Auntie as Aunt Sally
Alasdair Palmer
FUZZY MONSTERS: FEAR AND LOATHING AT THE BBC by Chris Horde and Steve Clarke Heinemann, £16.99, pp. 315 It is hard not to feel some sympathy for John Birt. He left LWT just at the moment when, if he had stayed, he would have become a multimillionaire. Instead, he has spent the last five years on the pathetic salary (for a TV executive) of less than £200,000, being attacked for almost every- thing he has done. No wonder he felt the need to 'minimise his tax burden', as they say in legal circles. Birt neatly summed up his predicament at the Edinburgh TV festi- val last year: 'Which would you prefer £4 million or national vilification?' I know which I'd prefer, and I'm not quite sure whether to dismiss Mr Birt as an idiot or to admire him for his high-minded commit- ment to public service broadcasting.
Chris Horrie and Steve Clarke, the authors of Fuzzy Monsters, have no doubt what they think Birt is: Birt is an idiot. But not because he turned his back on millions at LWT. To Horrie and Clarke, Birt's problem is his conception of public service broadcasting, which they see as a deranged and idiotic attempt to force a simplistic orthodoxy on the brilliant, creative minds of the BBC.
The book is an attempt at an in-depth examination of how Birt came to be in a position to be able to enforce his 'pseudo- Leninist conception', as Michael Grade, once a friend, then a rival, and now a foe, described it. For those who find in-depth examinations of the BBC fascinating, the book will be of considerable interest. For the rest of us, it has all the excitement of a history of a sub-committee of the Polit- buro. The BBC's management style has always been much closer to Soviet Moscow than to Hollywood, and there is none of the kiss-and-tell skulduggery, the outra- geous amounts of money, sex and outright crime which can enliven books on the movie business. John Birt and Marmaduke Hussey may be enormously powerful, but they are living proof that power is not necessarily an aphrodisiac: whatever adjec- tives come to mind to describe the men who run the Beeb (and many of the most pejorative are in this book), 'sexy' is not one of them.
The authors quite properly see that there is no point in trying to be fair or impartial: that would make the book unreadable to everyone except John Birt, and even he might have some difficulty grappling with scrupulously impartial reporting of all his initiatives, directorates and accountancy procedures. But the bristling bias against Birt does not make the book any more engrossing to outsiders, though it may make it more successful with the large number of people who have either lost their jobs or their empires since he arrived.
Fuzzy Monsters also has the problem that the story it tells lacks a climax. Nothing catastrophic has happened to the BBC: the licence fee is still in place, the Corporation is still making costume drama, and its tele- vision and radio news is usually the best. Birt and Hussey are cast as the evil Princes of Darkness, intent on desecrating the tem- ple. The problem with that analysis, and with the book, is that the temple is still in place, and not looking all that different. As
a result, the book simply peters out. The morality tale ends without a moral, which is very frustrating: if you've stayed with it, you feel you're entitled to some impressive denouement as a reward. You don't get one. Birt is still in power, Duke Hussey is still in power, programmes are still being made, and everyone is still worrying about the same problems they were at the begin- ning: audience-share, the licence fee, and government interference.
The early pages of Fuzzy Monsters are, nevertheless, a salutary reminder of how
intensely the Thatcher government hated the Beeb. All governments want to control the media, but the Hizbollah of the Thatch- er revolution set about it with a fanatical intensity. Did they succeed? The evidence, even from this book, is that the answer is no. They succeeding in frightening the gov- ernors — which is not difficult — and get- ting a couple of programmes banned or neutered, but the outrage which greeted that did them much more damage than the original 'biased' films would have done.
John Birt's biggest problem is not that he is an idiot but that he is an intellectual working in television, which is simply not an intellectual medium. When TVAM tried to follow Peter Jay's 'mission to explain' a theory of intellectual telly developed in conjunction with John Birt — it collapsed, only to be rescued by Roland Rat. It is deeply disturbing for intellectuals to dis- cover that they can't make the most power- ful medium yet invented work for them. It is even worse for them to discover that apparently inarticulate people, with no dis- cernible ideas, can. When intellectuals make programmes in their own image, viewers switch off, which is what seems to have happened to much of the BBC's non- news current affairs output when it was 'Birtised'.
But to single out Birt as the sole and only begetter of everything awful, as Fuzzy Monsters does, is silly. The BBC is always going to be an easy target for criticism, whoever runs it, not just because there are as many views on what counts as 'quality' as there are people, but also because it is paid for by taxes at a time when people resent paying taxes for anything. The Beeb is impaled on a dilemma. If it wins the ratings war, what's the point of the licence? Why not fund it by advertising? If it loses that war, why should people who don't watch its programmes be compelled to pay for them? Birt ha been wrestling with that dilemma, which it is probably impossible for anyone to resolve successfully. But Honk and Clarke write as if the problem did not exist. Like most of the best institutions in Britain, the BBC is easy to make fun of and hard to justify simply, quickly and coherently. We all know that our culture would be much poorer without it. But what kind of person would want to run it?
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