BOOKS

Believing a Book's Cover

Conn Welch

THE LAST DAYS OF THE BEEB by Michael Leapman Anyone of normal percipience could deduce much about this book by studying no more than its glossy jacket, the blurbs thereon, the accompanying press release and the end paper. On this last the half-familiar faces of the grey eminences who with mixed success struggle to direct the monstrous and unwieldy BBC are arranged, like a family tree, in descending order of the power for which, as the press release informs us, they 'doggedly claw', `manoeuvre and jostle', as in some teneb- rous snake-pit.

Does not the word 'Beeb' for instance in the title tell us something? Is it ever used except, affectionately or derisively, by those in or very near to the BBC, 'in the know' or wishing to be thought so, who observe with minute and inordinate in- terest its internal power struggles, 'sagas' and 'palace coups' and who treat the protagonists, however dim, weird or self- important some of them may be, however meretricious or mediocre, however vulgar or outrageous, with the fascinated vener- ation appropriate only when dealing with giants in thought, art or statecraft?

Of these 'in' Beeb watchers Mr Leap- man, a journalist who 'specialises in writ- ing about media affairs' is clearly one, a fact which does not make the prospect of his company for about 300 pages exactly alluring. His likeness on the cover flap is pleasant but not wholly reassuring: with an earnest, puzzled, wondering, perhaps naive half-smile, he appears at first glance to be colouring a children's book, though on closer inspection this turns out probably to be one of those publications which illustrate percentages by differently sized and coloured slices of circular cakes. A hilarious example from Private Eye is reproduced by Mr Leapman. It purports to be an 'at-a-glance guide to how the BBC accounts for your £56 licence fee'. In descending orders of magnitude, the slices represent the cost of Esther Rantzen's libel actions, Sir Terence Wogan's salary (almost as vast), executive freebies to Hong Kong, California, etc., 'crappy American serials', new computerised weather charts and (very small) 'all other programmes'. Mr Leapman's sense of the ridiculous, so essential when dealing with any organistion in which pompous persons devote their attention to silly things, is, if unreliable, certainly not non-existent.

It does not prevent him from describing the BBC's philosophy as 'liberal', still to English ears a strange word to apply to a public organisation, responsible if not to the state then to no one at all, ruthlessly centralised and venomously hostile to all

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competition and criticism. Does it permit him to smile when an independent produc- er describes as 'one of the most important moments in history', a decision by Stuart Young (wrongly promoted on the jacket to his brother's peerage), the chairman, to ask Sir William Rees-Mogg to open the governors' debate on the Real Lives IRA film? I wish I could be sure. Does it permit him in private to acknowledge that the adjectives he has chosen for Alastair Hetherington, 'tall, white-haired, ascetic' are quite inadequate to capture the full comic flavour of this Macvolio?

Two or three adjectives are normally allotted at the outset to each character. Mr Leapman acknowledges the assistance of a word-processor. Was it this impercipient machine which characterised Brian Wenham as 'urbane and thoughtful', Alas- dair Milne as 'sharp, restless', George Howard as 'demonstrative' and 'ebullient', Michael Grade Robin Scott as 'slight, dapper . . . a com- petent administrator', Aubrey Singer as `plump, innovative', Russell Grant, Break- fast Time's notorious astrologer, as 'rotund and outgoing' (this last peculiarly inapt, since the governors repeatedly tried to make him outgo without success), Colin Shaw as 'slight, precise' as befits 'the keeper of the [BBC's] corporate conscien- ce', if it has one, and so on?

One can't help suspecting that far more bizarre and idiosyncratic realities must lurk behind some of these lifeless, off-the-shelf, Identikit adjectives, journalistic in a bad sense. Yet despite Mr Leapman's ten- thumbed descriptive incompetence, the characters of his protagonists do emerge from their actions and interactions if cor- rectly recorded here; and an unedifying crew some of them seem to be.

Michael Grade to be sure is launched with four adjectives, 'energetic, affable, outspoken and occasionally indiscreet' and credited with 'a fresh, classically handsome face'. His photograph suggests rather to me a sort of carnivorous cockerel, and even Mr Leapman notes the 'eyes that stared and sparkled a bit too much, giving him an oddly manic aspect'. He should have been warned: those eyes did not mislead him. Already in the Listener Grade has jumped the gun, presumably unable to contain himself, to denounce Leapman's book as 'misleading, mis- chievous, misconceived, misguided, mis- judged, misrepresentative and, I am almost tempted to add, malicious'.

Nor is director-general Milne left as just sharp and restless. Further attributes, not all to me attractive, flesh him out: 'brisk and decisive', 'curt with colleagues', `smooth and practised with selection boards', 'a reputation for abruptness', 'im- patient, easily bored, apt to switch off, after setbacks `sulky and dangerous', not suffering fools gladly — perhaps not, though some of his deeds and opinions, If truly reported here, seem to me foolish enough. When sneaked to, for instance, he apparently sneaks on the sneaks. Unwise? You need not read more than the front flap to find that Mr Leapman regards 'the early Sixties, under director-general Hugh Greene [as] the golden age of the Beeb • This was the age of 'satire', of That Was The Week That Was (TW3). Forgive me a personal anecdote which I have thought revealing. To this programme or one of its successors, I submitted a sketch seeking to ridicule, by reductio ad absurdum, certain idiotic beliefs and attitudes (I forget what) then prevalent and a la mode. To MY astonishment, the TW people loved it. When I saw it done I was even more astonished. They played it straight! They had taken it quite seriously as a contribu- tion to current wisdom. My satiric purpose may indeed have been obscured by my own hamfistedness. Probably it was; yet, even so, having missed the point, only absolute fools could think the piece anything but inane and indeed pointless.

Has not genuine satire deep roots in seriousness, in settled and firmly held convictions? Can anyone know what is funny who doesn't know what isn't? It is no coincidence to me that, in our day, Beach- comber and D.B. Wyndham Lewis were devout Catholics, or that nearly all that remains funny in Private Eye for more than a moment is founded on an incongruous and intermittent respect for old-fashioned morality and convention. The TW people did not, so far as I recall, scourge with wit vices and follies of the age. Rather did they salute and embody them, sneering at de- cency from a dung hill. By taking such fools and their epoch quite seriously, Mr Leapman comes near to disqualifying himself altogether as a commentator on the BBC's antics. How can he chronicle the `decline' of the BBC without realising that Sir Hugh's golden age was either the beginning of it or (perhaps more digestible from his point of view) the unwitting begetter by its excesses of the more authoritarian regime he now deplores? The sharp contrast between Weimar and Nazi Germany is obvious to all. Perception notes the numberless con- nections between the two, how the one suckled the other. 'Only connect' is a good watchword for all historians, even of the BBC.

A certain philistinism warps Mr Leap- man's judgment, even when he imputes it to others. He comments on Professor Alan Peacock, the dread inquisitor into the possibility of advertisements on BBC, tad news' as such, `one of that breed of free-market economists that had inspired fear in all public institutions since Mrs Thatcher . . clasped them to her bosom.' Minuses so far, but Mr Leapman reports that 'on the plus side [Peacock] was fond of music, so could not be a total barbarian.' Can this imply that otherwise he is or could be or that free market economists, if they don't like music, are generally barbarians? Was Adam Smith a barbarian? Only a philistine could think so.

Nor, I fancy, if love of music be a sure defence against charges of barbarism, could Mr Leapman himself convincingly plead it. Would any music lover report without comment an appalling sneer from the 'plump, innovative' Singer (a junior Robert Maxwell, someone called him) at the ageing musicians and old-fashioned music of the BBC orchestras, i.e., at people and institutions who were the glory of the BBC and on whose behalf the composer Dr Robert Simpson resigned in disgust. 'I can no longer', Dr Simpson wrote, 'work for the BBC without a profound sense of betrayal of most of the values I and many others believe in; and its management includes elements [sic] whose authority I cannot accept without shame.' This is the authentic voice of the old mandarin BBC at its best. Does Mr Leapman represent it as its worst?

To be fair, I think not. He would perhaps once, in Sir Hugh's golden days, have found it natural to do so. But the BBC's megalomaniac mistakes and atti- tudes since then have prised his mind open and introduced a salutary scepticism. The BBC's whining about political control, while setting its face adamantly against non-political sources of income; its absurd failure to recognise that who pays the piper will in the end call the tune; its contempt for Keynes's wise dictum that the state should only do what private enterprise cannot or will not do; its treatment of all constructive criticism as blasphemy; its insane determination to compete at all times in all fields, no matter how base, alien or ludicrously expensive; its insist- ence that the acceptance of advertising must lower its standards; its disgraceful debasement of those standards without the excuse of advertising, so that many of its programmes are more moronic and bestial than what advertising presumably in its view imposes on its rivals; its wrecking, for instance, of whatever was worthwhile in independent breakfast television by plung- ing so far down the market that poor Peter Jay was not more able to compete than an elderly vicar at a pop festival; its Pecksnif- fian blathering about public service, while shamelessly employing and luring away from elsewhere brash vulgarians for whom the phrase can have no meaning, and who repeatedly let the BBC down, as it richly deserves to be; its sanctimonious ethical pretensions, while slyly flouting, for inst- ance, all its own rules about filling senior posts and while organising fake contests to deceive; its tendency to disparage people of taste and culture, for whom it should cater and whose numbers it should strive to multiply, as dwellers in a middle-class, middle-aged 'ghetto', in which it would be wrong to join them . . .

All this and much else has had its effect on Mr Leapman's mind, so that by the end he is calmly thinking the unthinkable, rationally discussing whether to split the BBC up (horror!) or to allow advertise- ments here or there (horror upon horror!), fearlessly uttering impieties undreamed of.

He assures the BBC he has no malign motive. My hat! He must know well how little effect such assurance can have on some of the paranoiacs at the BBC. Mr Grade's outburst is only a foretaste of the wrath to come. Nor is the BBC over- scrupulous in dealing with its supposed enemies, who are often, like Mr Leapman, really candid friends who deserve a hear- ing. We must tremble for his welfare, even for his survival.