphasised that the BBC spends far too much time talking to itself, and not nearly enough engaging with the outside world, or with its paymasters, the licence-fee payers.
One of the oddest things about talking to BBC people is that they will spend half an hour sounding off about the horrors of the institution, of its bureaucratic culture, of the shameful way its senior executives reward themselves ludicrous amounts of public money.
And then those journalists will say: "I hope you're not writing a Right-wing newspaper attack on the BBC." Everyone spoken to for this series stressed that they back the principle of the BBC as a public-interest broadcaster, and uphold its licence-fee funding model.
As they grumble about the bureaucracy and poor management, most BBC people concede or stress that much of the output remains very good.
Indeed, radio output may never have been better; much of the television drama remains very good, though there is less of it.
BBC Four has done well in pioneering a new form of relatively low-budget drama, and moving away from the familiar bonnet dramas the corporation has excelled at for years.
But the problem remains of how an institution so top heavy, so weighed down by centralised management, can reform itself.
An on-air reporter says it is the second-rate programme-making staff who get shunted up the management ladder.
"It's insane," he says. "We have one of the largest media organisations in the world run by jobbing journalists who couldn't hack it.
"In any private organisation they would eventually be fired, but in the BBC they just keep on climbing up the ladder."
Oddly, though almost everyone inside the BBC, and its former staffers, back the notion of the licence fee, there is widespread pessimism over the corporation's prospects for changing itself.
"The warning here is Gorbachev. Once you start trying to reform an organisation such as the BBC, it collapses, just like the old Soviet Union," says one well-known presenter. "Who, as director-general, is going to say, let's make this place smaller, let's reduce all the salaries, including mine?"