ANOTHER VOICE

The man who attacked Esther Rantzen won't set a trend. More's the pity

MATTHEW PARRIS Anasty dispute between two leading BBC documentary-makers, Esther Rantzen and John Ware, turned nastier over the weekend. Under the headline `Twist the facts' Mr Ware had published in the Sun- day Telegraph an astonishing attack on a Rantzen Report rubbishing the British Hos- pital and Home for Incurables. He said the documentary was unfair and improperly executed. Last Sunday, Ms Rantzen hit back. In a letter to the paper ('Oh no, John, no John, no') she bitterly rejected Ware's criticisms. Now, John Birt is said to have ordered a review.

Upon these stormy waters I hardly ven- ture. One takes stock of Ms Rantzen's rebuttals, but is left — until the matter is adjudicated — with an uneasy, feeling about that documentary.

And I suppose we should be reassured that an adjudication is to occur. Having myself denounced, in this column and in intemperate language not a word of which I regret, the culture of mendacity which sur- rounds television programme-making, I should relish the emergence of new allega- tions. Unearthers are being unearthed and that is surely to the good?

It may be. But there is more in this spat to unsettle than to reassure. Let me explain why,

John Ware's intervention was a most extraordinary thing. It is unusual for news- papers to lay into the methods of broad- casters with so unbridled an attack. There is an unspoken feeling in the industry that none of us is without sin and we do best not to cast the first stone. Are we print journal- ists any more scrupulous than our sisters and brothers in television? If we all started exposing each other, where would it end?

Particularly this is true where prominent colleagues may be fingered. Some months ago, the Daily Mail began sniffing around Polly Toynbee's personal affairs, and Ms Toynbee went public with a pre-emptive strike in the Independent. By sundown at the waterhole the unease among the media herd was palpable. Journalists — men who would treat with merry abandon the expo- sure and wreckage of a Cabinet minister's private life — could speak of little else for weeks but their sensitivities in the Toynbee matter. It was as though these dilemmas were being raised for the first time. When I suggested in this column that it was inter- esting for journalists to observe our own species being hunted in the way we hunt others, friends of Polly's were on the phone within hours to protest and warn. There are so many reasons why it is safer to stay friends.

And if that is true among journalists gen- erally, how much more is it true within mainstream television. Even those employed by rival channels almost never attack each other on air or in print — and certainly not to question one another's pro- fessionalism.

But most incredible of all is the sight of one documentary-maker laying into anoth- er from within the same corporation. John Ware makes programmes for the BBC's Panorama. Panorama itself (though not, so far as I know, Mr Ware's own contributions to it) is often accused of tendentious docu- mentary-making.

So when first I spotted Mr Ware's article I blinked, gulped, and had to read the opening paragraphs twice, not for the con- tent of his allegations but for the fact that he, John Ware, was going public with them. What next? A 'we-take-the-lid-off Rantzen Report investigation into the methods of Panorama? A World in Action exposé of What the Papers Say? I doubt whether most newspaper readers appreciate quite how cosy the world of the media is, or the almost unprecedented nature of Mr Ware's attack.

So why did he do it? Will he be doing more of it? Could this become a fashion? The answers are: for very special reasons'; 'no'; and 'regrettably not'.

As he makes clear, John Ware has deeply personal and rather emotional reasons for respecting the BHHI's work. His friend and former colleague, Ian Smith, is there, horri- bly disabled through a skiing accident. Mr Ware has visited Mr Smith. He feels — you sense this in his article — pretty cut-up about his friend's condition, and he knows through his own direct experience how lov- ingly he is cared for at the BHHI. Visiting him, he has seen the dedication with which they care for others, too. That is why he felt moved to take the extraordinary step he did. I should be the last to disparage this. It may happen to us all that personal involve- ment opens our eyes and alerts our moral sensibilities to a great supposed wrong. In our professional capacity we would have kept our indignation within bounds and, perhaps, private, but now professional cir- cumspection collides with a deeper duty. The same sort of thing happens when (say) a Tory MP discovers that the hospital car- ing for his own disabled daughter faces the spending axe, and rebels against a three- line whip. I respect it very much.

But how often is John Ware, or anybody else with the insider status to command the cover story and two pages of the Sunday Telegraph 'Review', likely to find himself involved in such a collision? It was a coinci- dence that he happened to know so much and feel so deeply about the target of a col- league's expose. Without this coincidence, what chance that the case for the hospital could have been put with anything like the impact it achieved — or at all? What chance that others, if they think themselves unfairly treated by documentary-makers, are able to shout it from any rooftop from which they can be heard?

And what chance that, if the accusations were true, they could be laid at the door of Ms Rantzen alone? My own experience of television presentation suggests that her programme must be a team effort, its responsibilities shared among people who move freely within broadcasting and between programmes. That the cynical dis- regard for truth which Mr Ware says he has stumbled upon could be the product of one presenter's approach, or confined, like some rare infection, within one television production team, strains credulity.

If it is established that an injustice has been done to the BHHI, its rectification will be about as reassuring as checking your bank statement in an idle moment and for the first time in your life and finding it wildly adrift. This month's account can now be rectified, but were any of the others right?

Still, if he has any sense of professional caution, John Ware will insist that the mal- practice he alleges was a one-off; highly unusual, almost unknown in an industry whose standards and integrity are other- wise of the highest. And pigs will fly.

Matthew Parris is parliamentary slcetchwriter of the Times.