In continuing to cut the crap, Greg Dyke is placing trash TV above public service broadcasting
STEPHEN GLOVER
The odds are that Greg 'cut the crap' Dyke may be the last director-general of the BBC in its guise as a public service broadcaster. It becomes clearer all the time that he is driven simply by ratings, and wishes to hive off more 'elitist' programmes to minority digital channels which practically no one watches. That is the lesson of the BBC's reported decision no longer to cover party conferences on mainstream television, as well as the launch last Saturday of the new arts channel BBC 4.
People rightly say that party conferences are no longer what they were. They fondly remember bloodcurdling clashes between the Bennites and Labour right-wingers in the early 1980s, and Conservative conferences besieged by Trotskyist agitators screaming 'Tory scum'. Those were the days. It is certainly true that New Labour has turned modern party conferences into bland, carefully stage-managed affairs, which is what the Tories have been trying to do since time immemorial, though not always successfully. But things do sometimes happen that are not planned by the party hierarchies. Interesting and revealing speeches are still made. If conferences took place during prime-time television, Mr Dyke might have a point. But they compete only with children's programmes and daytime trash television.
Unless there is a change of heart, the BBC will show the party conferences on its digital parliamentary channel, which is watched only by obsessives and members of the media class. Only about half the population has access to digital television, including BBC 4. Perhaps we should not make too much of the fact that BBC 4 drew only 11,000 viewers on Saturday, since its programmes were also being shown for one night only on BBC 2, where they attracted an audience of between 600,000 and 900,000. But my guess is that BBC 4 will be watched by very few people. Excellent though its output may be (and some of the programmes I have seen so far were very good) it is likely to be the preserve of a tiny minority. The majority, meanwhile, will be offered more trash television and even fewer arts programmes.
This process of 'dumping' upmarket programmes on to digital television, criticised last Sunday by Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, contradicts everything the BBC once stood for. There was a time when the Corporation opened the eyes of ordinary people to possibilities that no one else had bothered to tell them about. The BBC had, and even now has to some extent, an educational role in the widest and most unhectoring sense. That is being jeopardised by the ratings-driven Greg Dyke with his passion for minority digital channels.
For some inexplicable reason my invitation to my old friend Peter Stothard's leaving party got lost in the post. Nonetheless, vivid accounts reach me of this memorable occasion. Robert Thomson, Mr Stothard's successor, is described as being surrounded by hordes of journalists desperate to touch the hem of his cloak. He was evidently dazed by all this adulation, having been appointed editor of the Times and flown the Atlantic (economy class, according to one report, owing to a cock-up) in a very few days.
It seems to me that most people, including myself, have so far missed the point about Mr Thomson. This is that he is culturally and journalistically an outsider. People think that because he is an Australian he is somehow an Englishman who has gone wrong, but an Englishman all the same. That is not how most Australians of Mr Thomson's generation would see themselves. He is to most intents and purposes a foreigner who happens to have spent only very few of his 40odd years in this country. It may be objected that he has at least worked for a British paper, but the Financial Times, for which he spent many years as a foreign correspondent far from these shores, can hardly any longer be described as British. Most of its circulation is now abroad, and its heart, if it has one, is in Brussels, Frankfurt or New York as much as it is in London, let alone Britain. Far from being a colonial boy who is familiar with the nooks and crannies of Fleet Street, Mr Thomson should be seen as a stranger who has very little experience of Fleet Street.
His proprietor Rupert Murdoch has always been drawn to outsiders, and most of his best editors have come from outside the establishment. Andrew Neil of the Sunday Times was a Scottish working-class lad who has spent his life inveighing against public schools and Oxbridge. Kelvin MacKenzie of the Sun was an anarchist who owed no loyalties to anyone or anything. David Yelland, the present editor of the Sun, plainly regards himself as a sort of honorary American. Even my old friend Peter Stothard, though educated at Oxford, was sometimes at odds with the establishment, as a recent, slightly chippy piece by him about Princess Margaret attests. But all these editors, though outsiders, were British, and knew this country as their own, and were familiar with Fleet Street and its ways.
Mr Thomson's unfamiliarity with this country and its journalistic world could be to his advantage. He may see our shortcomings with an incisiveness an insider could never muster. But I rather think he will have his work cut out. On one level he may simply not know his way around the political map of London. Perhaps more importantly, he may have only a vague idea of the qualities of many journalists, including his own. I dare say some of the home-grown boys at Wapping, where the Times is based, are already sharpening their stilettos. Mr Thomson is obviously clever, and I am sure he is a quick learner, but he will need the support of people who know the ropes. If he is wise, he will disprove reports that the likes of Ben Preston, the Times's deputy editor, and Michael Gove, an assistant editor, are on their way out.
Idid not have the space last week to respond to Mark Steyn's latest sally about the number of civilians who may have died as a result of American bombing in Afghanistan. Mark may be one of the wittiest writers alive, but he does not appear to be quite so brilliant with figures. He claims that I am sticking by my assertion that 4,000 civilians have died. This is what I wrote in the issue of 26 January: 'How can he [Mark] know that 4,000 people have not died? Well, obviously he can't — any more than I can know that they have.'
I certainly stick by that statement. No one yet knows how many civilians have been killed, and a precise figure may never be achievable. (By contrast, the number of dead as a result of the World Trade Center atrocity has very nearly been established. Mark has not reflected on the fact that this figure is well under half the original estimate.) My point is that the American way of waging war in Kosovo and Afghanistan — dropping 'precision' bombs from a great height — has led to numerous civilian casualties. For fear that America's moral case may be damaged, Mark is anxious to minimise this figure, and mocks anyone who fears that the number of fatalities may be higher than he would like it to be.
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