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'You either believe in it or you don't'(Guardian (UK) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) It was a hot London day and the U-shaped courtyard of the BBC in Portland Place was airless and sun-strafed. Light glared off pale stone. Employees crowded into a sliver of shade to eat their lunchtime sandwiches. The doors of the older, 1930s wing stood open, so that the wonky, stained little notice that sometimes hangs there bidding visitors "welcome to the BBC", was invisible. On my many visits, I had enjoyed this intimate, ad hoc sign. It was so different from the portals of its neighbour, new Broadcasting House, opened in 2013, where there is nothing so improvised and human. Nor is there yet any poetic challenge to the soul, no inscription proclaiming this a temple of the arts, as there is in the foyer of the older building. Instead, images of BBC personalities - a procession of men - hang above the reception desk: the actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman in Sherlock guise; Idris Elba as Luther; and the physicist Brian Cox staring soulfully at the sun. I sat in the foyer of new Broadcasting House, watching the ebb and flow of staff as they made their exits and entrances, from among the other visitors waiting to be ushered through revolving doors to the inner chambers. Once there, suddenly illuminated by an uncanny reddish glow, you can look down into the newsroom thrumming away below you in the basement, or upwards to the glass walls that rise above. The newsroom should have had columns like great trees supporting it, according to the original vision of the architect, the late Sir Richard MacCormac, but along the way - and amid acrimony - the corporation dropped this flourish on budgetary grounds. The building seems to me to resemble the institution itself - the new and the old tangled together in uncertain harmony; high artistic ambitions sometimes compromised; a certain corporate pomposity undercut by small, humane gestures. How healthy is the BBC of today? Will it flourish for another 92 years? As I sat in the foyer, staff passes cheeping through the security barriers, I considered what I had learned about this corporation over the past 10 months. What had surprised me was its vulnerability. It may be a great vessel, but it is blasted and buffeted on every side by powerful and ruthless enemies. Its universality - we pay for it through the TV licence, and it is far and away the largest and richest cultural organisation in the country - also renders it uniquely exposed. Its every move is monitored, analysed, discussed. A cadre of journalists exists solely to pick relentlessly over its bones, some of them, especially on the political right, spurred by deep-rooted political objections to the way the BBC is funded, and to the entire notion of the BBC as an ideological intervention in our national life. These principled objections are often complicated and intensified by commercial vested interests and the belief, rightly or wrongly, that if the BBC were stripped of its "unfair" advantages, their own businesses would flourish more fully. (James Murdoch, in his 2009 MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh television festival, talked vividly of the BBC as something we allow to "throttle" the news market and of the difficulties for private enterprise when the BBC is "dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market".) Add to this public horror at the actions of the late BBC presenter Jimmy Savile and the outrage at the BBC's use of money at a time of national austerity (the pounds 100m junked Digital Media Initiative, the payoffs to departing executives, and the remuneration of its highest-ranking employees and stars) and it is hardly surprising that the public discourse about the BBC is more often bitter and vituperative than thoughtful and subtle. And yet the passions roused by the BBC are so intense precisely because all of us have a relationship with it: 96% of us use it, including, of course, its most passionate detractors. It is with us in our homes, our cars, our phones, and on our computer screens; it is our omnipresent, intimate companion. Our relationship with the BBC has changed in recent years: we are in an age that has seen the fracturing of the media, and the BBC has found it necessary to head out into the world to find its audiences wherever they may be - on the TV and radio, but also on apps, satellite and cable channels, and online. Once, the BBC represented a truly communal experience, when 20 million viewers would simultaneously watch Morecambe and Wise on a Saturday night. No longer. The BBC is not, as it once was, a cathedral in which we all gather together, but rather a many-roomed palace in which we are free to roam, where we will encounter others with whom to marvel at its riches, but through which we will nonetheless choose our own route, pace and narrative. Despite this increasingly fragmented experience, for most people the BBC is the national institution that most powerfully touches their inner lives - working its way into our sense of ourselves as individuals and part of a community. And if the screen is a kind of mirror into which the nation gazes, we are often in sharp disagreement about the accuracy of the reflection. The BBC is a space in which the most fundamental anxieties about cultural identity and political purpose can be fought out - often bitterly. Every day the BBC citadel withstands the slings and arrows of the rightwing press and politicians. Papers such as the Daily Mail create the temper of the discourse around the BBC. "Almost an official arm of New Labour", argued the paper's editor Paul Dacre in his 2007 Hugh Cudlipp lecture, which he told me remains a fair summation of his views. "By and large BBC journalism starts from the premise of leftwing ideology: it is hostile to conservatism and the traditional right." Arguably, though, the old Daily Mail taunt that the BBC was a nest of liberals, with an institutionalised leftwing bias, looks more and more difficult to sustain. Indeed, there are fears on the centre-left that the BBC has consciously or unconsciously drifted to the right, exhausted by the daily clamouring of its noisiest critics, and no longer quite holds the impartial centre. There are fears too that, still bruised a decade after its wrestling match with the last government over its coverage of the runup to the Iraq war - a bout that ended with the resignation of both its director general, Greg Dyke, and its chairman, Gavyn Davies - the BBC can be pusillanimous in some of its reporting, that it fears to challenge the most sensitive elements of the British establishment. The BBC that withstood a 36-hour raid of its Glasgow headquarters by Special Branch in the 1980s over the Zircon affair (an investigation into a pounds 500m spy satellite, the existence of which was unknown to the public accounts committee) feels like a distant memory to these critics, who would adumbrate the corporation's reaction to the revelations by former US National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden. In the US, Australia, mainland Europe, in Asia and in Latin America the revelations concerning Prism and Tempora - the secret programmes used for mass surveillance of email communication in the US and UK respectively - were treated with real seriousness and provoked urgent public debate. The New York Times and the Washington Post regarded the story as of global significance. So did Channel 4 News. But Channel 4 News is, in the words of its editor, "an ant versus Goliath when it comes to the BBC", with an audience of about 650,000. The BBC - which by virtue of its sheer scale holds the ring of national debate - remained almost mute. And so it was that of all the nations in the world, it was on its home turf that the Guardian remained virtually a lone voice. Meanwhile, its editor, Alan Rusbridger, was asked to prove his patriotism before a committee of MPs and GCHQ operatives arrived at the organisation's offices to supervise the destruction of computer hard drives. The charge of pusillanimity is denied by Tony Hall, the director general of the BBC. "I don't recognise that picture at all," he said. "The fact is - and this is one of the things I know about impartiality - when people know a lot about a story, they kick up a big fuss because we're not reporting it as they want us to report it. But then part of our job is to stand back from the furore and say: 'Actually let's put this in context, let's do this properly.' In that instance I don't see any pulling back at all." In other words, Hall, in the politest possible way, was accusing me of being biased - that my questioning of the BBC's approach to this particular story, which won a Pulitzer prize for public service in the US, was engendered solely by its having been reported by my colleagues, rather than because it had touched on fundamental notions of privacy, human rights and the individual's relationship with the state. Arguing for the bravery of the BBC's journalism, he pointed to the undoubted personal risks encountered by reporters in dangerous regions such as Gaza, Ukraine and Iraq - and their principled determination to steer a straight course between passionately held, violently opposing views. The courage and integrity of foreign correspondents such as Jeremy Bowen and Lyse Doucet was, to me too, self-evident. I was thinking, rather, of a different order of danger: not personal, physical danger but danger to the BBC as an institution. Does the BBC really have the appetite, two years before it agrees a new charter and a new licence fee with the government, to go up against the British establishment at its most secret and powerful? Hall said: "One of the things that has always amazed me about the BBC is that it is the most self-questioning organisation I've ever worked in. It asks itself questions all the time about whether it's doing the right thing, could we have done that better." In other words, his conscience is clear. Some weeks earlier, when I asked the BBC director of news and current affairs, James Harding, whether he would have run with the Snowden story if it had come directly to him, he argued that the issue was not that it touched on such delicate matters of state - but rather that it was, he claimed, a piece of campaigning journalism that was invested in a particular outcome. "I don't think the issue would have been whether the BBC could have gone after a story about the behaviour of a different part of the state - of a part of the state, sorry . . . That's what you do if you cover the NHS, if you cover the police, if you cover the armed forces, if you cover the intelligence services . . . I don't think that's an issue at all. I think the thing that is really tricky on Snowden is where you get yourself straddling a line between reporting a story and campaigning a story. "Now, we obviously cannot campaign. We cannot use the public's money to make an argument. And the nature of that kind of leak and that kind of story was that the person who held the information wanted a certain story and to roll it out in a certain way. That deal, the deal between, if you like, the media organisation and the source - I'm not sure we could have done that deal . . . So in my last job [as editor of the Times] I ran a campaign on something you may think as innocuous as cycling safety. You couldn't campaign on cycling safety at the BBC. And that's where things are different." However, there was no deal between the Guardian and Snowden to give the story a specific angle or to campaign for a particular outcome. Nor did Snowden bring an agenda to his whistleblowing beyond wishing to allow the public to enter a debate - as he put it, to "give society the chance to determine if it should change itself". The analogy drawn between the Snowden whistleblowing and the Times's (entirely laudable) cycling campaign seemed to me to be infelicitous. Unlike news organisations on the right, the Guardian does not rail against the evils of the licence fee nor thunder against its "throttling" of opportunity in the marketplace. But the BBC's importance in holding a line in its journalism cannot be overestimated. British civil society depends upon it. If journalism is at the heart of the BBC, the matter by which it stands or falls, its television drama, is what most of us think of when we think of our own enjoyment of the BBC. This is personal territory. Each of us has our loves and prejudices, our notion of what is good and valuable. The comedy Mrs Brown's Boys is not for me, but it was the highest-rating Christmas viewing in 2012 and 2013, and for the BBC reaches a working-class, northern audience that it sometimes struggles to engage. My taste veers more to The Fall - the BBC Northern Ireland drama starting Gillian Anderson - and Line of Duty, Jed Mercurio's taut cop show. But even as a lover of detective stories and police procedurals, I could not help being faintly disquieted that all bar one of the shows (the exception being Stephen Poliakoff's latest drama, Dancing on the Edge) picked out for commendation by Hall in his foreword to the BBC's 2013 annual report were whodunnit genre pieces of one kind or another. Aside from The Fall and Line of Duty, he mentioned Sherlock, Top of the Lake and Sally Wainwright's terrific Happy Valley. I contrasted this with the new writing I had seen at the theatre over the past months: a rambunctious, hyperreal satire on the press and police; a post-apocalyptic play, in which survivors attempt to recall scripts from the Simpsons, which meditates on the notion of collective memory, religion, myth and the history of theatre; a verse drama riffing off Shakespeare's history plays imagining the accession of a future King Charles III; a bleak meditation on ideas of fame, celebrity and material culture filtered through the story of a pop star as he loses his individuality in a series of luxury hotel rooms; and an ideas-packed play that unravelled the impact of the Snowden revelations and examined ideas of personal privacy. In short, much as I had enjoyed and admired recent BBC drama, both in the quality of its writing and its extraordinary performances (from actors such as Keeley Hawes and Sarah Lancashire) it was in the theatre that I had found the most formally adventurous, exuberantly ambitious and unexpected original writing. Hall said he was keen to link BBC drama more strongly with British theatre - that was one of the reasons he had recently invited Sir Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the National Theatre, to become a non-executive director of the BBC. Hall must be getting used to being asked why the BBC is not producing drama comparable with House of Cards, Breaking Bad and The Wire, for he pre-empted any question along those lines by pointing out the differences in financial model between on-demand services such as Netflix on the one hand and the BBC on the other: "For the price of two series of House of Cards we've done 70-plus hours of varied drama," he pointed out. (Two series of House of Cards works out at 24 hours of television.) For the consumer, there are enormous differences too. A subscription to Netflix, which at present produces a comparatively small amount of original work, costs about pounds 83 annually, set against pounds 145.50 for the licence fee, which grants access to all free-to-air British television and material live-streamed through iPlayer, ITV Player and 4oD. To my charge of "too many whodunnits" Hall pointed to the adaptation of Hilary Mantel's novel, Wolf Hall, planned for BBC2 in 2015. The actors Damian Lewis and Mark Rylance, he said, are not being paid the rates they could get elsewhere because they believe in the BBC's commitment to Wolf Hall. He added: "I don't see why people polarise things and say it's either all brilliant in America and Scandinavia and somehow the Brits have got it wrong." He believes that we should "stand up for what Britain's doing really well . . . You know, Broadchurch, fantastic," he said, referring to ITV's cop drama starring Olivia Colman and David Tennant, which in May won more Baftas than the whole of BBC1 and BBC2 drama combined. It wasn't clear to me, though, that the question was about only these programmes' extent and duration: the essential quality of The Sopranos (say) is not just that it ran for many seasons, but rather that the writing was so ambitious and so richly allusive (artfully referencing a filmic canon from Rossellini to Ford Coppola as well as Roman imperial history). Nor does a version of a bestselling, prize-winning novel that has already been successfully adapted for the stage, however excellent it may turn out to be, suggest startling originality. Hall also referred to the commissioning of a second tranche of Shakespeare history plays, a follow-up to the highly acclaimed The Hollow Crown season of 2012, for which Sam Mendes executive-produced films of Richard II, Henry IV parts one and two, and Henry V. Sir Richard Eyre, a former artistic director of the National Theatre and sometime governor of the BBC, directed the two Henry IV plays. He regards the whole episode with a certain scepticism. The commission was generated not by an enthusiastic drama department, he said, but "by fiat" from the then director general Mark Thompson, who decided that a strong cultural statement ought to be made by the BBC in the year of the London Olympics. "It was not a popular idea [within the BBC]. I had absolutely nothing to do with the BBC at all until it was made," Eyre said. "When I had a fine cut of my two films, I said I was going to show them on successive days at a preview theatre. And I couldn't get anybody from the BBC to come. They asked me to send tapes over to them. I said 'No. I've worked for a year on these, come to a preview theatre, watch it on the screen and then we'll discuss it afterwards.' Then much to their surprise it was very well received and people were saying 'Now we understand what the BBC does; this is the jewel in the crown of BBC.'" He laughed. "Suddenly they were running after us." Michael Grade, once a controller of BBC1, later BBC chairman, thinks that "it's a thin period [for drama] at the moment". He shifted impatiently in his seat - we were speaking near his office in Chelsea. "How do you explain the fact that Jamaica Inn got on the air?" he said, referring to the Daphne du Maurier adaptation that was criticised when it was aired in April for its sometimes inaudible dialogue. "Somebody once said of me - and I'd love this on my tombstone - 'He picked good people, and let them get on with it.' That's the job. Nowadays, you've got hundreds of people crawling over it, most of them know cock all about anything, they've never done anything." He went on: "How do you explain the fact that Jamaica Inn gets on the air, and you can't hear a word anybody's saying? Question: how many BBC drama employees went on location? How many watched the rushes? How many went to the rough cuts? How many went to the fine cuts? How many went to the sound mix? How many people saw the finished version? And yet it ended up on the air. You can make terrible programmes: you can think of The Borgias, lots of horrible programmes on the BBC, but at least you could hear what they were saying. I mean that is unforgivable . . . . You can't understand how it could happen at the BBC. Has anybody been fired? Who are these people that passed that for transmission and wasted pounds 3m of licence payers' money?" Part of the problem, argues Grade, is that endless "process" has muffled the commissioning power of the old BBC impresarios, the television "barons" of yesteryear who had enormous power but who stood or fell by the quality of their shows. "Today you don't know who's responsible for anything. It's so convoluted, the system . . . Committees, eight signatures, e-submission, I mean what's going on? It should be all about editorship, about somebody owning the product in each area, and having the vision, and if they're no good, if their batting average is not up to snuff, sorry chum, we'll get the next one in." James Graham writes for theatre (his This House was a huge success for the National) as well as for BBC radio and television. Things have changed vastly for the better over the past couple of years, he told me. "I remember when I began a feeling of impossibility of ever getting anything on. And I knew people who'd made a living out of just developing TV that would never see the light of day and never get beyond a certain stage." Several years ago he spent a year developing a script for the BBC about young western travellers in Thailand, including spending time in the country. The script went back and forth endlessly, working its way through many drafts. Finally, "staff were rotating, executives were moving to different places, and it lost momentum. And I don't even know if anyone has ever turned it down" - but it quietly died. The process was enervating. "I'd rather have been working in bars and writing plays that were definitely going to be made than spending all my time and energy on something that just never felt like it was going to happen." The development process used "to feel a bit like a computer game. It was as if you had to pass all these different levels and these different baddies before you get to the big baddy at the end." He is much more optimistic, now. "It doesn't feel like there are so many layers that you have to go to until you get to Ben [Stephenson, BBC head of drama]." Andrew O'Hagan, the novelist, essayist and playwright, has several projects in development in Hollywood. But he feels a quiet despair at the commissioning process even for BBC radio - which operates as a structured, staged submission process taking several months from idea to green light. "The relationship between the 'talent' and the broadcaster has become deranged. The pitching process has the effect of killing the thing you love; and because of that the BBC is falling out of touch with a whole generation of writers," he said. He compared the process with that on magazines such as the New Yorker, where editors are strongly empowered curators, forging relationships with writers, constantly questing outwards for new ideas; or indeed the commissioning process in British theatre. "A clever commissioner should be trusted to make the programmes they want to make," he said. Bound up with the complaint of byzantine process and bureaucracy is a sense of disenfranchisement between the BBC's worker class - including many of its journalists - and its executives. "I think the over-remuneration of people [under Thompson] was a huge mistake," Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen told me when we met in London between his trips to Syria this spring, "and it's caused massive damage to the BBC. It's caused it internally, because the vast majority of people who work at the BBC do not get brilliantly paid. But the massive salaries given to top management angered people on the shop floor, exaggerated the 'them and us' feeling that there was a chauffeur-driven top of the corporation with enormous salaries and massive bonuses. And that caused a lot of resentment and still does. I resented it personally." He added: "I hope that might be a bit different under Tony Hall - I think he's a sensible bloke . . . But what I really resent about it too is the way it's damaged us externally: it's handed people who don't like the BBC sticks and stones to chuck at us, and that's a bad thing." Hall has much to do as the charter-renewal process begins. The most important task, perhaps, is to argue the BBC's virtues on his own terms; to create the boundaries of the discussion in the way that, despite all the pain it caused internally (and perhaps because of it), John Birt did with his ruthless efficiency drive in the 1990s. Birt's changes involved separating broadcast and production within the BBC and introducing an open market, Producer Choice, in which programme-makers were able to shop around externally for the best-value services, rather than necessarily using inhouse provision. Hall is a Birtista by professional background (he was plucked from the ranks by the former director general to run BBC TV news). His most striking innovation as director general so far is a logical extension of Birt's marketisation of the BBC: he has announced that he will allow the BBC and independent production companies to compete to make BBC television on equal terms, without quotas dictating the proportion of work available to them. The corollary is that he will also allow BBC production teams to pitch to broadcasters outside the BBC. He is thus beginning to seize the initiative, but there is much else to do - not least, and this is a matter that Hall cannot resolve on his own, the quieting of the seemingly endless debate about the governance of the BBC. Much will depend on the choice of the new chair, a heavy responsibility for the Conservatives. At the moment, if rumours are to be believed, several plausible candidates have withdrawn from consideration. The job is starting to look like a poisoned chalice. Dame Janet Smith's review into the culture and practices of the BBC during the years that Savile worked there is an unexploded bomb that may damage the corporation when it is finally published, perhaps this autumn. I began to think of the BBC as if it were a church: supported by high ideals, feeding our inner lives, sustained by the goodwill of the faithful, and, sometimes - like all large institutions - infuriating in its internal workings. "Sustained by the goodwill of the faithful" is the most important part of that: the licence fee is remarkably well-tolerated because the British public still recognises the BBC as one of the greatest institutions of Britain, something that almost defines Britishness both at home and abroad, an institution that, for all its problems and peccadilloes, is part of us, the shining, hypnotic screen into which we look and see ourselves, the collector of our memories and the gleaner of our experience. It is a survivor from another age, when the notion of a technological advancement being harnessed for the commonweal was not a fanciful one, when calling the BBC templum artum, a temple of the arts, was not faintly embarrassing. As Grade put it: "You wouldn't invent a hereditary monarchy today, you wouldn't invent the House of Lords, you wouldn't invent the BBC in a dynamic market. You either believe in it or you don't. You can't intellectually - in a modern sense with a modern mindset - justify it. But it is part of what makes this country different from anywhere else in the world. And you either believe in the BBC or you don't: the BBC is essentially an idea." In the 1930s Hilda Matheson, the first BBC head of talks, wrote of the licence fee: "It is a peculiarly British expedient - a compromise between public and private ownership . . . It is supported by a peculiarly British argument - the undoubted fact that it works." Without the BBC we would be poorer in spirit. We would know less about the world: our cultural and political lives would be diminished; our curiosity neither so piqued nor so sated. I can barely imagine my days starting without the weather app and the Today programme, and ending with the Proms, The World Tonight or - yes - a cop drama. Those who love it expect much from it: we expect more from it. We cheer it on, but we urge it to do better. We still believe. We do not wish to see it stumble. We do not wish to hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar. Gillian Anderson in BBC2 crime thriller The Fall Jamaica Inn prompted complaints about inaudible dialogue Morecambe and Wise, stars of communal Saturday-night viewing Edward Snowden. Would the BBC have run his story? Jed Mercurio's acclaimed police drama, Line of Duty Tony Hall, director general Michael Grade: 'You don't know who's responsible for anything' Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman in Sherlock ? ? You wouldn't invent a hereditary monarchy today, or the House of Lords, and you wouldn't invent the BBC The relationship has become deranged. The corporation is falling out of touch with a whole generation of writers Captions: Sir Richard MacCormac's new Broadcasting House in Portland Place, London Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian (c) 2014 Guardian Newspapers Limited. |