Post by QPR Report on Jun 27, 2009 23:33:56 GMT
EXCUSE ME...? 
Ron Liddle/The Times
From The Sunday Times June 28, 2009
Lighten up, Auntie, and ditch the leaden middle managersRod Liddle
was a little bit disappointed by those expenses charged by BBC executives and revealed by the corporation last week in another of those sudden outbursts of “openness and transparency”. I had hoped we might be able to gather once more around the guillotine like a tricoteuse, finishing off the sweater we started with the bankers and which now has 12 sleeves as a consequence of our ghastly politicians.
I yearned for disclosures about houses, whores and yachts, but all we got was claims for half a handbag and a book about Britain’s most boring football club, QPR (this latter for the rather weird Mark Byford, deputy DG).
The BBC executives’ venality and arrogance was only mildly irritating and, sort of, beside the point. It is not their incidental expenses, their occasional demands for a taxi and a bottle of bubbly sent to Bruce Forsyth on the 80th anniversary of his chin; it is, in 60% of the cases, their salaries and the fact that they are there at all.
Why, for example, does the corporation need a “director: vision” on a salary of £400,000 per year, or thereabouts? Shouldn’t the director-general have written into his contract that he ought to have a sort of vision for the BBC and that he should, at some point, attempt to put that vision into practice? If not, what does his job entail? You might argue that this is particularly the case when, over the last few years, the BBC has shown all the vision which you might expect from a blind man kept in a blacked-out basement with a sack over his head.
Successive director-generals have taken office insisting that they will scythe down the dead wood in the corporate bureaucracy (apart from John Birt, whose masterplan was to dramatically increase the amount of dead wood, a cunning strategy in which he was very successful); all have seen the bureaucracy expand, at the expense of the people who actually make programmes.
Only rarely can organisations reform themselves, much though they insist that this is precisely what they are doing, or intending to do: there are too many vested interests at stake.
Right now, we have a BBC which is suffocated by massively over-remunerated and not terribly bright middle managers; people who have failed ever upwards and have been removed from the difficult and genuinely creative business of making stuff people want to watch or listen to. Administrators who could not really cut it at the sharp end and have instead kept their noses clean and become that deathless thing, a “manager”, replete with a free car, courtesy of the licence payer, and a new, impenetrable vocabulary derived from a pseudo-science.
The truth about the BBC is that the overwhelming majority of employees, the people who make the programmes you value, such as Newsnight and Today and the World at One and the occasional decent drama, are on very low wages indeed, sometimes scrabbling around on three-month contracts with no security and certainly no pension.
Above them resides an ever-expanding, leaden monolith, the members of which have one overriding purpose: to ensure that they don’t cop the blame for anything and thus get sacked. And so the corporate structure militates against almost everything which is valuable in programme-making – originality, the truly different, the challenging, the controversial.
Public attention will soon be focused again on the huge sums the BBC spends to retain its light entertainment talent, and perhaps rightly. It is inconceivable that any sentient being would think Jonathan Ross is worth six million quid a year. But hell, at least Ross’s salary involves a vague nod towards the marketplace; a lot of people, perhaps inexplicably, enjoy his shows.
There is at least a connection between the money Ross makes and the pleasure he gives to people. There is none whatsoever between those who take home in excess of £200,000 a year for being head of diversity, or compliance, or vision, or strategy or any other of those abstract nouns which pervade the BBC
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle left his post as editor of the BBC's Today programme in 2002, after a row about impartiality in an article he wrote for The Guardian. He was formerly a speechwriter for the Labour Party. As well as writing for The Sunday Times, he contributes to The Spectator and Country Life and presents current affairs documentaries on television
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/rod_liddle/article6591059.ece
Ron Liddle/The Times
From The Sunday Times June 28, 2009
Lighten up, Auntie, and ditch the leaden middle managersRod Liddle
was a little bit disappointed by those expenses charged by BBC executives and revealed by the corporation last week in another of those sudden outbursts of “openness and transparency”. I had hoped we might be able to gather once more around the guillotine like a tricoteuse, finishing off the sweater we started with the bankers and which now has 12 sleeves as a consequence of our ghastly politicians.
I yearned for disclosures about houses, whores and yachts, but all we got was claims for half a handbag and a book about Britain’s most boring football club, QPR (this latter for the rather weird Mark Byford, deputy DG).
The BBC executives’ venality and arrogance was only mildly irritating and, sort of, beside the point. It is not their incidental expenses, their occasional demands for a taxi and a bottle of bubbly sent to Bruce Forsyth on the 80th anniversary of his chin; it is, in 60% of the cases, their salaries and the fact that they are there at all.
Why, for example, does the corporation need a “director: vision” on a salary of £400,000 per year, or thereabouts? Shouldn’t the director-general have written into his contract that he ought to have a sort of vision for the BBC and that he should, at some point, attempt to put that vision into practice? If not, what does his job entail? You might argue that this is particularly the case when, over the last few years, the BBC has shown all the vision which you might expect from a blind man kept in a blacked-out basement with a sack over his head.
Successive director-generals have taken office insisting that they will scythe down the dead wood in the corporate bureaucracy (apart from John Birt, whose masterplan was to dramatically increase the amount of dead wood, a cunning strategy in which he was very successful); all have seen the bureaucracy expand, at the expense of the people who actually make programmes.
Only rarely can organisations reform themselves, much though they insist that this is precisely what they are doing, or intending to do: there are too many vested interests at stake.
Right now, we have a BBC which is suffocated by massively over-remunerated and not terribly bright middle managers; people who have failed ever upwards and have been removed from the difficult and genuinely creative business of making stuff people want to watch or listen to. Administrators who could not really cut it at the sharp end and have instead kept their noses clean and become that deathless thing, a “manager”, replete with a free car, courtesy of the licence payer, and a new, impenetrable vocabulary derived from a pseudo-science.
The truth about the BBC is that the overwhelming majority of employees, the people who make the programmes you value, such as Newsnight and Today and the World at One and the occasional decent drama, are on very low wages indeed, sometimes scrabbling around on three-month contracts with no security and certainly no pension.
Above them resides an ever-expanding, leaden monolith, the members of which have one overriding purpose: to ensure that they don’t cop the blame for anything and thus get sacked. And so the corporate structure militates against almost everything which is valuable in programme-making – originality, the truly different, the challenging, the controversial.
Public attention will soon be focused again on the huge sums the BBC spends to retain its light entertainment talent, and perhaps rightly. It is inconceivable that any sentient being would think Jonathan Ross is worth six million quid a year. But hell, at least Ross’s salary involves a vague nod towards the marketplace; a lot of people, perhaps inexplicably, enjoy his shows.
There is at least a connection between the money Ross makes and the pleasure he gives to people. There is none whatsoever between those who take home in excess of £200,000 a year for being head of diversity, or compliance, or vision, or strategy or any other of those abstract nouns which pervade the BBC
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle left his post as editor of the BBC's Today programme in 2002, after a row about impartiality in an article he wrote for The Guardian. He was formerly a speechwriter for the Labour Party. As well as writing for The Sunday Times, he contributes to The Spectator and Country Life and presents current affairs documentaries on television
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/rod_liddle/article6591059.ece