Radio
The fee or not the fee ...
Michael Vestey
Imes Past, Times Future, a six-part series running on Radio Four, has some high-quality chatter, accidental humour and some flashes of insight. Chaired by Jeremy Paxman and produced by the inde- pendent company Barraclough Carey North, it offers glimpses of the way our institutions are run.
The contributors, mostly those who once held senior positions in their various fields, sit around the table and try to explain the past and assess the future. This week (Wednesday) the question was asked: Do we need the BBC? Previous programmes covered the Home Office, the unions and the Civil Service. Throughout the series an element of cosiness has crept in as luminar- ies protect their vested interests. Gerard Mansell, former head of the BBC World Service, Brian Wenham, one-time manag- ing director of BBC Radio, ex-television producer Anthony Smith, and Lord Bar- nett, vice-chairman of the Board of Gover- nors that brought you John Birt, all thought the licence fee was a jolly good idea that needed to be preserved for ever. Only Sir Alan Peacock thought the licence fee had had its day. He chaired the committee set up by the then Prime Minis- ter Margaret Thatcher to look into the future of the BBC's funding. His commit- tee's conclusion was a bit of a dog's break- fast, in that it thought the licence fee should eventually fund other broadcasting organisations with the BBC being paid for by subscription. He now thinks there is no justification for a licence fee which, he believes, enables the BBC to provide unfair competition.
My own deeply unfashionable view is that, provided a way can be found to pre- serve Radio Three and Four without their taking advertising, the BBC should be bro- ken up and privatised with shares offered to the public. Everyone who pays the licence fee has, rightly, an opinion about the BBC and its programmes. If they were actually offered the chance to buy shares in a reconstituted BBC, it would be, surely, the most popular privatisation of all among the non-Great and the Good classes.
Radio Three is an ever-present reminder that we still live in a civilised society, and so is Radio Four for that matter. The grotesquely overstaffed (by managers and `specialist' correspondents) News and Cur- rent Affairs department could be hived off to perform a role similar to ITN's. Wen- ham called it the largest broadcasting news machine in the world. I see no reason why the other BBC radio and television net- works shouldn't take advertising.
The current Reith Lecturer, Professor Jean Aitchison, believes strongly that obscure languages should not be allowed to die. She would have been interested to hear in an earlier Times Past, Times Future Programme of one that is still alive: union- speak.
Paxman asked, 'Are the unions a spent force or due for a revival?' He dispensed with the titles of his guests and so will I. Retired trades union leaders Jack Jones, Clive Jenkins and Brenda Dean were ranged against the former Tory party chair- man Cecil Parkinson and the anti-commu- nist one-time electricians leader Frank Chapple. Barbara Castle was there, too. After the bruising she received in 1969 when her union reform plans, In Place of Strife, were wrecked by opposition from Jones and his fraternal brothers, you might have expected her to have a more balanced view of the unions.
But the poor old thing just couldn't bear to be heard publicly agreeing with someone like Parkinson, certainly not in the compa- ny of the brothers around the table. It was painful to liSten to — I could almost hear her brain cells hissing and steaming, like a fuliginous factory in her old constituency. The unions were to blame for their decline, said Parkinson. They began to abuse their economic power and in the end the public needed protection from them. Clive Jenkins was the soul of sweet rea- son, telling Paxman that he had always believed in conciliation and the strike bal- lot. He spoke soothingly in that feline Welsh lilt, at once oleaginous and menac- ing, like a Trollopian creep. But then Pax- man read from Barbara Castle's memoirs: `Will you help me? I asked him [Jenkins]. To which he spat out, "No." He then pro- ceeded to be as insulting as he knew how and told me his union would enter into widespread and destructive strike action immediately. I was furious inside. "It is war!" we screamed at each other like fish- wives.' Or fishknives, as Paxman fluffed before correcting himself.
Jones and Jenkins believed union mem- bership had fallen by nearly half because jobs had been taken by new technology. Jones called for shorter working hours and Castle believed unions should exercise political as well as economic power and she hoped Tony Blair would encourage that.
It was both fascinating and depressing at the same time. As you would expect, Pax- man — in my view, the best interviewer the BBC has — holds it together very well, though he must stop shouting into the microphone; but then, I suppose, Paxman without the shouting would be like The Archers without its signature tune.
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