There are some historic moments in public life that we all wish we could have been there to witness. Martin Luther King delivering his I have a dream speech; the Berlin wall coming down. Personally, since I was an employee of the organisation for five years and now study media, I would like to have been at that infamous governors meeting at the BBC in the wake of the Hutton report which decided that the popular, populist director-general Greg Dyke, who had seemed so secure, would have to fall on his sword. Why did the governors crumble so easily to government pressure that fateful night in January 2004? And what was the atmosphere like when the pugnacious Dyke realised that his time was up?
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A new book by anthropologist Georgina Born, Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the reinvention of the BBC, was written before the convulsions and so is not able to answer these questions directly, but it offers a unique insight into an institution in crisis. Cowed by the Hutton report, deeply demoralised by the simultaneous resignations of the director-general and the chairman and facing an increasingly rampant anti-BBC lobby who scent blood in the run-up to the charter review in 2006, 2004 was indeed an annus horribilis for the BBC. In light of this, Born takes the long view and presents a picture of a corporation in the painful process of adapting to political, social and technological change.
Inside the tribe
The author was certainly around the organisation during one of the most transformative eras in its history. Between 1995 and 2003, spanning the period of transition from the management-heavy, politically-cautious era when John Birt was in charge of the BBC to the heady brew of creativity, risk-taking and commercialism that characterised Greg Dykes reign, Born was able to observe that powerful contemporary tribe media executives at first hand. A social anthropologist who specialises in studying cultural institutions, she describes in comic detail the tricky progress of her work, the finely-observed details of which say more about the inner workings of the BBC than any policy document. From sitting in on top-level planning meetings with figures such as Alan Yentob to spending months observing the workings of Newsnight, Born is granted extraordinary access to a secretive and hierarchical organisation. Yet it is an access that has to be constantly negotiated and renegotiated, subject to the occasional paroxysms of paranoia from the top brass.
Certainly cooperation is uneven, and a strong theme of closure to some of the most sensitive areas of the BBC runs through the book. At times the process must have been excruciatingly embarrassing, with Born sticking out like a sore thumb, a tolerated but insignificant presence. Describing a governors lunchtime seminar with the assembled great and good of Britains establishment, she is left to flounder and admits feeling slightly at a loss where to stand.
Absurd moments are plentiful, as when an executive assistant is belatedly assigned to oversee her study after she has already spent over a year on it. In their subsequent exchange he admits his amazement at how she was given permission I cant understand how you ever got in here, he says; this is the most secretive organisation. Born relishes the delicious irony in writing a fly-on-the-wall account of an organisation that makes fly-on-the-wall documentaries. As she puts it: I became a kind of psychoanalyst of the institution, in whom individuals entrusted private thoughts, theories and anxieties.
Like a latter-day Clifford Geertz at large in media-land, Born stalks the secretive corridors of Auntie (the BBCs cosy nickname) and uncovers paranoia, bureaucracy, and some monstrous egos. She speaks to staff that face great uncertainty in their careers, with the increasing casualisation of the labour market in the cultural industries. She finds an organisation that had been given a fresh lease of life by Greg Dyke after the demoralising layers of internal bureaucracy imposed on it by his predecessor John Birt, and now worries about its future. She discovers a vibrant culture of creativity, and some of the best programme making in the world. She considers the worrying implications of the Hutton report for the worlds largest and arguably most important cultural institution. But above all Born tells the story of an organisation which more than any other acts as a mirror of the changing culture and politics of Britain.
The result is an often bizarre, yet highly readable, mixture of social science, history and anecdote, interspersed throughout with excerpts from the diaries Born kept during the course of her research. She recounts not only telling and colourful exchanges while in the field, but also invites us into her subconscious. For example, as the promised access to observe the then controller of BBC1, Michael Jackson, keeps floating elusively out of reach, she describes a dream where he throws darts at her feet while chatting amiably to his colleagues. While such reflexivity is de rigueur in ethnographic research these days, one does wonder whether at such moments the book becomes more about Born and less about her quarry. Yet the mixture of cultural theory, personal reflections and interview excerpts adds colour and depth to her account.
The threat of extinction
The scale of the current challenge to the BBC is huge. Not only must it come to terms with redefining a new vision for public service broadcasting in the digital age, in a media landscape dominated by the three diktats of choice, commercialisation and competition, but it also faces an ideological threat where the very notion of a large publicly-funded institution is anathema in the market-driven ethos of Blairs Britain.
By any standards, this crisis is acute. The near-simultaneous resignation in January 2004 of the BBC chairman and director-general made the organisation particularly vulnerable to its enemies. Their replacements (Michael Grade and Mark Thompson respectively) are still relatively new to their jobs; extensive job-losses, relocations and internal reorganisation are planned; a new charter review when the government will decide the structure and funding of the BBC is approaching in 2006. All this makes the current moment especially dangerous for the BBC.
Moreover, the loudest voices in the public debate are firmly anti-BBC, against the licence fee which they personify as an unfair tax on the public, and of the belief that the BBC is a cultural tyranny, one that distorts the market and acts as an unfair barrier to competition (for example David Elstein in openDemocracy).
The majority of these voices are on the side of commercial media organisations which would benefit massively from the BBCs demise. But the attack on the core principles of the BBC is the result of a wider political culture where there is a deep distrust of public intervention of any kind and an overpowering belief in the primacy of markets to deliver the best service. In the neo-liberal logic of Blairs Britain, the BBC is a strange anomaly, the most visible symbol of an older belief in public service unfettered by market forces. However, for all this aggression, the British public consistently rate the BBC as its most trusted public institution, in an age where trust in public institutions is at an all-time low. The BBCs reputation remains high across the world as well.
Georgina Born argues that it is only through sweeping structural reforms that the BBC can retain its independence from political coercion and continue to provide the service that the public demands. Bringing the BBC under the economistic regulator Ofcom is not the answer, for how can value be put on some of the social benefits of public service broadcasting?
Instead Born suggests that the BBC needs to retain its self-regulatory structure but acknowledges that the present cosy relationship between the governors and the executive is non-sustainable. There needs to be a strong independent self-regulatory body that can restore trust, which should be full time and should include creative expertise as well as other professional experience. But most radically, Born argues that there needs to be a definition of public service communications set down in law with an independent commission set up, separate from government, that sets the licence fee as they do in Germany. This would serve to depoliticise the issue of licence-fee renewal and make the BBC less vulnerable to political attack.
However troubled the account may be, Uncertain Vision reminds us why the BBC exists, and why we would be impoverished culturally without it. Who else, for example, would have invested the time and money in a series such as Adam Curtiss The Power of Nightmares, one of the most powerful and intelligent political wake-up calls to the neo-conservative agenda in recent times?
At this crucial time, with the BBC weakened by Huttons farcically one-sided report, we must remember the BBCs vital democratic role to hold powerful figures to account and to enrich the cultural fabric of the nation (as well as entertaining us all). Yet without political autonomy, the ability of the BBC to achieve these ends and thus to safeguard its own future is imperilled. At times critical, at times highly amusing, ultimately Born forcefully argues for the continuing necessity of public service broadcasting in a culture and media that is increasingly overrun by vested interest.
