Trouble and strife
Michael Vestey
THE FUN FACTORY: A LIFE IN THE BBC by Will Wyatt Aurum Press, £20, pp. 363, ISBN 1854109154 Will Wyatt opens this account of his 34 years at the BBC with the attempts by himself and John Birt to prevent Greg Dyke becoming the 13th directorgeneral of the corporation. Birt wanted one of his own proteges to succeed him, Mark By-ford, then director of regional broadcasting, in the hope that Byford wouldn't reverse any of his massive and debilitating structural changes, as Dykt. might and indeed did. Wyatt, then deputy to Birt and with no claim to the job, convinced himself that Dyke's financial donations to the Labour party ruled him out. The two began plotting, seemind.■ unaware that the chairman of the governors, Sir Christopher Bland, was determined to have his former colleague at LWT. Dirty tricks were afoot. Information about Dyke's donations was leaked to the Times which opposed his appointment. Later, according to this book, Dyke was relaxed about Wyatt's opposition. Did he know, though, that Wyatt had been leaking and briefing? Dyke is said to have blamed another candidate, Tony Hall, the chid executive of news, for the press campaign against him because he'd been at Oxford with the editor of the Times. Hall left soon after. Perhaps he too was plotting but he always struck me as being too correct for that.
Wyatt is, by all accounts, an amiable man, good with people and a successful documentary producer. But he also knew how to plunge the knife in. One of the casualties of the anti-Dyke conspiracy u a, Sam Younger, director of the World Service. Birt and Wyatt wanted their man Byford to gain more senior experience before applying for the director-generalship. Younger was considered expendable, here dismissed by Wyatt as 'doing a competent if unspectacular job' at the World Service. So to make way for Byford, Younger, a much respected executive, was eased out of the corporation. In my view Dyke, although handicapped by his past association with Labour, is a better director-general than Birt in that he's not interested in permanent revolution and an obsession with structures which made the BBC such a grim place to work throughout the Birt period. Factory yes, but not much fun. Even Ron Neil, then director of news who clung to the heaving ship all the way through the gigantic waves, confided to Wyatt, 'I hate my job. I don't like coming to work and I can't sleep.' As Prince Charles once remarked to him. 'Isn't it [the BBC] obsessed with efficiency? Efficiency often means losing the human dimension.' Since Dyke arrived morale has risen considerably.
Wyatt, one has to say, is a great survivor and one of the few senior people to stay until the end of the Birt era. Perhaps he genuinely admired him but he prospered by realising that Birt didn't tolerate dissent. If you wanted to remain you had to support him and the constant turmoil unequivocally, however wasteful it might be in fees to the management consultants who for a time seemed to run the place. They rubbed their hands with glee at the hundreds of millions of pounds of licencefee-payers' money that came their way. In the mid-1980s there was undoubtedly a problem at the top of the BBC and in
television current affairs at Lime Grove which was arrogant and out of control. Relations with the Thatcher government were hostile. Wyatt, though, believes, as did Birt in his solipsistic and vainglorious memoirs published last year, that the latter saved the licence fee and the renewal of the BBC charter. The truth is that neither was really at risk. Although Thatcher instinctively wanted to abolish the licence fee and break up the BBC, even she shrank from doing so. No government would try it unless the BBC became sufficiently unpopular for it to act. This doesn't mean to say it won't happen one day; the time is just not right in the immediate and near future and I have difficulty foreseeing when it might be. Although well written, this is really a book for insiders, broadcasting aficionados and historians. The general reader might find the management struggles and the concerns of the endless committees rather arcane. Even Wyatt confesses that he didn't expect withdrawal symptoms at no longer having to attend `the on-line steering group, the marketing steering group, the financial systems steering group, the efficiency review, the rights strategy group, the Discovery working group, the UKTV board, the broadcast steering group, the presentation project and many more'. No wonder the programmes suffered.
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