Media/ Uncertain Vision by Georgina Born - Inside Story by Greg Dyke: Why two books about the BBC, and why now? The corporation's programme output on radio and television is one that Irish audiences access almost as domestic channels, writes Muiris Mac Conghail.
She is the aging mother of all public service type broadcasting. The BBC is in trouble, and these two books explain why the malady is serious. The Dyke book is the least pompous and most accessible of all books written by those who have held high office in the BBC. Its clarity is its style.
Much of what is said by Dyke in Inside Story is about the relationship between government and the British national broadcaster - the BBC - at a time of war, in this case when that war was instigated by the Blair government in collaboration with the Bush administration in the US. The government has been on the side of the collaborators in that war.
Georgina Born's book examines the nature of the society within the BBC during the period of Dyke's predecessor, John Birt, who as ruler of the BBC left that organisation, as Born writes, in a condition of "political subordination . . . more pervasive and damaging than is apparent from a focus solely on clashes over political journalism, as well as exemplifying New Labour's wider attempts to rein in the public sector".
Greg Dyke was on holiday in the west of Ireland on May 29th, 2003, when Andrew Gilligan made the first of his many broadcasts on Weapons of Mass Destruction. Dyke's main concern on that day was whether or not the BBC should show pictures of two dead British soldiers in Iraq in a documentary to be shown some days later. The holiday was disrupted and in "these circumstances none of us had taken much notice of the Gilligan story . . . Eight months later, that broadcast would lead to my exit from the BBC".
The war in Iraq was not a time of national unity, as Dyke notes, and the BBC found itself in the difficult editorial position of reporting on dissent and war together. This was made all the more difficult when the government evidently expected the unquestioning loyalty of the British Broadcasting Corporation in the face of the common enemy, Saddam Hussein. Dissent and the questioning of Blair were treacherous. Alastair Campbell shielded Blair and went for his critics. Dyke writes: "Everything that happened in the year has to be put into the context of the person with whom we were dealing. Alastair Campbell, while a brilliant operator, has a classic obsessive personality and he had decided that the BBC was the enemy. From then on, if not before, I suspect he was looking for revenge."
Well, you might ask how the Hutton inquiry into Dr David Kelly's death managed to find the BBC and Andrew Gilligan guilty of editorial errors which damaged the prime minister and the British government's endeavours in the pursuit of their unjust, and possibly illegal war against Iraq.
My heart leapt when I heard of the proposed judicial inquiry and my mind raced immediately back to a judicial inquiry established in 1969 into the 7-Days programme, of which I was editor, on illegal moneylending. The then RTÉ Authority, chaired by Todd Andrews, stood four square behind the team and T.P. Hardiman, the director general, was unflinching.
An RTÉ Authority was finally got some years later when Gerry Collins, the then minister for Posts and Telegraphs, organised its dismissal by Government in November, 1972. There was no great liberty left for broadcasting and so it has been with RTÉ since. Charles Haughey and Ray Burke frightened RTÉ into caution, obedience and political subservience and there the story rests.
Capable of setting his own terms of reference, Lord Hutton decided to investigate those "allegations attacking the integrity of the government which drew Dr Kelly into the controversy about the broadcasts [Gilligan's May 29th, 2003, Today broadcasts] and which I consider I should examine under my terms of reference". The only term of reference the judge had received from the Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs was "urgently to conduct an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr Kelly".
The urgency part of the inquiry's proceedings was how to get the BBC. Greg Dyke's book contains considerable and valuable material on the Gilligan affair and the various moves within and without the BBC as to how this was progressed. On the day the Hutton Report was issued, Dyke gives an important documentary account of the manner in which the governors of the BBC gradually and patently dissembled.
Perhaps a key to the character of Dyke is that in his wildest dreams he did not anticipate the governors "would want him out". Following the resignation of Gavyn Davies as chairman of the board of governors, the governors ambushed Dyke and with a grovelling apology on Gilligan to the Blair government proceeded to appoint an acting director general.
Greg Dyke's account of his life before arrival at the BBC in 2000 reads rather like the John Boorman film, Hope and Glory, and indeed part of his background and formation is not dissimilar to Boorman's. A new boy from a working-class background with a close-knit and loving family, Dyke made his way through Marks & Spencer, regional newspapers, York University, London Weekend Television and Pearsons. He made some money (quite a lot, actually) with "go-away money" and threw in his lot with the British Labour Party, which he now regrets. He became a director of Manchester United and stood between Murdoch and his attempts to buy that club. For all that, full marks, and then he came to the BBC to try to clear all the depth charges John Birt had left.
What Greg Dyke found at the BBC is well detailed and described in Georgina Born's study of the BBC during the Birt years and the opening period of the Dyke regime.
Uncertain Vision is studies of the BBC, essentially during the Birt years (1993-2000) with some add-on material relating to the start and abrupt ending of the Dyke years. Georgina Born, a Cambridge academic, is an anthropologist and her book is written very much from within that discipline.
When Greg Dyke took up office in 2000, Born notes that "he found a demoralised and over-managed organisation . . . that the Blair government spin was spun out and that his determination to supersede Birt's policies and withstand political pressures was necessary, well judged and highly productive. Dyke's changes made the BBC less inhibited and more risk taking, including in its dealings with the government." The BBC's journalism in the Dyke years was "to become increasingly troublesome for the New Labour government . . ."
Uncertain Vision is a terrifying description of an organisation at the doors of hell with accountants everywhere checking plays and scripts in and out with measuring tapes. The portrait of the "internal market" looks like a picture of the economy of a former Eastern Bloc country under the old Soviet hegemony with the ever-present presence of placemen accountants, many of them brought in on contracts from companies with KGB type names awaiting their next consultancy. RTÉ imported much of Birt's thinking into its production and management process. But then the subordination of RTÉ had begun in 1972 with the dismissal of an RTÉ Authority.
Notwithstanding the arrival of Michael Grade as chairman of the BBC, in whom I have a childlike belief and who once famously said at the 1992 Edinburgh Television Festival as chief executive of Channel 4: "It is the BBC which keeps us all [other broadcasting organisations] honest" - I still have the yellowed cutting - I believe that Her Majesty's Government will do for the BBC and it will not survive. Everything in Georgina Born's fascinating book tells me that the BBC is doomed as much by the enemy inside as by the considerable outside range of enemies. John Birt is central to the book: John Birt as Lord Birt and adviser to the prime minister has notgone away . . .
By the time the BBC Royal Charter negotiations have been completed in 2006, the funding mechanism for the BBC will have been restructured so that by 2010 the BBC will be a subscription service. Murdoch will have achieved that much for his support for New Labour.
The licence fee mechanism for RTÉ will be changed similarly and "commercial realities" inspired by the neo-liberalism of this Government will determine the future of Irish broadcasting.
The source of the BBC illness goes back to Lord Reith in the general strike in the UK in 1926. Georgina Born's important reference notes that Reith wrote "since the BBC was a national institution and since the government in this crisis was acting for the people . . . the BBC was for the government in this crisis too". No coverage for the strikers!
I used to believe the RTÉ licence fee and the authority would between them protect the independence of public service broadcasting in the Republic. I no longer believe these mechanisms will secure independent public service broadcasting and we have been living on borrowed time since the dismissal of an RTÉ Authority in 1972.
Muiris Mac Conghail was formerly Controller of Programmes at RTÉ and teaches at the DIT School of Media. He trained at the BBC in 1964/'65. He is a contributor to the recently published Oxford New Dictionary of National Biography on aspects of the Blasket Island culture
Media/ Uncertain Vision by Georgina Born Secker & Warburg, 564pp. £17.99 - Inside Story by Greg Dyke HarperCollins, 340pp. £20