by Roger Mosey
Mark’s early moments acting as our leader didn’t win hearts and minds. The unreserved apology he and the acting chairman Lord Ryder made about the BBC’s errors over Hutton was unavoidable for any corporation after a public inquiry, but the awful staging of it and the repetition in subsequent days of the word ‘sorry’ meant that morale sank still further – especially in the journalism areas, where people could see the brutal consequences of the slightest mistake. Mark was also unlike any other BBC leader we had come across. He turned up at a news board meeting to try to cheer us up after the traumas, and immediately told us how he planned to do that: ‘I will love you.’ He repeated the words, more slowly. ‘I. Will. Love. You.’
And in the months that followed, Mark Byford did a wonderful job in healing the BBC when its wounds ran deep, and he became one of the people I most liked and respected in my time there. He was always on hand with advice, and it was invariably wise. The more you knew him, the more his personality became endearing rather than irritating – which is the opposite way round to many media folk. The hand he had to play as acting DG was a difficult one: the staff still yearned for Greg, which made new leadership a tougher challenge, but normal business had to resume with the right balance between journalistic enterprise and accuracy. There was also political pressure, most conspicuously from some BBC governors, for an accounting for the errors of the past. If the chairman and the DG had lost their jobs, what about the people on the coalface who had brought about this collapse, in their view, in the reputation of BBC News?
If you know the people involved, that was an absurd position for anyone to take. Richard Sambrook, Mark Damazer, Kevin Marsh and the rest are journalists of the highest integrity. The idea that people like Kevin should be subjected to what he calls ‘the process’ in his book about Hutton – essentially a disciplinary process without using the ‘d’ word – was only compounding months of external mauling. Some years later I read Charlotte Higgins’s excellent essays about the BBC in The Guardian, and Richard Sambrook’s quote leapt from the page:
After Hutton, I’d say it was about two years till I got over it. It was the first thing I thought about when I woke up in the morning and the last thing I thought about when I went to bed at night, every single day. What happened there? What could I have done differently? To what extent was I culpable, or not culpable?
I never experienced horrors on that scale, but I witnessed enough people who did – and I had enough troubled hours of my own caused by lesser stories – to know the emotional truth of what Richard said.
George Entwistle, even more bizarrely, was dragged into the process because of Newsnight’s alleged failure to connect a Susan Watts briefing from David Kelly with the Andrew Gilligan story based on the same source – despite the fact that both had generated stories on flagship programmes and nobody else made the immediate link either.
There was a view at the time that the process was Mark Byford’s fault, and he should have stopped it. In reality, my sense is that the process was foisted upon him and he did his best to manage it humanely and to keep all the individuals on board. In that, he succeeded. It would have been an unforgivable outcome if more heads had been placed on spikes outside Broadcasting House.
With his reputation for possessing a safe pair of hands, Mark came within a few days of being appointed the BBC’s next director-general when the date was set for the job interviews in April 2004. But then Michael Grade was selected as the new chairman of governors, and the DG race was suspended. Things within the BBC are sometimes taken as established facts even if nobody’s quite sure of their evidential base, but there was an immediate assumption: Byford wasn’t Grade’s type of chap, whereas Mark Thompson was. And so it proved.
Mark Thompson was the man everyone always thought would be DG. On the day he was appointed as editor of the Nine O’Clock News, the same day I became editor of PM, he was tipped as ‘the man most likely to rise to the top’. There was a presidential air about him even as a 29-year-old. What was unusual about him when he became DG was that, even as someone who had been at Channel 4 for a couple of years, he was ‘one of us’. John Birt, as he once said himself, to much chortling from the staff, came from another world, and the showmanship of Dyke was different galaxies away from BBC traditions. Between them, they had run the BBC for more than a decade, and the previous incumbent had been an accountant. But Mark was a BBC programme maker through and through: graduate trainee, news editor, channel controller, regional director, head of television. It felt like someone like us was back in charge.
I enjoyed working with Mark. Most of the time when he was DG, I was in sport – an area that interested him personally not one jot. But he knew the importance of sport for the BBC, and I learned to admire his ability to improvise on subjects about which he knew little. At an early meeting with BBC Sport producers, he was asked what he thought about our coverage of live golf. I am close to certain that his golf-watching had been confined to ten minutes a few years previously while he’d been waiting for News-night to come on, but he delivered an articulate and editorially credible analysis of BBC golf from flimsy foundations. When it came to sports rights negotiations, he was tigerish in his competitiveness. There was never any chance we would lose Match of the Day under his watch, and he gamely flew out with me to Georgia to profess an enduring love of the Masters to the Augusta Club when we thought the rights were vulnerable to Sky. He was unflinching in his commitment to the 2012 Olympics.
For the BBC, this was the era of Mark T and Mark B. Mark T performed the smart move at the start of his director-generalship of entrusting Mark B with the whole of the journalism portfolio, thus putting distance between the DG and the kind of news issues that had brought down Greg. Watching Mark T announce this at a leadership session, it struck me as both right and tactically brilliant: Mark B was there to catch the crap. What soon became apparent, though, was that the two Marks were complementary. Mark T was at his best in his lightning assessments of changing circumstances and his ability to seize advantage from them, while Mark B was the person at his side saying, ‘But if you do that now, Mark, you’ll be giving yourself a problem in three years’ time.’ Michael Grade had described Byford as ‘the conscience of the BBC’, and Mark T said he ‘never had a closer or more supportive relationship with any colleague’.
I can vouch for it being an excellent combination, and its strengths were manifest in two of the bigger crises of the Thompson era: the mess over rigged competitions and the meltdown caused by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand careering out of control in their programme on Radio 2. After losing a DG over assessments of weapons of mass destruction, to have lost the next one over the naming of the Blue Peter cat or rudeness towards an actor from Fawlty Towers would have been bathetic; yet there were moments when the edifice felt close to collapse, and it was the Thompson–Byford partnership that shored it up.
But these turned out not to be the real crises burrowing away underneath the corporation. It was only after both Marks had left that we found out about the horrors of Jimmy Savile, which had been unknown to us. But the problem about money was more obvious as something that had been building up for some years: at its baldest, everyone at the top of the BBC – and I include myself in this, with a salary that reached £270,000 a year – was being paid too much. The figures from 2010 are noteworthy for being so much more than the same roles attract now. The DG received a total remuneration package of £838,000, close to double what Tony Hall gets; Jana Bennett as director of television was on £517,000; and Mark Byford was receiving £488,000 per annum. A key figure from the Trust floated the idea that it was possible the next DG would have to be paid £1 million a year if the BBC was to attract the best talent in the world, and internal minds boggled at the people in the HR department earning around £200,000 a year, with their director on £320,000.
In fairness, this madness was apparent across the public sector in the pre-crash years in the pay given to council chief executives and university Vice
-Chancellors and NHS administrators. But some things were unfortunate for the BBC. It was a problem that John Birt and Greg Dyke and Mark Thompson could all have earned much more elsewhere. Mark’s successor as chief executive at Channel 4, Andy Duncan, was paid a grand total of £1.48 million in his final year there. This meant that chief executives who had made a real sacrifice were probably slower to see that the corporate pay bill was still way too large. It was also unhelpful that Freedom of Information made all top BBC salaries visible to everyone in the organisation. What it did was fuel pay requests from staff who saw what their colleagues were earning, and it ratcheted up inflation. It would also have been better if a Franciscan nun had been chairing the BBC’s executive remuneration committee instead of the chairman of Barclays Bank.
Curiously, though, it was in tackling this – arguably somewhat belatedly – that there was a fateful moment for Mark Thompson and the BBC. The priority in 2010 became cutting pay and being seen to be run in as lean a way as possible, and as part of those discussions Mark Byford did a very decent thing. He offered to leave the BBC if his presence as deputy and his salary were part of the problem. Byford would never have made that offer if it hadn’t been a serious one, but it must nevertheless have been a traumatic moment for him when, after a period of consultation, Thompson accepted it. I, more than most, knew how little Byford wanted to go. He was chairman of the London 2012 steering group and he had set up the structure I was running, and there was no one more passionate about delivering the Olympics. He also loved his job chairing journalism board, in charge of news and sport and the nations. So it was a shock when his senior team was called into his office one by one in the October of 2010 to be told: ‘I’m going. I’m leaving the BBC.’ For once, I wanted to give the famed bear-hugger a big hug himself – but, fortunately for the dignity of the occasion, we managed to restrain ourselves. The emotion was real, though, and Byford’s departure turned out not to be just a moment of personal sadness.
For a start, Mark got a pay-off that ultimately made him the poster boy for the deficient executive culture of the BBC. As far as he was concerned, he took what he was offered. As far as the BBC was concerned, it was trying to do the right thing for a long-standing servant of the corporation who had sacrificed his job. As far as the public was concerned, it just didn’t wash – and the grisly parliamentary hearings in 2013 were a reminder of the disconnect between the media culture and the real world, even though there was a credible underlying story about the millions of pounds of savings, far exceeding the redundancy costs, that the BBC had made in its executive ranks.
But worse than that, Byford was absent when new crises hit the BBC. I cannot imagine the Savile affair spiralling out of control if Mark had been sitting alongside George Entwistle. Mark would have had a grip on all the Diamond Jubilee coverage in the same way that he did for the royal wedding. Even in the routine day-to-day affairs in the closing months of Mark Thompson’s director-generalship, we missed the steadying hand of Byford. The re-created autonomous news division never had the steadiness that it had gained within journalism board, and the nations’ directors saw less of their boss when that boss was the DG rather than the DDG. What it had needed, of course, was a piece of classic Byford advice when Thompson came up with the politically smart idea of making him redundant: ‘But if you do that now, Mark, you’ll be giving yourself a problem further down the line…’ Byford was, arguably, the best DG the BBC never had. He was certainly the deputy that every DG needed. It is hard to think of anyone more devoted to the BBC and its ideals, and his energy was formidable, even if it meant for people like me a constant bombardment of ideas throughout the day and into the night.
His reputational reward was much less than he deserved, though that applies too to the people who made it to the very top: Greg having to resign, John Birt being derided as a Dalek, Mark Thompson being assailed after his departure on pay-offs and Savile. Thompson was right to muse about why people wanted to do the job at all.
But, as ever with the BBC, there is a test greater than the corporate reputation, and that is the strength of its programme making and the level of audience trust in its content. When we think back to the political hostility to the BBC at the end of the Thatcher era, and the explosion of competition in the digital age, the fact is that the BBC at the end of the Birt, Dyke and Thompson director-generalships was in far better health than anyone would have predicted in 1990. It was still the dominant broadcaster of its age, buoyant because of the robust health of the flagship services such as BBC One and Radio 4 and the innovation of online and iPlayer and the rest. If the buck stops at the top for things that went wrong, it should stop there too for what went right.
CHAPTER 12
TRANSITION
AS I WAS being ferried back home on the day after the Olympic closing ceremony, Chris Patten phoned me. It was a call of congratulations on a job well done by the BBC team. Curiously, though, that was it from the Trust. Given their inclination to break open the white wine for what some would deem to be lesser events, like the retirement of a trustee from Wales, it is in retrospect perhaps odd that they never gave the Olympics leadership team a drink or sent a thank-you note. We must assume many of them had been watching BBC Two and BBC Four for their alternative content. By contrast, we had a glowing public tribute from Mark Thompson:
As a once-in-a-lifetime broadcasting moment draws to a close, I want to pay tribute to every single person in the BBC who has helped to bring London 2012 to our audiences … It’s needed total commitment and great stamina through very long hours, but everywhere I’ve been over the past fortnight I’ve seen amazing team-work, passion and utter professionalism. The result has been the best coverage of any event by a broadcaster that I have ever had the privilege to witness.
The team and I also had a wonderful email from the former BBC chairman, Michael Grade:
I am lost in admiration for your virtually flawless coverage. I watched wall to wall, HD, Red Button, Radio 5 Live, Olympic DAB channel, online, you name it. If ever there was a killer argument for the licence fee, this was it. For less than the cost of a day ticket to the hockey, you got the full Olympics, pick and mix, all you could eat! A total triumph, editorially and in every way … Congratulations, Team GB and Team BBC delivered way beyond expectations. You should be SO proud of what you planned and executed. The Corporation will be calling your achievement in aid for the next 100 years!
The week after the Games I slept more than I was awake. Long nights, supplemented by afternoon naps, got me over what felt like an extreme version of jet lag, and my only disappointment was not having the Olympics to watch when I woke up. But I had an intriguing few weeks ahead of me. Working as director of ‘Vision’ – as television was then, irritatingly, still called – was a decent prospect while I sorted out what my post-Olympic life was going to be like. I could think of nothing in the BBC that would ever give me the thrill of London 2012, and my inclination was still to leave rather than to stay. I did, however, like the idea of working with George Entwistle as he established himself as director-general, and television was the powerhouse of the whole organisation, with a budget of more than £2 billion. An immersion into that world for six or seven weeks, until a permanent appointment was made, could only be a good thing. In fact, I was there for nine months and served under four DGs: Mark Thompson, George Entwistle, Tim Davie (acting) and Tony Hall. This was a period with diminishing amounts of joy in it, and the source of cheer in the gloomiest hours was plotting how to escape. It was a year without any sense of mission.
I started in television just a week after the Olympic closing ceremony to find that most of the rest of the division had gone on holiday, exhausted by the Games. So I enjoyed myself by going on a day trip to Cardiff to see the Drama Village and walking around the sets of Doctor Who, Casualty and Pobol y Cwm, the Welsh soap. I caught the train to Bristol and met the amazing team behind BBC Natural History, who were attracted by the lessons from the Olympics about creating ‘ev
ent television’ alongside their crafted films. I found most of the people in television to be welcoming, though the BBC edged back to type after the collective effort of the Olympics: there was a sense of some folk playing politics and eyeing the succession, and it is never easy to be in an acting role. The best you can do is keep the business of a division moving along, which I think we succeeded in doing; though the weeks of the Savile crisis made that extraordinarily difficult.
What you cannot do in those circumstances is duck decisions. The recent history of the BBC shows that a decision not to broadcast can be worse than a decision to transmit, and one of the examples of that involved Donald Trump. In October 2012, as the Savile affair was raging around us, BBC Two had scheduled Anthony Baxter’s documentary film You’ve Been Trumped, which was an unflattering but funny account of the tycoon’s creation of a golf resort in Scotland. This had gone through our compliance procedures in the usual way, but on the Friday afternoon ahead of a Sunday transmission we received a humdinger of a letter from Trump’s lawyers. If we went ahead with the broadcast, they said, they would complain to Ofcom and the BBC Trust and reserved the right to take legal action. A Trump spokesperson described the documentary as ‘a piece of propaganda that is wildly inaccurate, defamatory and deliberately misleading’. We went through Friday night in a flurry of legal and editorial policy consultations, and I phoned George to let him know what was going on. My instinct was that this was a classic example of last-minute pressure around an unfriendly programme, but we didn’t want to take needless risks. If this went wrong, it would feed powerfully into the ‘BBC crisis’ story. I certainly got no sense of equivocation from the Trump lawyers. They even called me on my mobile on Saturday when I was pushing a trolley round Waitrose. I was being lectured by New York lawyers alongside the cheese cabinet.
