Getting Out Alive: News, Sport and Politics at the BBC

by Roger Mosey

  We decided to broadcast the programme as scheduled and without any cuts. A strong defence was that it had been shown as a film in cinemas in North America and in Europe, and it was only when it made the transition to the BBC and a mass television audience that the rhetoric against it built up. The Trump people asked for a right of reply for one of their representatives immediately after the programme, potentially standing alone as a piece to camera, and we denied them that. We said, however, that we would be delighted to welcome Mr Trump as a guest on Newsnight the following night if there were points he wanted to make. Paxman v. Trump would have been marvellous box office. But our invitation was declined, and instead there was a barrage of condemnation from the Trump organisation. Donald himself tweeted: ‘The BBC is widely criticized for a lack of professionalism. We dealt with a Roger Mosey – a total lightweight who doesn’t have a clue.’ I had never previously been called light. George Sorial, Trump’s chief counsel, was quoted in The Guardian:

  The BBC is now an active participant in what many … know is a complete false telling of the story behind the construction of Trump Golf Scotland. I would say Roger Mosey should certainly resign or the BBC should consider firing him. We’re filing complaints with Ofcom and the BBC Trust and are considering other available legal actions.

  To the best of my knowledge, no complaint was received, and in this case it is apparent that the alternative course, of delaying the programme, is what would have added to the momentum of a ‘BBC crisis’. It would have been about loss of nerve, and giving in to corporate interests. But these decisions are never so clear-cut at the time that you have to take them.

  The other challenge was maintaining quality on air amid the management meltdown. The Saturday evening on which George Entwistle resigned was part of Remembrance Weekend, with the commemoration at the Royal Albert Hall next in the BBC One schedule after the newsflash that he was stepping down. The following day we were live at the Cenotaph for one of the nation’s most solemn moments, the two-minute silence. On Friday it was Children In Need. All of these needed to be as flawless as possible to avoid another wave of controversy washing over us, and Children In Need was a particular test. We were concerned that trust in the BBC had slumped to such an extent that people might not donate to the charity, especially given the stories emerging each day about Savile and children he had met on BBC premises. To address this, Terry Wogan delivered a script about the effects of child abuse, which began simply and unequivocally: ‘Children should be able to trust adults. That should be a given. Our role is to protect them.’ There was relief when the money raised beat the totals of previous years, and Children In Need avoided any damage through its association with a tarnished BBC.

  We needed to make sure, too, that the appalling acts of previous decades were not made worse by bringing them into the present. That is why a commemorative plate painted by Rolf Harris did not make it onto Children In Need. We knew by then that the police were taking an interest in Harris’s crimes, though at that point there were only allegations and he had not been arrested. I later saw a website which, not knowing the true reason, apologised to customers:

  Earlier this year, there was talk of manufacturing a Diamond Jubilee plate designed by Rolf Harris to raise funds for Children in Need. Despite having received numerous enquiries from customers, we are sad to report that this project will not be going ahead. No doubt the BBC has other things on its mind.

  Few people had spotted the omission, but it was impossible to explain why it had happened when investigations were continuing. That was a problem that came up time and again through that autumn. We could remove the known guilty from the air, as in the case of Savile: we dropped all editions of Top of the Pops that featured him. We could not edit out of archive programmes, or withdraw from advertised live appearances, those about whom there were suspicions but not yet charges, and all the time we bore the risk that a wrong call would result in another reputational blow. ‘They knew he had been accused of something serious, but the programme still went ahead.’

  In television, the fact that benign Savile obituary programmes had been broadcast the previous Christmas increased the nervousness. Every time someone died, or a tribute season was planned, I would receive a call from a scheduler in my role as divisional director and gold commander: ‘Is there any reason you know why we shouldn’t broadcast a programme about X?’ We never lost sight of the fact that it was the victims of sexual abuse, and our audience’s understandable anger about the past, that necessitated this caution. But it was a jittery few weeks, working with Tim Davie as acting DG, as we tried to balance maintaining normal business with minimising the risks of further damage to the corporation.

  If there was any light relief, it came from the impending move of BBC television from its home of more than fifty years, Television Centre, to New Broadcasting House (NBH) in London. As divisional director, I oversaw the transporting of many of our staff and their belongings along the Westway to what was, in all sorts of ways, a wonderful new space. However, I had experienced some of its pitfalls already. NBH was predominantly open plan: it was designed to increase interaction between different teams and to break down barriers – or, as we called them in the BBC, ‘silos’. The intention was that I would have no individual office myself, and I would be perched on a chair at one end of an area shared with television HQ staff and some programme makers. I worked from there during some of the Savile crisis, and discovered immediately that conversations from the far end of the office were transmitted perfectly to my ears by the excellent acoustics. This made me sure that any of my confidential chats or phone calls would go back the same way. I asked to move into one of the small conference rooms to ensure privacy, and was granted my request – only to find that, even with the door shut, I could hear every word spoken by a woman ordering coffee outside. It turned out that some of the walls deliberately did not reach the ceiling, for reasons of air conditioning, and there were ducts in the floor that relayed sound along them to the outside offices. I learned to speak much more softly than I had been used to.

  Many television colleagues were also less than keen initially on their new home. The channel controllers had chosen a space on the sixth floor of the building which, at first sight, had looked as though it gave them a quieter area than most. When they got there, they discovered that they fronted onto what had become a busy walkway. They sat neatly in a row, accessible to all, and at one point were ‘door-stepped’ by a visiting journalist. Someone described them as sitting there like disconsolate check-in staff for a budget airline, and they soon demanded new desks and – where possible – partitions and defensible space.

  Humour was to be found, though, in the meeting rooms. The excellent sitcom W1A, whose commissioning I approved while I was in television, must have found it hard to satirise their names, because we really did have finance meetings in ‘The Del Boy Room’. My windowless meeting room for guests was called ‘Nice to See You’, and it must have been a narrow squeak that its companion space was not called ‘’Allo, ’Allo’. Up on the seventh floor, the break-out area used for conferences and seminars was splendid – except for its literal openness, which allowed guests for Radio 1 on the eighth floor to march along a corridor directly above, either chattering to each other or ear-wigging on the discussions below.

  This is not to detract from the success of the building overall, because most of the time it worked: you bumped into people much more often than in Television Centre, and it broke down the hierarchies in a refreshing way. It was just not the ideal place for the most sensitive of conversations, as the controllers pointed out to me every time they had to have ‘secret’ talent negotiations in glass-walled rooms with a hundred pairs of eyes looking in. It was not all done without cheerfulness, though, and I became fond of Janice Hadlow on BBC Two and Richard Klein on BBC Four, both of whom did a tremendous job in commissioning shows that were a pleasure to watch.

  As if my life was not complete with being responsible for t
he whole of BBC television, I was given the additional role of chairing the BBC’s Editorial Standards Board. As its title suggests, this looked at standards and policy across the organisation, and it was paralleled by the Trust’s Editorial Standards Committee, which would receive reports from the management as well as running its own complaints process. I went into this with reasonably good spirits, but it soon became the most tiresome of chores. I had, up until this point, got on fine with most trustees, despite my differences with some of them about sport. But after George’s departure, and with the cathartic thought that ‘I really don’t have to work here any more’, I didn’t hide my feelings when I found Trust processes baffling or irritating. This included having to deal with their impartiality reviews, which took an enormous amount of Trust and management time to little apparent result.

  With the one exception of Anthony King’s work on devolution, which changed the BBC’s journalistic output for the better, I am not sure any of them made us much wiser. On rural affairs, for instance, which was underway during my time there, it was predictable that the report would conclude that there should be more about rural affairs, or, as the Trust put it, the BBC ‘must tackle the deficit in its network coverage of rural England’. It was also inevitable that the review would call for the reintroduction of a rural affairs correspondent. Most reviews demanded new on-air or off-air editors to pursue their subjects. I had once, in television news, drawn up a list of all the things that well-intentioned regulators wanted us to do more of: arts, business, sciences, religion, European affairs, the developing world – the list went on and on. But there was almost nothing anyone wanted us to do less of, and the network bulletins remained stubbornly just twenty-five minutes in length. I am not aware of any BBC Trust report into a specialist area that called for less of it.

  Rural affairs was actually one of the more sensible reports, but others contradicted each other. The science review by Steve Jones concluded that climate change was settled science and that we should reflect that – only for the impartiality review by Stuart Prebble to criticise a piece on the College of Journalism website because it was ‘entirely devoted to sustaining the case that climate change is effectively “settled science” and that those who argue otherwise are simply wrong’.

  For the most part, journalists simply shrugged their shoulders and got on with the job. In so far as the reports had an effect, though, they were about greater co-ordination and centralisation of policy. This is a good thing on issues of fact or legal matters. It is more of a problem if it seeks to shape opinion across an organisation with as many outlets or as much market share as BBC News. I have always believed in editors editing their individual programmes and fostering as much diversity as possible. It is better if they choose different stories and fresh treatments, rather than offer a table d’hôte menu cooked up by the centre. My worry was that the Trust’s wish for ‘compliance’ across the BBC, with their view of a desired agenda, would erode programmes’ autonomy – the right, sometimes, to be contrary.

  The one thing that kept me sanguine throughout this was the knowledge that I didn’t have to stay: I could retire from the BBC when I turned fifty-five in January 2013. I could do what I thought was right in television without bothering about the politics, or the obsession in some quarters about ratings, and I could say what I believed to be true to the Trust. This made my relationship with them even chillier. But there was the backdrop of the appointment of Tony Hall as director-general, and the dilemma that caused for me. I liked and rated Tony, and we had kept in touch throughout his Opera House years. I had phoned him after George left and told him he was the person the BBC needed as DG. We therefore had a number of meetings about the organisation and its challenges after his appointment had been announced, and while he was still at Covent Garden, all of which were warm if slightly fuzzy. At one meeting, in a supposedly out-of-the-way coffee shop, the Arts Council chairman Peter Bazalgette was on a nearby table and waved cheerily at the BBC conspirators. In truth, we were skating around the question of what I might do – with Tony saying appropriately kind things, and me wishing there would at least be a concrete proposal. I hoped to conclude my unexpectedly long role in television and to get some certainty back into my life. I had not been offered a permanent job after the Olympics and nor had the BBC served me notice of redundancy. The previous autumn’s jitteriness was still hobbling the organisation, and that was worse for those without a guaranteed role. I was in limbo, with a not altogether helpful thought in my mind: I wanted to be allocated a new post, but I was also pretty sure I would turn it down. The best thing for me to do was to leave, and yet I would have preferred to have an external job to go to, and the autumn of 2012 had offered no time to look for one. We meandered through the early weeks of 2013, with some of Tony’s pieces slotting into place but warm fuzziness still the order of the day for me.

  It was in the middle of February that I got an email from one of my colleagues, Barnie Choudhury. He attached an advertisement from an academic website for the Mastership of Selwyn College, Cambridge, with a note: ‘Just in case you need a new challenge… I think you’d be great.’ I later saw the ad in the Sunday Times. Being head of a college was something I had considered before: I had enjoyed the many visits I had made to universities and colleges in the build-up to the Olympics, and my Wadham heritage still meant a lot to me. I decided to apply, though with the belief that it was the longest of long shots. This was Cambridge, which I had visited only half a dozen times in my life, and I was a broadcasting executive seeking a role at a college where all the previous Masters had been academics or ordained priests or both. I sent off my CV and a covering letter, and thought little more about it.

  The BBC wheels continued to grind slowly. Eventually they disgorged advertisements for two roles: director of television and director of news. Both were jobs that I might have been qualified for, though neither excited me, and in any case I was clear with Tony that I was not going to start putting myself through an application process. He had agreed that I would be offered something at an appropriate level, and I received an email from the HR department accepting that I would not run for television or news and saying, ‘The key thing, Roger, is that we want you to stay and we need you. We’re doing everything we can to resolve this quickly.’ It was therefore useful to bump into a Media Guardian journalist at an awards ceremony and to give an honest answer to the inevitable question about my intentions. Ben Dowell asked me, ‘So are you going to apply for both jobs, then?’ and I said, ‘No, neither’ – which took him aback because there is normally hedging, or straightforward lying, when personal prospects are discussed. He wrote a piece, which got the story out ahead of any interviews. I had previously experienced The Guardian being convinced that I was a candidate for director of radio in 2008, when I had never applied, and it was not unknown for colleagues to express sympathy on losing out even when you had no interest in a role. Ben’s report said:

  Roger Mosey, the BBC’s acting head of Vision, has not applied for the senior posts of director of television or director of news and is thought to be ready to take on a new role at the corporation. Mosey, who was regarded as a potentially strong candidate for either role after overseeing the BBC’s successful coverage of the 2012 Olympics, is understood to have spoken to incoming director-general Lord Hall over continuing his 33-year career at the BBC with a new post. He declined to comment.

  That last bit was odd, really, because I had not only given The Guardian their story but I had said I was happy to have it on the record.

  Tony finally arrived at the BBC at the start of April. I tweeted supportively after his first executive meeting on 2 April: ‘Tony Hall’s first management board has just ended. It felt cheerful and upbeat.’ It did. Tony’s gift is to make it feel that a grown-up is back in charge, and he has a fundamental optimism that is reassuring while also being a silky political operator. I then showed that I wanted to get away from the BBC and its burdens by flying off to Australia two days
later for my first visit there and a first long break since the Olympics. I loved it. Drifting along the Swan River outside Perth on a glorious autumn day, consuming the wines of South Australia in Adelaide, and eating fish and chips in the shadow of the Sydney Harbour Bridge: it was a marvellous antidote to what had felt like a long, grey winter in the BBC. I took the boat out to the Olympic Park from 2000 to check that there is life after the Games, but I spent almost no time at all thinking about work, which was a contrast to my quest for news and BBC gossip when I had been on long-haul holidays in the past. In those days I used to reach for my phone or laptop at every moment. In Australia, I needed them mainly for the football scores from back home. I did, however, get an email from Selwyn College while I was away, in which they invited me for a first interview at the beginning of May.

  I arrived back in London in late April in a relaxed frame of mind, though my role in television was ending in about three weeks’ time following the appointment of Danny Cohen. That appears finally to have galvanised the BBC into making me a job offer, and when it came it was a decent one. I was walking through East Sheen on the way to meet George Entwistle for a long-arranged supper when HR head Lucy Adams called me to float the idea that I should become editorial director. I would be working direct to Tony on three things: big editorial issues that cut across BBC divisions, longer-term editorial policy, and overseeing major events. It was obvious that there was a flavour of the old Byford role about this, including the bit where you do the things the DG wishes not to do.