It was 1982 and I was fresh out of Saint Martin’s School of Art, wet behind the ears and eager to get a job in media. I met two young women who worked at the BBC, we came up with an idea and we approached a TV legend called Paul Watson, who was a kind of British terrestrial version of Martin Scorsese. After various meetings at the old BBC headquarters in White City, we even made a pilot.
He didn’t end up producing our show — it was called Avid and was meant to be a weekly television version of an insanely fashionable magazine — but couldn’t have been more enthusiastic or more encouraging.
And that was when I fell in love with the BBC. Every meeting was about ideas, about the creative energy needed to produce such a complex beast (something we obviously didn’t have), and the exactitude of what we were attempting to do. Of course, TV has changed and the BBC is now swimming in a very different sea, subject to rapidly changing consumer patterns, previously unimaginable competitors and an increasingly aggressive media that in some quarters wants to destroy it wholesale. It’s a sentiment that is now shared by many who don’t even have vested interests.
But be careful what you wish for. To contribute to the death of the BBC would be a collective act of institutional vandalism, not unlike destroying the NHS. It’s been said many times before, but there is no better time to say it again.
Lately the corporation has had an Ouroboros quality, eating itself alive — but its heart is in the right place
Is the BBC annoying? Of course it is. Regardless of what they say externally, there is an innate Left-of-centre bias in their newsrooms (one senior BBC producer once called me a “Tory ****” in front of a room full of people just to see how I would react, seemingly for no other reason than I was — at the time — writing a column for a Right-wing paper). And, yes, as an institution it can often appear to be extraordinarily pleased with itself. As they are a gigantic subsidised public body they are continually accused (often correctly) of being financially wasteful, and there is an increasingly loud hum concerning the viability of the licence fee. Then there are the Radio 4 comedies (none of which are ever funny), the whole concept of Radio 3, BBC World (pointless, especially when compared to best-in-class competitors such as Sky News) and their vain attempts to come up with a breakfast TV format that works effectively. (Its most recent chair, Richard Sharp, gave the impression he was quite happy to have a light hand on the tiller; it’s too early to tell if his successor, Dame Elan Closs Stephens, will be more successful).
But, and here I would like you to imagine that a fire alarm has just gone off in your home, it’s the BBC. A part of the fabric of our nation. The warm bath of comfort in times of national mourning or international crisis. The noise you hear in the background when you’re washing up, absentmindedly listening to some know-all wang on about the grain harvest in a country you’d never previously heard of. The home of Radio 6 Music, a national treasure if ever there was one. And the place you turn to when you want the world to be a little less tabloid.
In a terrestrial, scheduled world — which we still often live in, even though our lives are now obviously driven by streaming — the BBC is still our friend. Well, it is mine, even if it isn’t yours. Lately the corporation has had an Ouroboros quality about it, eating itself alive as the rest of the media gleefully look on. And while as an institution they are rarely faultless, I still believe their collective heart is in the right place.
In the last week or so it has been unsettling to see the way in which some people (a few of whom actually work at the BBC) have piled in to give the corporation a good kicking. We all know why they’ve done it, and as a news operation the Evening Standard has obviously been as questioning and as professionally curious as everyone else. But what we didn’t do was kick it in the shin once again, purely out of spite, as it crawled away just because we could.
Because why would we?
