Striking a pose
Rod Liddle believes that glamorous BBC presenters are not having a terribly difficult time making moral decisions about whether to cross the picket line The Tolpuddle Martyrs it ain’t, believe me. Wonderful though it might be to imagine a revolution led by the fragrant and semi-foxy Natasha Kaplinsky and the enigmatic Dermot Murnaghan, red flags held aloft over the barricades in White City as famous presenters bellowed insurrectionist slogans against the hated director general — well, it wasn’t quite like that, if we’re being honest. Monday’s show of force by the disaffected legions of the BBC was simply an outpouring of grief from the corporation’s techies — the studio managers, the cameramen, the boffins, the engineers and so on. The journalists, and particularly the very famous journalists, by and large sniffed the breeze and decided that, on reflection, it would be a good day to stay at home — and their bosses, anxious to avoid anything remotely approaching a showdown, agreed. When push comes to shove, they’ll all be back. Having once bravely not crossed the picket line and thus shown their proletarian solidarity with the masses, sort of, next time they’ll walk on by. Just like Terry Wogan this time around, they’ll wish a cheery good luck to those less lionised colleagues still manning the braziers and sipping their café lattes.
For example, Newsnight would not have been broadcast regardless of whether or not Jeremy Paxman had crossed the picket line. The techies had withdrawn their support en masse and therefore the programme could not be broadcast. I would not wish for a second to cast doubt upon Mr Paxman’s revolutionary fervour and still less upon his clearly stated opposition to the cuts in staff numbers proposed by Mark Thompson. I’m just suggesting that it is rather easier to take a ‘moral’ decision not to cross a picket line when the effect of one’s not crossing the picket line is, shall we say, somewhat marginal (and that, further, no sanction is threatened by the timorous corporation suits). Terry Wogan, by contrast, took a ‘moral’ decision and crossed the picket line; but then the technical back-up for his ever so whimsical two hours of soul-destroying blather is rather less than that needed for a flagship news and current affairs programme like Today or Newsnight. By and large, the very famous, very well-paid people turned up when their shows were capa ble of being broadcast and did not turn up when they weren’t (and the excellent Jeremy Vine is an exception to this rule). But I would not wish to incur a libel writ by suggesting that, all this notwithstanding, the very famous, very well-paid people did not make their judgments about the day of action from a robustly moral standpoint. I’m sure that they did. It’s just that it was a moral standpoint at which it was made comfortable to arrive.
My suspicion that the strike was not quite how the papers sought to portray it — ‘Humphrys and Paxman in open revolt!’ — was reinforced by my discovery that at the Today programme, for example, the presenters were told that there was absolutely no point whatsoever in turning up for work. Call me a cynic, but as ultimatums to a rebellious workforce go, this is a few yards short of the sort of pressure applied at, say, Grunwick. Or Orgreave. By and large, the BBC top brass seem to have decided that this time around, at least, the unhappy employees should be allowed to wreak a small amount of havoc and that no real showdown should be forced with the people whom the public really cares about, i.e., the people who will make the headlines. Let them have their day in the sun, seems to have been the strategy.
Similarly, the less famous journalists were, at best, equivocal in their support for the day of action. At Newsnight at least 50 per cent (20 people out of 40) of the journalistic staff trooped in to Television Centre — but, as I say, the lack of technical support meant that the programme could not be put out anyway. This was without question a moral decision and quite probably a difficult one — for both those who stayed at home and those who turned up for work. The lack of a day’s pay when you’re on £20,000 a year is not a negligible sacrifice; nor is the fear, if you’re a member of staff (rather than a freelancer on a shortterm contract) that you have incurred the wrath of either your bosses or your colleagues. If moral decisions were made, then that’s where they took place.
It is all a little reminiscent of those epic battles of the early 1980s within the newspaper industry, except on a much smaller scale. Back then, opposition to the unquestionably necessary restructuring of the newspaper industry was led by the techies — the print unions, NGA, Sogat and Natsopa. A proportion of journalists, myself included, were dragged along to the picket lines in their wake, despite harbouring the distinct impression that the printers didn’t give a monkey’s about the financial plight of the hacks (who were paid, on average, less than the printers) or our worries about our own job cuts. We were useful then, just as Mr Paxman and Ms Kaplinsky are useful now to the techies’ main union, Bectu. I cannot recall a single instance of the print unions supporting an NUJ-led call to arms, although perhaps my memory has become politically selective. The position within the BBC today is directly comparable: despite years of improving technology which has made countless technical jobs obsolete, despite years of wrangling with the techie unions about overmanning and exorbitant pay rates, the corporation has not effected a revolution comparable to that which was imposed upon the newspaper industry. There has been a painfully incremental reduction, but the BBC still has too many wage-slave engineers and studio managers and there has been resistance from the unions to new technology at every possible juncture. Perhaps Mark Thompson has finally grasped the nettle.
That being said, Mr Thompson has made himself inordinately unpopular at the BBC in a very short space of time indeed. Director generals are usually afforded a year or two of blissful honeymoon — but Thompson expended whatever goodwill existed among senior staff within about two months. I have never heard BBC middleand top-level managers so unstinting and unguarded in their loathing of a chief executive — or at least not since the final days of John Birt, whose blueprint Mr Thompson is alleged to be following. The success of Mr Thompson’s plan to shed jobs depends far more on the co-operation of his first tier of managers than it does upon the goodwill of, say, Natasha Kaplinsky. Presenters, newsreaders and journalists tend to have an innate distrust of director generals but the BBC’s (arguably overpaid) salarymen and women make their judgments in an altogether more pragmatic and cynical manner. Right now, they seem to have it in for their boss; it is they who will determine who wins this battle of wills.
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