by Roger Mosey
This was a big ask. It was toughest on the network television service, headed at the time by Mark Thompson, because many of their programmes were the wrong length for the newly freed-up 9–10 p.m. slot. A lot of documentary and drama programmes were fifty minutes long, as was common for the old 9.30 p.m. placings, and our early liaison meetings had to kick around ideas for padding the slot or for bringing forward programmes planned for later in the season that were audience-winners and, crucially, the right duration.
It was not simple within BBC News, either. I had surreptitiously tipped off our graphics team as early as I could that we might need a title sequence with a ‘10’ in it rather than a ‘9’, but we also had to change shift patterns, incorporate the newly extended Nations and Regions slot within the programme and alter a generation of planning assumptions about Outside Broadcast (OB) trucks and satellite bookings. But it was stimulating. Our staff responded brilliantly to the challenge, and we loved the way the BBC under Dyke and our chairman Christopher Bland smacked away the competitive and political challenges – helped, of course, by the belief that what we were doing was right for the news audience as well as for our main TV channel.
That said, I was horribly nervous on 16 October 2000 when the first BBC Ten O’Clock News was about to go on air. We were still being assailed for rushing the changes, and as I got into the glass lift in the News Centre to go down to the editorial floor I had a clear notion in my head: ‘If this goes wrong now, it will be very, very bad.’ All it needed was a tape to be missing or a satellite link to go down, which are always possibilities in a live news programme, and our critics’ case would be proven: it was a botched job. I also could not quite imagine how the news division would explain itself to Greg if it screwed up the launch in any way.
My recollection is that the programme was editorially rather dull that night, but to the relief of all of us it was technically ‘clean’ – and the next day we discovered it had healthy ratings, too. Those continued. It was an article of faith among the media chattering classes that when ITV moved back against us, even if only for their peculiar pattern of three nights a week, we would lose the war for audiences. Initially, that was the case – but we went on to confound those expectations, and some years later the BBC was even able to appropriate the ‘News at Ten’ moniker that had been the proud badge of ITN when it owned the ten o’clock spot in its heyday.
Huw Edwards has been the under-appreciated hero of this long-term victory. The Ten was launched by the established and authoritative pairing of Peter Sissons and Michael Buerk. When it became time for them to move on, it was a strongly contested battle about who would take their place. It was arbitrated by Jana Bennett and Lorraine Heggessey for network television with my boss Richard Sambrook and me from news, and we had three people who clearly could be great Ten anchors: Huw, George Alagiah and Fiona Bruce. We argued it every way round, but opted for Huw because he had done a terrific job on the Six and because he shaded the others as a presenter on a live breaking story. It was one of our better decisions, with his authority on the Ten building over the years and his move into the iconic television events. By the time it came to planning the Olympic opening ceremony in London 2012, I would have no hesitation in wanting Huw to lead the commentary team.
The longer-term task facing television news was bringing the news bulletins and News 24 closer together. News 24 was continually being slated in its early days, and the Commons media committee had recently concluded: ‘We find it difficult to discern the justification for News 24 in view of its huge cost and small audience.’ Predictably, since they were in completely different departments, editors in bulletins and the channels saw each other as the enemy. Giving resources to one, they believed, took something away from the other – and our first combined editors’ awayday felt like it was composed of two opposing armed camps. It was a worryingly big culture change to get people on the bulletins to see that it was not good for BBC News to have an underperforming news channel.
My deputy, Rachel Attwell, set about transforming the look and feel of News 24 so that it was more in harmony with the rest of our operation, rather than the somewhat wacky initial incarnation with bright made-up flags and male presenters in their shirt sleeves. But what helped the credibility of the news channel more than anything else was the volume of huge stories. The first time we put News 24 onto BBC One for a breaking story was the crash of Concorde in Paris, and television controllers came to trust the channel, in a way they hadn’t before, as a source of coverage for the news they wanted on the main networks. In particular, Alison Sharman, the controller of BBC Daytime, saw that news was often good for ratings as well as for her editorial mix – so we cheerfully did snow and flood and crime specials for her alongside the ‘must do’ agenda of wars and terrorism. One day in September 2001, when we were at a staff lunch with the TV on in the background, we saw the traumatic pictures of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center; having News 24 meant all it took was a phone call to the network for us to be able to switch the coverage immediately onto BBC One.
Alison’s instincts sometimes overcame my journalistic caution, but she was almost always right. Just before Christmas in 2003 she phoned me at home on a Sunday morning about the rumours we were picking up that Saddam Hussein had been captured. I did the usual news division caveats: ‘At the moment these are only rumours; we haven’t got any official verification; we don’t want to build this up by putting rolling news on BBC One if it turns out not to be true.’ At which she responded politely but firmly: ‘It’s a story either way and it’s a darn sight more interesting than what we’re currently transmitting – so let’s go on air in five minutes.’ By then, the breaking news was about to be confirmed and we were broadcasting it on our main channel well before the competition. This increased profile for News 24 on the networks helped it become stronger in its own right, too. By the end of 2004, we had drawn level in viewing figures with Sky News after years of lagging behind.
Not every breaking story was quite so smoothly handled. One weekend, in March 2005, the former Prime Minister James Callaghan died. I took the view that the death of a former PM was something that should be noted in a brief news report on BBC One, pointing those interested to fuller coverage on News 24. I hadn’t reckoned with another venerable figure from the ’60s and ’70s. It was the night that Doctor Who was being brought back to network television after a long break, and the channel wanted to give it the best possible lead-in from the previous programme to get the audience hooked on the return of the Doctor. I thought Lorraine Heggessey was a splendid controller of One, but that night she was immoveable. I argued for a one-minute Callaghan news report in the next programme junction. ‘But Roger,’ she said, ‘it’s Doctor Who!’ ‘I know’, I replied, ‘but we’re talking about a former Prime Minister.’ Her voice took on an increased edge of determination: ‘It’s Doctor Who!’ Viewers wanting to know about Callaghan’s demise had to wait until after the Doctor’s reincarnation.
Throughout this period, the traditional programmes were in robust health. There was an amazing set of editors, including stars of the future like Jay Hunt on the Six O’Clock News, who went on to become controller of BBC One and then chief creative officer for Channel 4; Kevin Bakhurst on the Ten, who became deputy director-general at RTE in Ireland; and George Entwistle, who was so strong as a deputy editor that, when there was a vacancy, we handed him the role of Newsnight editor without an appointment process. He was exceptional in his editorship of the programme, too, bringing the best out of Jeremy Paxman and creating some memorable encounters with Tony Blair in the days when prime ministers thought it worth their while appearing at length on Newsnight. I was now the boss of the likes of Paxman and Sir David Frost, both of whom were, in their own ways, thoroughly charming. One of Frost’s greetings when I met him for lunch was characteristic: ‘Roger! This is the perfect day! Lunch with you and dinner with George Bush Senior!’
Paxman was a more formidable presence when I t
urned up at Newsnight team meetings. He would lurk towards the back of the room with the kind of look he reserved on air for ministers who were on a sticky wicket. BBC managers like me were juicy items on his menu, and he would apply himself to deconstructing the case we were trying to make. However, he was a pleasure to deal with one-to-one, and he was capable of discarding the conventions of the presenters’ rule book. There was one night when I was massively irritated by Newsnight’s editorial line on a story, which seemed to me wilfully divergent from some facts that had been set out on the Ten O’Clock News. Unusually, I called the duty editor at the end of the programme and made my displeasure plain. It was a surprise the next morning to read an email to me from Jeremy in which he sought to absolve the output team and take the responsibility himself. I have never known such willingness to take the blame from any presenter before or since.
It was largely unnoticed, which is as it should be, that we had rather a good balance of age and gender and ethnicity in our presentation team. Anna Ford was expertly steering the One O’Clock News, and Moira Stuart was reading the bulletins on Breakfast. Both departed from those roles after I left television news. Having two presenters on one programme is always controversial, but I was pleased we promoted Sophie Raworth to co-host the Six O’Clock News with George Alagiah. Darren Jordon, who had an intriguing past as a member of the Jamaica Regiment that had invaded Grenada, moved into network bulletin presentation and deputised for Anna on the One. Mishal Husain was introduced to domestic audiences on Breakfast after I’d seen her skills on BBC World, and some years later I persuaded her to take a major role in the 2012 Olympics.
It is an iron rule, though, that an organisation never gets credit for what it does right. The thousands of daily programmes and the dozens of breaking news specials that are sure-footed fade into nothing compared with the time you make a mistake, and the BBC is rightly judged by a higher standard than the rest. I have the utmost respect for Sky News, but the internal News 24 joke slogan about it was ‘never wrong for long’, based on its alleged ability to break a story and then break a different one if the first one turned out not to be entirely true. I recall Mark Byford’s reaction when Sky announced the death of Yasser Arafat a few days before he actually died: ‘If that had been us, Roger, I’d have had to go,’ he said. ‘I would have had to go!’ I hope that would not have been the case, but we could all see the point – and by then, of course, we had been through the row around the death of the Queen Mother.
Someone said wisely at the time that in the same way that the BBC had been rehearsing major royal obituaries for decades, so some of our critics in the newspapers had been rehearsing their coverage of the BBC’s coverage of the Queen Mother. We had a foretaste of that when Princess Margaret died earlier in the year, and our press office received calls from newspapers about our ‘disrespectful’ coverage of her love life in our obit – only for the same papers to go much, much further in their editions the next morning. But we unquestionably had a shaky start to our reporting of the death of the Queen Mother. If the death of a 101-year-old can be unexpected, it was unexpected: we had no warning signals, and the first I knew was a call on the Saturday afternoon of Easter weekend saying the announcement was imminent. By a horrible mischance, we had rehearsed major obituaries the previous week, which meant that everyone who had been part of that was now on days off, and rounding people up on a holiday weekend, as we had found when Princess Diana died, is tougher than when a death occurs in the middle of a weekday and the building is full.
The conceptual mistake we made in the first couple of hours of coverage was to think that, in an era of rolling news channels, this was ‘breaking news’. It was not. It was the death of a much-loved and very elderly lady, and once the announcement had been made we should have played the long-ago commissioned tapes about the Queen Mother’s love of horses or her Scottish roots – instead of which, we sought reaction on the phone and went live to hastily arranged outside broadcasts. It was only when we went to structured bulletins and the full obituary programme that we did justice to the Queen Mother’s life.
Crucially, too, Mark Damazer and I, as the senior news managers who had hurried into the building, were occupied not with what we were putting on air at that time but with the scheduling of the rest of the evening – complicated by the fact that almost all the other BBC bosses were away for Easter, and there was interim management in television because Mark Thompson had departed for Channel 4. Lorraine Heggessey was on a skiing holiday in Canada. We were trying to work out with her via a crackly mobile what to do mid-evening on BBC One, rather than being at the back of the gallery.
In the middle of this was Peter Sissons, who was the duty presenter that day. His burgundy tie became notorious as the emblem of the BBC’s disrespect, rather as if we had dressed him up in a bright pink bow-tie and made it revolve when he was on camera. The reason we stayed with the burgundy was that in our rehearsals we had always assumed that we would have some advance notice of the Queen Mother’s final illness. We would typically have Nick Witchell outside a hospital saying things were looking serious, and then the formal announcement would come from the Palace. This gave an odd challenge in that the presenters on air for the hospital watch would not be wearing black, but when the news broke they had to change – to a black tie for men and black suits for women – in about sixty seconds flat under the most pressured circumstances. This was strange because when the presenters came back into vision, the most conspicuous thing to some observers was that they had changed clothes, rather than that they were announcing an historic event – so we loosened the rules a little to say it was acceptable not to change if they were wearing sombre apparel. A bright frock or floral tie, no; but if they were unobjectionable in their turn-out they did not need to rush into black during the early part of the coverage.
In retrospect, that was the wrong call. But it would have been equally remiss not to have refreshed the guidelines. In the early part of my career, a royal death would have been marked by the tolling for one hour of the Croydon Bell across all our networks, and only when the Countess of Wessex was taken ill in the late 1990s did we realise that she was still within the top category of royals who would have required the bringing together of every single network for a major obituary – which I suspect even she, as a former public relations officer for Capital Radio, might have found something of an over-reaction.
What there emphatically wasn’t was an anti-royal agenda, as the days of reverential and polished coverage of the Queen Mother’s lying-in-state and funeral showed: the BBC has never been in the vanguard of republicanism. I wrote in 2002, and I still believe, that the BBC can do two things simultaneously. First, it can provide the platform on which the people of this country can share national experiences such as the big royal events. But, second, there is no compromise in the journalism because BBC News is free to report the failures as well as the successes of the monarchy – and certainly did during the crises of the 1990s and the Queen’s annus horribilis.
In my time in television news, the greater challenges about bias sat elsewhere. I believe most people in the BBC are fair-minded individuals, and journalists in particular have a professionalism that means they steer well clear of any party political bias. I have never had the problem of an editor who skewed an agenda in favour of Conservatives, Labour or any other party. But there can be a default to ‘groupthink’ – a set of assumptions that seem reasonable to everyone they know. We had an editorial debate around the time of the election of the new Pope in 2005, for instance, in which it was apparent that some of our output editors thought the correct positioning for a Pontiff would be pro-women priests, pro-gay rights and generally the kind of agreeable ecclesiastical liberal who would be at home in a north London Church of England parish. The idea that the cardinals might elect a traditional Catholic, like Cardinal Ratzinger, came as a bit of a blow. But the key thing was that we had the debate ahead of the white smoke at the Vatican, and our coverage on air was
, I hope, fair.
This was a typical pattern: identifying editorial problems and doing something about them. We did it, with a reasonable amount of success, during the Iraq War. There was a disdainful attitude towards George W. Bush from many in the media, including some parts of the BBC. I wasn’t alone on news board in being concerned about the incomprehension among some of our staff about why Bush had been elected and how he retained significant support in the US, and, as a public corrective, I gave a newspaper interview about the need for impartiality, which was headlined ‘President Bush isn’t automatically wrong’. More generally in covering a war, as during a general election campaign, there is such a strong awareness that the spotlight is on the BBC that there is a reduced risk of careless bias. I have never accepted the argument that the BBC was unduly pro-or anti-war. Iraq was possibly easier for achieving balance than some conflicts, notably the Falklands, because the divisions in the United Kingdom were so apparent – including the millions who took to the streets as well as those in Parliament – and they almost broke the Blair government before the bombing started. We didn’t lack voices opposing the war.
We made a riveting programme with the Prime Minister in the run-up to the conflict, as part of his so-called masochism strategy, in which we brought him together with an audience made up entirely of opponents of conflict. Newsnight went to Newcastle for what turned out to be a compellingly watchable encounter between Tony Blair at his most persuasive and a group of voters determined to resist him, but it cast light as well as creating heat. During a short break after the programme, Jeremy Paxman and I had a few minutes with Blair and Alastair Campbell – and the talk was about the quest for a second UN resolution and the need for international agreement. Blair had recently persuaded a reluctant United States to go back to the UN, which was seen as a win for a renewed diplomatic approach.
