If the BBC did not produce trash TV, there'd be no Newsnight
ROD LIDDLE
Just like the great, arguably the first, sociologist. Auguste Comte, I pay a batman to wake me up every morning with the words, `Arise, Mr Liddle, you have great things to accomplish.' He usually arrives, the batman, at about 11.30, carrying a bottle of Moldovan Sauvignon Blanc and 20 pristine Raffles. And I get out of bed, invigorated, just as Comte did. Or, actually, it might have been Saint-Simon, I forget which. Blame that on the Sauvignon Blanc.
Ambition is an important thing in my life. Every week I set myself challenges, things to be done, glittering trophies to be captured. This last week, for example. I set myself the tasks of a) writing a massselling book about punctuation b) becoming chairman of the BBC and c) launching an ultra-upmarket morning newspaper aimed entirely at myself — a newspaper which nobody else will be clever enough to understand. It's Tuesday now, and things are going well. The punctuation book is finished and the newspaper has already made its appearance at my breakfast table. Peter Jay once scolded a recalcitrant subeditor who objected to the obtuse nature of his prose with the words, 'Listen: this article has been written for only two people in the country.' Well, my new newspaper is written for — and designed to be understood by — one person in the country. And there are no subeditors, thank God.
After this, securing the chairmanship of the BBC should be a doddle. Everybody is agreed that anybody would be better than the current, temporary incumbent, Lord Ryder of Vichy, or wherever. This is the man who offered up that abject and unreserved apology to the government 'on behalf of the BBC', despite the fact that nobody else in the BBC — with the possible exception that other old Tory factotum, Sarah Hogg, and maybe the weird acting director-general, Mark Byford, who has begun to behave like one of those spooky arrivistes you read about in John Wyndham novels — felt even remotely apologetic.
Applications closed this week and, if you discount fantasists like myself and disgruntled BBC staffers, the pile will not, I suspect, block the corridors at Broadcasting House. And yet, as my batman repeatedly assures me, there are great things to be accomplished.
Aside from issuing abject apologies, the job of the chairman of the BBC's board of governors is to ensure that the corporation fulfils its public-service remit. There really isn't much else the chap needs to do, other than act as a sort of brake, a moral conscience, upon the director-general. I could do that. It would require an understanding of why the BBC needs to produce such programmes as Fame Academy — which, I accept, is sometimes aesthetically difficult. But not practically difficult. The BBC has always produced moronic entertainment for the lumpen prole and the arguments against it doing so do not hold much water. David Elstein — in what I assume one should see as an extended job application form — has recently suggested that the BBC should be kept on as a sort of unglorified PBS — that thing which nobody in the USA ever watches. Why should the licence-payer fork out for lowbrow entertainment, goes the argument, if lowbrow entertainment is provided on every other channel? The answer is very simple, if twofold: the BBC needs to show that it sates the appetite of the nation and, more importantly, uses such programmes as Fame Academy to cross-subsidise news and current affairs, serious drama and music. If the BBC were not capable of competing for the large audiences, the argument in favour of a mandatory licence fee would quickly lose its force. And do not kid yourself that without a licence fee you would not have such programmes as Newsnight or Panorama. These are expensive shows: they are the product of a network that has a mass audience, even while the programmes themselves have very small audiences. Newsnight struggles to climb very much above one million viewers, and it is comparatively expensive. Serious journalism tends to be expensive.
No state-funded public-service channel would, in the end, allow itself to spend such a budget on a programme which attracted so few viewers: this is why there is nothing comparable to Newsnight in the United States or, for that matter, anywhere else in the world. Instead, you have late-night news shows stripped of a budget for investigative journalism and with presenters who are rather less compelling than Jeremy Paxman. The BBC gets away with subsidising Newsnight precisely because of its apparently contradictory double bind — i.e., the
requirement to reach a mass audience while retaining a public-service commitment.
In his spare time, the new chairman could amuse himself and perform a service to the nation by exterminating Lord Ryder. I do not mean exterminating Lord Ryder as a human being, which would be needlessly cruel, but exterminating Lord Ryder as a concept. There really is no justification for such a man being a BBC governor (and still less chairman). It has to be said that the same is true of two thirds of the current board of governors.
Ryder seems, in his pronouncements, to be antithetical to the very idea of a strong and vigorous corporation. He has no background in journalism, aside from hating journalists, nor any notable expertise in the arts. Why, then, is he there? He and his fellow mendicants should be replaced by a board comprising experienced professionals from within the media. Then they might understand the flaws in problematic news stories, and even — heaven forfend — make a judgment, instead of floundering around in the dark for months on end.
On day two of my chairmanship, I would hive off the BBC's various internal mechanisms for dealing with complaints from the general public and Alastair Campbell and drop the whole shebang in the lap of Ofcom. Nobody takes the programme complaints unit seriously; it is seen, rightly or wrongly, as the BBC's defensive shield against external scrutiny. Bin it. If Alastair Campbell had felt able to complain to a third party during the Gilligan affair, much of the trouble would have been avoided. It is even possible that Mr Campbell himself would still be in a proper job, instead of touring the country performing vaudeville routines for the curious and the disturbed. I cannot think of a single reason why the BBC should be allowed to investigate its own real or imagined misdemeanours.
Finally, an apology to my colleague Stephen Glover. I should not have been so snide about his reported plans to launch an upmarket daily newspaper. It's a noble and good thing to do, and if there's one journalist in the country who might carry it off, it's Stephen. But for those of you who think that the BBC might survive as a marginalised public-service network paid for by voluntary subscription, keep an eye on Stephen's newspaper and see how well it fares in the marketplace.
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