AND ANOTHER THING
A useful idiot joins the long- running BBC hate-soap
PAUL JOHNSON
It must be admitted that the BBC's long- running internal soap, Get John Bin', is addictive, for me at least. Its peculiar flavour of sour grapes, embittered failure, character-assassination, witch-hunting and sheer mendacity is to be found nowhere on the actual screen, either here or in the United States. Most of the scriptwriting is done internally, by highly paid non-produc- tive bureaucrats, fearful of the chop, union flunkeys, left-wing programme-makers and console-room lawyers. Occasionally, the Old Lags take a hand: people like Bill Cot- ton and Paul Fox, who wanted to be direc- tor-general and never made it; or Alasdair Milne and Mike Checkland, who made it all right and flopped. In one episode Birt is the baddie; in the next it is Dukey Hussey, the chairman; then it switches back to Birt again. I suspect Will Wyatt, managing director, who came out strongly on Birt's side last weekend, will be the next villain. The Independent, Guardian and its clone- like Observer provide, as it were, the screen- time, and some of the more outrageous falsehoods.
The latest hero of the soap is that poor man's Cicero, Mark Tully, put up to savage Birt with a requisitoire at the Radio Acade- my. Tully is universally described in the chattering papers as 'distinguished', a code- word the Left employs about someone of no importance it wishes to manipulate. Lenin called such innocents 'useful idiots'. Tully's speech made no sense at all. He calls the atmosphere under Birt totalitarian and says people are scared stiff to speak, adding that his experience goes back 30 Years. He thus only knows the `liberal' BBC Inaugurated by Hugh Greene from the 1960s on.
My first BBC broadcast was in 1952, under, I think, General Sir Ian Jacob, then director-general. The atmosphere within the Corporation then would have made Tully's 'knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand on end, like quills upon the fretful porpen- tine.' That was the BBC created by Reith and satirised by Orwell in Nineteen Eighty- Four, the 'old' BBC to which Birt's critics now look back with self-deceptive nostal- gia. Much of Tully's attack on his boss, comparing him to Stalin, was a clear case of gross industrial misconduct, and in the days of Jacob, who banned even a great broad- caster like Muggeridge for much less, Tully's feet would never have touched the
ground until he was off BBC premises for good. Even today, Birt would have been fully justified in sacking him, but he is too soft-hearted; more's the pity.
If Tully's speech made no sense, nor does the whole campaign against Birt and Mar- maduke Hussey especially from the Left's viewpoint. After all, it is in the interests of the Left to have the BBC continue as a publicly owned and financed broadcasting network. Without the skilful efforts of Hussey, who has succeeded in selling the BBC to a large number of backbench Tory MPs and newspapers, the demand for the Corporation's privatisation, in some form, would by now have become irresistible.
It is part of Hussey's unspoken bargain with the Tories that the BBC's financial irresponsibility be ended, and the public gets good value for its licence-fee. That is why he put in Birt, and why Birt is waging a tough and increasingly successful cost- effectiveness campaign. He is thinning out the huge phalanxes of memo-writers and committee-attenders who made the BBC rather like the Persian army, and switching the money thus saved to programme-mak- ing. He is also carrying out a long-overdue and elementary exercise to enable everyone inside the Corporation to know what every- thing costs — the kind of effort now going on throughout former Iron Curtain coun- tries.
I discovered nearly 40 years ago that, although producers could not increase your minute statutory fee for a broadcast, they did not care tuppence how much was spent on taxis, chauffeur-driven cars and other luxuries, as it came on some other budget. That kind of waste, and countless others, are now being ended, and the well-fed pips are squeaking. But it ought to be in the interests of the intelligent Left, as of every- one else, to end financial abuses and give programme-makers more money. Again, I can see no logic in the Left's `An Italian doctor knew what to do.' objections to Birt himself, and the people he has appointed. Birt's notion of in-depth reporting, to discover the 'whys' and tows', goes against conservative media orthodoxy, which is to play the news as it comes, and is much closer to Marxist or at any rate New Left and Right-On theory. Many of his appointments, notably that of the ex- Guardian woman's editor and former head girl of Benenden Liz Forgan to run radio, raised hackles on the Right.
I happen to believe that Birt's choice of this shining example of Benenden culture to give the wireless a lift was inspired, and my view was confirmed when, during Wim- bledon, she took me behind the scenes of its coverage. When she entered the studio, I heard a whisper 'Here comes Jolly Hock- ey Sticks', but its tone was affectionate, and it was clear to me that engineers and com- mentators think the world of her because they can recognise genuine leadership, and respond to it. All the same, Forgan was not Guardian woman's editor and programme- controller of Channel 4 for nothing, and all her instincts are lefty. Recently she official- ly rebuked a sports commentator who com- plained that too many competitors had impossible to pronounce foreign names and who jokingly asked why couldn't they have proper English ones. Forgan feared that this 'outrageously racist' remark would cause riots and civil wars throughout Afro-Asia, or at least grumbles among Pak- istani pseudo-intellectuals living in Earls Court bed-sits. Hence her denzarche.
Equally, I can't see why the Left objects to Alan Yentob, whom Birt made boss of BBC 1, in some ways the most important job at his disposal. Yentob seems to stand for all the things I find most abhorrent in modern life, and ought to suit the Left down to the last full-frontal. So what is all the fuss about? I suspect the answer lies in the creeping malady which is slowly paralysing the mental faculties of all those who compose what used to be called the `progressive forces' in Britain. Marxism in all its forms having been finally discredited, and no plausible alternative theory having yet made its appearance — Political Cor- rectness, at least on this side of the Atlantic, is becoming a joke — the Left has had to make do with malicious gossip. That, at bottom, is what the anti-Birt cam- paign is really about, and why — however long its exponents persist in it — it is bound to fail completely.
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