Winding back the BBC clock

Why did Lucy Adams, the BBC’s confounded and derided HR boss, wear spectacles glued to her scalp whilst being grilled by MPs? Does she have two extra eyes in her head, through which she can seek divine inspiration from the gods of HR? 

She certainly demonstrated something that I’ve always suspected: the pointlessness of her profession.

Don't Scare The Turkey

The hare is dead: frankly, it never looked very alive to me.

The news that BBC1 has decided to axe its infantile game show “Don’t Scare The Hare” after just three disastrous and expensive episodes must come as no surprise to anyone who has actually seen it: which isn’t many (the ratings have plumbed new depths for Saturday night viewing).

For those who haven’t, it’s a show with dubbed laughter, a strange and superfluous music track, a scary presenter with giant glasses and a cap hiding his baldness, and an animatronic hare which trundles around the studio like a dalek. Grownups play children’s games and if they fail, the hare runs off “scared”. Oh, and someone wins some money.

Wow: somebody actually sat in a darkened room and came up with this drivel, and the BBC paid them a couple of million quid to stage it. It looks like cheap Bulgarian children’s television. Suspecting that it was designed for two-year-olds, we tried it out on Izzy. She didn’t last twenty seconds, angrily demanding we switch to Peppa Pig. The BBC clearly cast the wrong animal in the lead – it should have been a turkey.

Mind you, all producers have made them: turkeys, that is. When Mark Thompson quit the BBC as director of programmes, at his leaving do he gave a speech about his career highs and lows. Robot Wars, which I produced when he was running BBC2, was a high; but the lowest of the lows was a Saturday night game show called Happy Families.

It seemed like a great idea at the time: Gladiators had just completed its first series on ITV, and arena shows seemed to be the in thing. So, rather than lycra-clad superheroes with false names like Jet and Wolf, I came up with a show that pitched extended families against each other. We staged it at the London Arena: a barn of a place so big we had to build giant games to fill it. In the middle were two metal cages in which the contestants imprisoned their grandmothers. The contestants had to “Hoist up their Grannies” a hundred feet to the top of the building. Yes, I was responsible for this nonsense.

The show opened in the roof, with a giant roller coaster made up of hand-powered bikes. One by one each family member pedalled furiously to link up with the others into one long hand-powered train, which began a terrifying descent to the ground, hitting more than 40 miles an hour on the bends with no safety net. I was scared that we might dump an entire family onto the heads of the audience. Sometimes the bikes got stuck and the contestants were suspended in mid-air: one woman broke her arm on the pedals. We also built absurd games like “Terrorball”, in which someone had to answer trivia questions about their family while being spun upside down. There was even a game for the family dog.

I was terrified one of the grannies would suffer a heart attack. In fact, the biggest problem was incontinence: you wouldn’t believe how many times they needed to go to the toilet during filming. Each time the wretched cage had to be slowly winched down so they could be released. We went wildly over schedule, frequently filming into the night, by which time the audience – all 5,000 of them, had drifted off home. So instead of a mass spectacle, we had to shoot everything in close-up and cut in shots of audience cheering from the afternoon.

Right now I feel the pain of Don’t Scare The Hare’s producer. After so much effort, realising you’ve created a turkey is no fun. But at least the hare won’t be lonely, as it lies buried in the Saturday night television graveyard: it will have two granny cages and a load of rusty hand-pedalled bikes for company.

No Win Situation

When I joined the BBC as a news trainee in 1973, the first thing our instructor said to us six wet behind the ears young hopefuls was, “I expect one of you to become Director-General in a few years’ time”. I’m sure our newly graduated arrogance caused us to smirk with ambition, and indeed one of us, Tony Hall, nearly pipped Greg Dyke to the top spot a few years back. Today I couldn’t imagine a worse assignment.

Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, Mark Thompson decided not to broadcast an appeal by the Disasters Emergency Committee calling for donations to its Gaza relief fund, and now all hell has broken loose. His logic is that putting out the advert would undermine public confidence in the impartiality of the BBC. The result has been an outcry, with politicians, journalists, and even the BBC’s own staff, calling the decision weak, a serious error, or just plain wrong. Ben Bradshaw, the Health Minister, who used to be a reporter on Radio 4’s The World At One, said “This is a humanitarian catastrophe and I am afraid the reasons given by the BBC are completely feeble”. Even Phil Harding, the former BBC Controller of Policy (or, as we used to call him, Head of the Thought Police), who actually wrote the BBC’s editorial guidelines, says that although it’s a tough call, Thompson misjudged this one. I have to say, I agree.

Israel is, and always has been, the BBC’s hot potato. Constantly accused of bias on both sides, the BBC actually admitted it got it wrong (together with most of the world’s media) in 2005 over its overemotional (and consequently pro-Palestinian) coverage of the Israel attacks on Lebanon. That’s why this time it’s determined to get it right. The BBC says that by broadcasting the DEC appeal it might be seen to be backing Palestinians rather than Israelis as victims of the Gaza conflict. Consequently it’s now being accused of bias in favour of Israel. The Director-General can do no right.

The BBC’s mistake is that suggesting that broadcasting what is palpably a humanitarian, not a political appeal, might in some way confuse its viewers. This is condescending to the extreme. Does he serious believe that you and I will mistake it as some kind of pro-Hamas rant? This is an appeal by an umbrella group of 13 British humanitarian aid organisations, from Oxfam to Save the Children, to help children and innocent civilians whom, everyone agrees, are enduring the most appalling conditions. The money isn’t for the rebuilding of Gaza: that will presumably be funded by the Syrians and Iranians, who supplied the rockets that Hamas have been firing into undefended Israeli towns for the last six years. Whether or not Israel used disproportionate force against a civilian population, or Hamas used those civilians as human shields, is utterly irrelevant. Urgent aid is needed now, and these organisations need our cash as soon as they can get it.

The DEC was set up in 1963 to respond to extreme humanitarian emergency overseas. That such an emergency now exists is fact: it’s even accepted by the Israelis themselves, which is why organisations like Labour Friends of Israel are calling for the broadcast to go ahead. The scale of suffering is greater than anyone first thought; meanwhile the BBC insults the intelligence of its own viewers by suggesting they cannot distinguish between fact and propaganda.

As the Archbishop of York said at the weekend, this is not a row about impartiality, but about humanity. By the way, if you do want to donate, DEC’s phone number is 0370 60 60 900.

Andrew Sachs's Granddaughter

I can’t picture Gordon Brown sitting down with a mug of Horlicks listening to the Russell Brand show. Yet in the middle of the worst economic crisis for 70 years, with catastrophe looming in the Congo, he somehow found time to pronounce on a radio programme where just two listeners had phoned in to complain. There’s no doubt Brand and Ross’s answerphone messages to Andrew Sachs should never have been broadcast: they were lewd, offensive, and would have been an invasion of privacy whether or not they had been transmitted. But did they warrant such apocalyptic reaction?

The answer depends on how old you are. The events of last week brought into focus one of the biggest problems facing the BBC: how to engage with “Youth”. Commercial broadcasters need youth audiences because advertisers demand them, but the BBC needs “The Young” because without them the licence fee will soon become irrelevant.

That’s why BBC Three was launched. According to its latest ratings, this network still fails to attract substantial numbers of its target audience of 16 to 24 year olds. Last year my development team set up focus groups with scores of young people to uncover their interests and viewing habits. The results matched the BBC’s own research: young people are hard to shock, but love being shocked; they find almost nothing on television relevant to them except Skins and Shameless (both on Channel 4) or, if they‘re back from the pub in time, Two Pints of Lager and A Packet of Crisps. In other words, they craved shocking comedy. Enter Russell Brand.

This isn’t a new problem for the BBC. When I was a producer on Nationwide, being the youngest member of the team at 24, I was given a weekly slot to produce which my bosses imaginatively called Young Nation. It was November 1976, so I booked the Sex Pistols. We recorded an interview that was (to me) hilarious, but utterly untransmittable. So I told Malcolm McLaren that we’d have another go but, if they actually wanted any publicity from us, they’d have to toe the line. Anything offensive would be cut out. They got the message, and I got the first interview with the Pistols.

Bill Grundy was not so lucky. They went on live, and Bill was drunk. It ended his career. But my interview was so bland, I doubt it did anything for Jonny Rotten’s record sales.

The big challenge for the BBC is how to reach this elusive demographic without alienating the vast majority of us now too old to “get” juvenile shock humour. Or rather, we do get it, but we simply don’t find it funny any more. Even Jonny Rotten now does adverts for Country Life butter; yesterday’s anarchists are today’s Mail On Sunday readers.

I’ve listened to the whole of the Ross/Brand piece on You Tube and I found the series of apologies, each compounding the original offence, to be quite amusing, probably because it’s a well-tried sitcom technique. However, the underlying premise and the dialogue reminded me of embarrassing nights of drunken mirth (and regretful hangovers) in the Student Union. By contrast almost all young people I have spoken to found it funny and can’t understand all the fuss.

Not that you’d believe this if you read the tabloid that stirred up middle England. Yesterday The Mail on Sunday ran the headline: Exposed -- the BBC and the Myth of ‘Yoof’ and reported a BPIX survey alleging that 71% of young people found the broadcast “unacceptable”. BPIX is a mysterious organisation. Their website has been “under construction” for years; unlike legitimate polling organisations, it publishes no supporting data, nor the complete questions asked. Yet the Mail uses it, in its own words, to “blow a hole in the BBC’s argument”. I bet Mark Thompson wishes someone would blow a hole in the Mail on Sunday.

Respect to the Viewers

[Yesterday the BBC announced that one of its divisions, Audiocall, had failed to pass on £100,000 of revenue from viewers' phone calls to Children In Need. On the same day, Ofcom fined ITV £5.67million for the premium rate telephone call scams discovered across a range of its entertainment programming]

I used to think broadcasting was such an honourable profession. When I joined the BBC straight from university, it was one of the blue-chip careers, like the Foreign Office or Reuters. The day we arrived at the BBC Journalist Training School we were told what an honour it was to join. Sitting below a portrait of Lord Reith, our instructor said: “you will all become heads of departments here, provided you don’t commit either of two crimes: bounce a cheque at the BBC cash office, or forget to pay your licence fee.” For two years our training was about the right way of doing things – writing news bulletins, constructing balanced programmes, filling in our expenses forms. Above all, we were taught how important it was to respect our viewers and listeners. They funded our salaries, so their faith in our self-governing organisation was paramount.

Cut to 2008. A BBC division called Audiocall has “kept” £100,000 of viewers’ money that the public thought it was donating to charity through its telephone call revenue.

I could detail chapter and verse on this sad decline in standards, but it would fill up an entire book -- I'd best save it for my never-to-be-published autobiography. Suffice it to say that I, and other producers who rose through the ranks in the 80s and 90s, including my immediate contemporaries like Mark Thompson – are to a certain extent guilty, for we should have seen this coming.

It was in the early 90s that “premium rate telephone calls” were introduced. For an independent producer like myself, the opportunity to earn some extra profit by popping a viewers’ competition into a show was a godsend. You know the kind of thing: “Today's the Day that on 12th May 1971, Mick Jagger married his first wife. Was she called a: Doris, b: Charlie, or c: Bianca? Phone 0898123123 and you could be entered in our prize draw to win a round the world air ticket”. No matter that we made thousands every day from the call revenue and the actual cost of a bucket class round-the-world ticket was just £750. And we only gave away one ticket every 200 episodes. However, we knew it was fair because the whole thing was overseen, approved and run by BBC Audiocall, which was specifically set up to ensure veracity.

Except Audiocall wasn’t just there to make things fair: it was there to make money, because someone had the bright idea of making it part of BBC Worldwide, the corporation’s arms-length commercial organisation. That’s where the rot started. Television is about public service, not exploitation, and when the dead hand of easy money starts scratching away at editorial content, you’re just an arm’s length away from moral bankruptcy.

If the BBC was tempted by this new source of free cash, commercial television gulped it down. Soon entire programmes were being funded by call revenue. It was close to, but not quite, a lottery, and all perfectly legal.

But even in the dark days of GMTV’s absurdly simple multiple choice competitions, or the pointless “viewer surveys” on daytime television, producers would never actually cheat. Sure, we’ve occasionally pulled the wool over the eyes for dramatic effect (did you really think there were three separate holidays in Cilla’s envelopes on Blind Date?), but we never faked a winner.

So the recent revelations mystify me. Could greed have spread so quickly through the television industry? Or is it that we have promoted young people so fast, even allowing presenters like Ant and Dec to call themselves “executive producers”, so that the traditional wise heads are no longer running the ship? Well, probably a bit of both.

The catalogue of dishonesty, deception and downright fraud literally makes my blood boil. I’d like to apologise to you, the viewers, on behalf of my entire industry. Except I know that isn’t enough. It took the BBC decades to build up your trust, and I know it’ll take more than an apology or a fine from Ofcom to rebuild it.

How to Start a Business

According to a recent report, the North East of England needs another 30,000 businesses.

That's an awful lot of business cards, I should start up a graphic design company. Apparently we need to "develop a more entrepreneurial culture".

The name "entrepreneur" sounds like a member of some exclusive sect. I became one because I had a phone call from Andrew Lloyd Webber. He asked me to direct a television version of his musical Song & Dance, and he wanted me to cast his then girlfriend, and subsequent wife, Sarah Brightman.

At that time I was at the BBC earning £2,000 a month. I was thinking about going freelance, but never had the courage. Obviously I jumped at the chance of working with the great man, but I had no idea what to charge him for the month's work it was going to take. So I rang an agent, the late Richard Armitage, whose father Noel Gay wrote The Lambeth Walk and Run Rabbit Run. He was the wisest man and most loyal friend.

"What would make you happy?" he said.

As anything more than two grand would have been a bonus, I said "Do you think he would stretch to three?"

An hour later Richard rang back. "I said you'd accept £45,000".

After I regained consciousness he said, "Let that be a lesson to you. Andrew only employs the best, and I told him you are the best director in the world. So that seemed about right to both of us."

Of course, it was nonsense. I was way down the directors' pecking order, but it's undoubtedly the most important lesson I ever learned, and which I recently passed onto my son who has become a director himself.

So I had £45,000 burning a hole in my bank account, and at that time Richard was reviving his father's hit West End show, Me and My Girl. He was looking for backers, so I offered to invest my entire earnings in the show. Richard refused the money with two other pieces of great advice: "Never invest in a friend's business, and never put all your money into something you can't control". Shame, really, because the show ran and ran. Instead I quit the BBC and put the cash into setting up a TV production company. Within two years it was the largest in the UK.

During the next fifteen years, there were incredible highs and utterly miserable lows. The most important quality an entrepreneur can have is the ability to cope with failure. Television production is like Norfolk: turkeys come with the territory.

Mark Thompson, now director general of the BBC, once said that his most disastrous commission was Happy Families, a terrible Saturday night spectacle that involved Grannies being hoisted into the air in giant cages. One of my many turkeys, which viewers voted off with their remotes. Occasionally out of the gloom would emerge a couple of shows which would become part of popular culture and make it all worthwhile, like Challenge Anneka and Robot Wars.

Now I've launched another production company in Newcastle, which has cost me ten times as much as the last one. Reducing the North East business start-up requirement to 29,999.

Talk about risk money: I know I can lose the lot, but that's what entrepreneurs do. The venture capitalists (who actually take almost no risks at all) call it "skin in the game". It's the adrenalin of potential failure which keeps you awake at night and drives you to success. It requires courage and a good sense of humour. And I know those are qualities that people in the North East of England have in abundance.

Which makes it all the more galling that just as One North East is calling for more entrepreneurial risk, our government is trying to stifle it by increasing Capital Gains Tax by 80%.