MEDIA STUDIES
Change for change's sake at Radio Four — and for Mr Boyle's
STEPHEN GLOVER
James Boyle, controller of BBC Radio Four, says his wide-ranging changes are `unashamedly Reithian'. This is a reference calculated to win over elitists and conserva- tives everywhere. And indeed on first inspection more drama and current affairs as well as more book programmes look like an improvement. They might have brought a wintry smile to Lord Reith's features. Mr Boyle has some claim to be winning back the high ground.
And yet I find myself unable to welcome his innovations. We all have our gripes, such as moving The Archers to two o'clock, though I suppose we mustn't get too hung up on these. What is indisputably worrying is Mr Boyle's continual invocation of research to justify his changes. He never describes this research, but mentions repeatedly that it has taken place through- out the United Kingdom. He even said on Tuesday morning's Call Robin Lustig (a programme itself facing the axe) that 'it's done scientifically', as though this genuflec- tion towards the great god should set our minds at rest.
It is not 'done scientifically'. Mr Boyle is in the main not talking about 'quantitative research' whose straightforward questions to samples of over 1,000 people can, for example, establish audience levels pretty accurately. He is really talking about 'quali- tative research', little focus groups involv- ing small numbers of people. These have no statistical basis, as even their propo- nents admit. Focus groups are beloved of New Labour, and were used by the Inde- pendent before its recent disastrous relaunch. They provide a way of meeting `ordinary people' without the need to pop down to the pub.
I wonder, though, whether Mr Boyle is so silly as to believe that focus groups can offer a profound understanding of what millions of Radio Four listeners really want. It is possible he is. More likely, though, he is merely using focus groups to justify change. Since they have no statistical basis, and merely throw up a mêlée of dif- fering opinions, you can infer from focus groups almost anything you choose. Mr Boyle uses his to justify change. The same `findings' could probably be employed by another executive to justify keeping things as they are.
Mr Boyle is the kind of modern manager who wants to leave his mark and thinks that change is the only way to do it. Once bish- ops, headmasters, BBC executives and even politicians did not think it their automatic duty to alter arrangements that were per- fectly satisfactory. Now it is change for change's sake. No doubt Radio Four could have benefited from a bit of gradual tinker- ing, but this root-and-branch reform will merely make many listeners unhappy. It is most unlikely that the Radio Four audience will increase — in any case a most un-Rei- thian ambition. In a few years Mr Boyle will be transferred to another station, where he will continue his long march, and some new tyro will shake things up all over again.
The revival of the Aitken case reminds me of a point I had been intending to make about the Guardian's role in the collapse of Jonathan Aitken's libel trial last June. Many days into the trial, when it seemed that Mr Aitken was likely to triumph, the Guardian's lawyers produced a lethal piece of information that showed Mr Aitken's wife Lolicia was in Switzerland on the morning of Sunday, 19 September 1993. She therefore could not have been in Paris, as Mr Aitken had maintained she had been, to pay his bill at the Ritz. Mr Aitken's case collapsed in ignominy.
How did the Guardian acquire this vital information at the 11th hour? It came from its old friend Mohamed Al Fayed. He produced the relevant telephone logs of the Paris Ritz, which he owns. These showed that a call had been made from Mr Aitken's room at the Ritz at 10.15 a.m. that Sunday to the Hotel Bristol in Villars, an hour's drive from Geneva. Even then it was the newspaper's lawyer, Geraldine Proudler, rather than a Guardian journalist, who spotted this. A reporter called Owen Bowcott was hur- riedly despatched to the Hotel Bristol, which had gone out of business. After wading through records in its basement, he found an invoice which established that Mrs Aitken had been at the hotel on the morning of 19 September.
Strange to say, The Liar, the Guardian's official book about the Aitken case, does not mention that Mr Al Fayed was the source of the vital information which res- cued the newspaper from almost certain defeat in the libel courts. Nor was Mr Al Fayed's crucial role referred to when the Guardian recently won the team reporting award at the British Press Awards for its investigation into the Aitken affair. Mr Bowcott should be commended for his assiduous work in the basement of the Bris- tol, but it is difficult to see what part other Guardian journalists played in delivering the coup de grace. Possibly Ms Proudler should have a share in the prize, but the man who really merits the plaudits for the scoop of the year is Mr Al Fayed.
The tribulations of the Independent have become a soap opera for the chatter- ing classes. The plot is so tortuous that it is easy for spectators, particularly new ones, to forget what happened only the day before yesterday. My eyes nearly popped out of my head when I read the remarks of my former colleague Andreas Whittam Smith, founding editor of the Independent, in his old paper last week. Mr Whittam Smith said, 'We started the Independent in order to create a newspaper which was pro- prietorless. If you are going to have a pro- prietor, Tony O'Reilly strikes me as really ideal.'
Can this be the same Andreas Whittam Smith who in February 1994 took to the air waves with David Montgomery, chief exec- utive of Mirror Group Newspapers, to extol Mirror Group as an ideal majority share- holder in the Independent? The same Andreas Whittam Smith who utterly reject- ed Tony O'Reilly's overtures before and after a meeting they had on 18 February 1994? The four-year involvement of Mirror Group has been a disaster for the Indepen- dent, as was easy to predict. Far from pre- dicting this, however, Mr Whittam Smith was Mirror Group's fervent champion.
Incidentally, I have remembered a per- fect example of a newspaper not reporting its internal ructions, which I repeat in a spirit of evenhandedness towards the Times, which has been much criticised for under-reporting the HarperCollins affair. In May 1993 Sir Ralf Dahrendorf resigned as chairman of the Independent. His resig- nation was baldly reported by the newspa- per in a five-line paragraph on page three, without explanation. This was rather odd, because Sir Ralf had fallen out in a big way with the chief executive and editor of the Independent, claiming in a letter to one sympathetic shareholder that this man `instils more fear than loyalty'. Who was this person? Andreas Whittam Smith.
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