This New Noise (8 page)

She summoned up Gormenghastian images when recalling these years. Fellow producers ‘looked like zombies … they were going about in a sort of coma of fatigue'. Alexandra Palace itself was ‘a gaunt and enormous building on the top of a hill … it was derelict, mouldering, draughty, away from the centre of London … [a] huge, vast, rat-ridden building'. Collins and McGivern, the heads of the television service, had offices ‘upstairs in a tower. Very much in the tower. There's a tiny tower which stands on the top of this huge building, up which you could climb precariously.' The gallery in Studio A, from which she would preside over programmes, ‘was a creaking wooden platform … There was an iron ladder which you had to climb which was extremely dangerous so that … I had a special handbag made for me which I would hang over my shoulders because I had to hang on to both sides of this ladder … and many a secretary fell down this ladder to the detriment of her ankles.'

In 1953, Adams retired as the head of the talks department. Goldie made an application for the job, marked with a friendly handwritten note from her departing boss: ‘I am glad to forward this.' Goldie's pitch began, ‘The five years I have spent in television have been hard. They have been occupied, not only with building up new techniques of presentation in the talks field, but also with the training of personnel and the creation of a unit of production to deal with one section of talks output. That work is scarcely complete …' She did not get the job; instead Leonard Miall, until then a foreign correspondent – with no experience of television but a great knowledge of international affairs – was appointed, Goldie becoming his deputy. ‘He
was a nice chap and it worked roughly,' she later said, somewhat evasively. His subsequent annual reports on her work are glowing, with the occasional telling detail. ‘She is quick to show her intolerance of what she regards as second rate. This keeps the department's standards high, but it sometimes tends temporarily to undermine the self-confidence of producers,' he wrote in 1956.

In 1954, Goldie moved with the talks department away from Alexandra Palace to Lime Grove in west London, a warren of slummy offices and studios with a faintly renegade air that was to be the home of BBC current affairs until the 1990s. The arrival of ITN in 1955 seriously raised the game for television news, with its unstuffy, buccaneering approach. Alasdair Milne remembered in his memoir, ‘Every body thought BBC Television News, under Tahu Hole's guidance, pathetic. ITN was winning the audience's appreciation hands down by its fresh and open approach, fronted by new faces such as Robin Day and Ludovic Kennedy, compared with BBC News Division's stiff and solemn demeanour.' That year Goldie was put in charge of the flagging
Panorama
, which had begun two years previously as a magazine programme with a kind of bouquet of contrasting items. Goldie decided it needed a complete reinvention as a serious forum for debating the matters of national importance. She relaunched it with her protégé Michael Peacock as editor, and Richard Dimbleby – who in 1953 had famously commentated on the coronation – as its anchor.

Panorama
was, she remembered in
Facing the Nation
, ‘the voice of authority'. But now she went on to help invent
what she called ‘the voice of the people' – the current-affairs show
Tonight
. The programme, which ran five times a week from 1957 to 1965, a relatively short period that belies its influence and impact, was an invention to fill what was called the Toddlers' Truce – a gap in the early-evening schedule in which parents were supposed to persuade their children to go to bed. This now eccentric-seeming convention was swept aside by ITV, for which the shutdown merely represented a lost opportunity for making money.

Various ideas had been put forward by other producers to fill the gap, none of them up to snuff, as far as Goldie was concerned. She, meantime, was ‘in great cahoots' with two mercurially talented young producers, Donald Baverstock and Milne. They had been discussing ideas for ‘a new sort of programme … Donald's approach to his audience and to television was becoming very obvious, very individual and very clear. It was that
Panorama
was far too authoritative … He didn't like people being told things. He wanted to look at life through the eyes of the individual who was on the receiving end.' Goldie put forward the idea for
Tonight
– ‘a magazine programme that would go on nightly … and be much more individual and human' than
Panorama
. McGivern was inexplicably angry and dismissive of the idea, initially – she realised later that his hostility was because of the acute shortage of television studios, for this was before the building of Television Centre. With Milne and Baverstock ‘cooking up ideas for this programme very busily' she put her mind to solving the studio problem. Ever resourceful and willing to improvise,
she remembered a place she had once visited to judge some BBC training-school exercises – a small space in Kensington that Marconi had established to train technical staff for the arrival of independent television. Goldie got her way. The programme was presented by Cliff Michelmore. The team included Jonathan Miller, who performed a weekly satirical sketch; Antony Jay, who went on to write
Yes, Minister
, and Alan Whicker. It ‘looked at those in power from the point of view of the powerless', she wrote. ‘
Tonight
was … not rebellious, far less revolutionary, but it was sceptical.' Jay remembered it like this: ‘We shared the feeling … that there was an out-of-touch group of people running Britain and covering their failures with a cloak of government statements and PR half-truths … abetted by docile and amenable Fleet Street proprietors who were worried about their advertising, and that we had a duty to show the other side …'

The files of programme correspondence show how controversial
Tonight
could be – there was an almost endless stream of letters from the town clerk of Nuneaton, for example, in autumn 1957, taking exception to a film on the town that had been, according to a memo written by Miall, deliberately ‘sardonically humorous and unfair'. (A provocative report – for example referring to Nuneaton's most famous daughter, George Eliot, as a ‘bloke' – had been made with the express purpose of provoking a reaction from townspeople that would be recorded for a second film.) The town clerk demanded that the mayor be interviewed to respond to this traducing of Nuneaton's reputation – they were not, he wrote, prepared to be
judged by reference to ‘slag heaps, rubbish tips and back alleys'.

The matter politely rumbled on for a year, being gently dribbled by the BBC into ever longer grass. The final round of correspondence came in 1958, replying to a suggestion from the unfortunate town clerk that a
Tonight
film crew should visit to report on a mobile X-ray unit being presented to the town by ‘His Worship the Mayor', the kind of worthy event that
Tonight
would never have touched. The BBC reply delivered the polite death blow: ‘Owing to arrangements caused by the General Election,
TONIGHT
is coming off the air as from the end of this week until 12 October, and so I am afraid it will not be possible for us to fall in with your particular suggestion, but I am sending it on to our News Services, both National and Regional, asking them to give it sympathetic consideration.' And there, to adopt the parlance of BBC memoranda, the matter rested.

Goldie was a talent-spotter par excellence – largely of clever young men, though she also had clever young women on her team, including Catherine Dove, who became a producer on
Panorama
, and Cynthia Judah, later Kee, who ran the cultural side of
Tonight
. Many of those who began under her aegis rose to high power: Milne became director general; Baverstock controller of BBC1; Huw Wheldon managing director of BBC Television. She often said that her directors needed to have the instant reactions of a fighter pilot. Most of them had indeed served in the war, Baverstock (‘a man of huge talent … wild and aberrant' in the words of David Attenborough)
as a navigator for bombers.
Tonight
exemplified a new spirit in television, and its makers became the progenitors of other hugely significant programmes. The
Tonight
team created
Monitor
, a kind of
Panorama
of the arts under Wheldon;
The Great War
, the pioneer of blockbuster history series; and
That Was The Week That Was
, the satire show that defied convention and for many defined the new spirit abroad in the 1960s.

Goldie was a BBC loyalist to the marrow. When she died, she left all her money to the BBC's hardship fund, and all her papers to the BBC archive – her letters to her husband revealing a quite different side to her, one of childlike affection and admiration. (Six days before he died, she wrote to him, ‘You are so talented, you make me earthbound and obvious … I have felt like a little ugly duckling wondering why this bird of paradise should ever have loved me.') For the last two years of her career, from 1963 to 1965, she at last ascended to the level of head of talks and current affairs. But her retirement was blighted by a dispute over the level of her pension, during which she seemed to have threatened to ‘expose' the BBC's behaviour. Various colleagues wrote in support of her to the then director general, Hugh Carleton Greene (brother of the more famous Graham). One pointed out that she would never have been swayed by the siren call of ITV (as were so many BBC employees in the 1950s), and no one would have dreamed of trying to tempt her there, either – it would have been like trying to poach the director general. Kenneth Adam, then the director of television, paid tribute to her vast creativity. The BBC, he wrote,
would be ‘supremely unimportant without people such as Grace Wyndham Goldie'. He tried to excuse her rancour by reference to her relationship with the bottle – hardly an exclusive one, for this was the era of the well-stocked entertainments trolley and the office cocktail cabinet. We must take into account, he wrote, ‘the knowledge we have of Mrs Goldie's reaction, in circumstances of entertainment, to her own job and that of the BBC'. (Only a BBC executive, one feels, would be quite so adept at euphemistically communicating that she could be bitter when drunk.)

Her biographer John Grist, who worked as a producer under her (and indeed had been an RAF pilot in the war) wrote that ‘she could charm and frighten any man' and that within her there was ‘a deeply set sliver of nastiness' that caused her to bully those she saw as vulnerable or inadequate. Melvyn Bragg told me he remembered a woman who was ‘very clever, very tough-minded, and completely charismatic. She would perch on a stool in the bar and hold court, and toughies like Alasdair Milne and Tony Jay and even Attenborough and all the rest of them would just wait our turn to talk to Grace Wyndham Goldie. She knew what she wanted. She had a very good eye for young people who were talented; she had a very good eye for what would make a programme. Grace was quite somebody.'

It is hard, at this distance, to shake out the responses to Goldie. She was clearly an object of fascination as a power ful woman, an exotic creature within the BBC, described in terms subtly different from those employed to assess her male peers. The language used in relation to
her quivers with male anxieties about females with power; and she herself clearly adopted strategies for inhabiting a senior role that rendered her unpleasant, at times, to her colleagues. Like many a baron of the BBC, she was not exactly a candidate for canonisation; but rather a professional broadcaster of immense dedication and rigour, whose contribution to the development of television – both in her early recognition of its formal possibilities, and in her realisation that it could handle politics and power seriously – was vast.

She was a very different person from Hilda Matheson, and was operating in a much bigger, more stratified and less bohemian organisation, and yet they shared this: a deep-rooted and idealistic belief in the civic purpose of broadcasting. Woodrow Wyatt,
Panorama
's roving reporter in the late 1950s, wrote in 1985 that she ‘should have been made director general of the BBC. She would have been another Reith, gentler and more tolerant but firm on quality and impartiality. She was the last senior official of the BBC who cared deeply about impartiality and insisted on having it. No one was allowed to slant, right, left, or liberal, in the programmes she controlled … She could have run the BBC far better than any of Reith's successors, and would have left a modern ethos behind her … The prejudice against women was, and is, nearly insurmountable.'

It was 30 June 1938, John Reith’s last night as the founding director general of the BBC. There was no dinner, no ceremony. He had forbidden staff contributions towards a present and vetoed speeches. Instead, with a couple of colleagues, he drove up to the Midlands, to the high-power transmitter at Droitwich. He fulfilled the nightly task of shutting down one of its oil engines with his own hands – with his engineer’s training, no one had to show him how to do it. Then he went on to Daventry, to the other great transmitter, which he had inaugurated a dozen years earlier. As night faded to dawn, he watched as the mast lights dimmed.

‘A new day was breaking for Daventry and the BBC. In it I was nothing and nobody to Daventry and the BBC,’ he recalled in his autobiography,
Into the Wind.
Then he drove back to Broadcasting House, arriving at 6.45 a.m. In his diary he recorded, ‘Went to my room to collect the last of my gear and that’s the end of that.’ The flatness of it all is somehow unbearable.

He left the BBC in a mood of frustration, convinced he had not been fully stretched, clear in his view that television was a waste of time. (He called the opening night of the service in 1936 ‘a ridiculous affair … I was infuriated by the stuff they put out.’) He went on to run another
youthful projector of the glories of the British empire, Imperial Airways, and longed for a task of great responsibility during the war, but he believed Winston Churchill’s hostility – they had fallen out over the BBC’s coverage of the General Strike – stunted his career.

Being director general of the BBC rarely ends well, even when there has not been a metaphorical execution, as in the case of George Entwistle (resigned in 2012 after 54 days), Greg Dyke (forced out in 2004 after clashing with the Labour government) and Alasdair Milne (cast out in 1987 by the Thatcher-appointed Marmaduke Hussey). For those who have left as younger men, it has been hard to find their career’s second act: like being prime minister, nothing quite equals it for power and glamour.

Dyke left surrounded by his own news crews and employees waving ‘Save Greg’ placards, finding out, or so he imagined, ‘what it was like to be an American presidential candidate or Madonna’. John Birt (director general 1992– 2000) wrote in his memoir,
The Harder Path
, that when he re-entered ordinary life, ‘I had to learn how to use a cash machine, how to cope with the horrors of helplines, how to navigate London by bus and tube’. Entwistle, the Lady Jane Grey of the dynasty, announced his resignation while standing outside New Broadcasting House, just as he had done when he was proclaimed DG. He spoke in a clear but somehow faintly disconnected fashion, as if reading the lines of a play, ‘I have decided that the honourable thing to do is to step down from the post of director general.’ He then collected his overcoat and went home to his son’s eighteenth birthday. He had spent twenty years
stitching together his BBC career; it took 54 days as DG to unravel it.

Since the BBC’s beginnings in 1922 the sixteen directors general have been men; Rona Fairhead became the first woman chairman in 2014. Reith was the longest-serving DG; none has managed more than his sixteen years. Bright boys, from solidly middle-class or aspirant working-class backgrounds, good grammar schools, academically successful: that has been the prevailing pattern. Tony Hall, DG at the time of writing, was absolutely typical: the son of a Birkenhead bank manager, he studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford. The BBC has always been the natural home of the meritocratic middlefolk of Britain, rather than the upper classes. Reith himself, though a son of the manse, was not deemed suitable material for university and resented it. In his autobiography he described his engineer’s apprenticeship tersely: ‘For four and a half years rising at 4.45 a.m., travelling from the west to the east end of Glasgow, a 56-hour week in the locomotive shops. For much of the time evening classes from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.’ His austere gaze was schooled there. ‘When I presented myself at the shops it was with a ferocity of countenance designed to advertise a
nemo me impune
lacessit
[nobody harms me with impunity] admonition.’ His memoirs are strewn with schoolboy Latin, as if he is still a man with something to prove intellectually.

Directors general are often defined against the characteristics that have been seen to attach most strongly to their predecessor. Therefore Michael Checkland (1987–92) was importantly an accountant and not a
programme-maker, as Milne was characterised as a brilliant programme-maker who had not understood money. Birt was marked as the outsider who could shake up the BBC and reform it, drag it forth from its complacent ways. Dyke (2000–2004), though another outsider, was seen as warm-hearted and egalitarian, ‘full of emotional and spiritual generosity’, according to Mark Damazer, who was deputy head of news under him; the man with the human touch to soothe the wounds caused by Birt’s machete slashes through the corporation; the one to reconnect it with its creativity.

According to Sir Christopher Bland, the chair of the BBC in the last days of Birt and the appointer of Dyke, ‘One’s a roundhead and one’s a cavalier. If you could clone the right characteristics of both of them you’d wind up with the perfect director general.’ Mark Thompson (2004–12) was clever, strategic and thick-skinned; the supreme operator, big-brained and full of schemes and deals and politicking. Entwistle was, according to Professor Jean Seaton, the BBC’s official historian, ‘chosen incredibly particularly to not be a grand planner, to be a man that came in on the tube, to be straightforward, to be creative’. And where Entwistle – at least with the benefit of hindsight – was seen to have been lacking in experience, the DG at the time of writing, Hall, was the old hand – un-besmirched by the crises that toppled Entwistle but a battleworn BBC man to the bone, having worked his way through the corporation over thirty years, from trainee to director of news under Birt. At the same time, by virtue of having worked at the Royal Opera House for a decade,
Hall was deemed capable of understanding what the BBC projects to those outside the citadel – and of reconnecting it with its creative roots.

Like the aristocrats of ancient Rome, who revered the
imagines maiorum
, the wax masks of their forefathers that hung in the atria of their mansions, directors general need to invoke the right ancestor figures. (Traditionally, each departing director general sat for his portrait as they left, which would be placed in the council chamber in Old Broadcasting House. In tune with the times, these are now to be replaced by cheaper photographic portraits; and there are no plans for George Entwistle’s image to hang among them.) After Entwistle’s fall, there were many BBC old hands who glanced back at the control and order of Birt’s regime with a certain wistfulness. James Purnell (he was head of BBC corporate planning under Birt, then Labour culture secretary, and later returned to Hall’s BBC as head of digital and strategy) conjured Birt’s shade: ‘We have been here before,’ he wrote in the
Financial Times
in 2012, referring to the embattled BBC of the late-1980s. ‘The BBC was saved by Lord Birt’s boldness.’

Looking back over ninety years of BBC history, it is Reith and Birt who now seem to loom largest as the BBC’s most powerful ancestor spirits. Reith, the founding father, built it up from 36,000 licences to 8.7 million, from four employees to four thousand, from start-up to national institution, forging the ideals at its heart. Birt wrestled it into a post-Thatcherite shape, devised a digital strategy that is still being played out, and introduced sweeping reforms to its news operation.

Both trained as engineers. Both have lent words to the English language, neither – like their inheritances – unambiguous: ‘Reithian’ conveys all that is lofty in broad casting, but comes with an atmosphere of puritanism and paternalism, of Auntie-Beeb-knows-best; ‘Birtism’, not with standing its rehabilitation as an idea, with its overtones of control and strategic farsightedness, suggests almost totalitarian levels of managerialism. Cognates include Birtspeak (convoluted workplace jargon, often expressed by ‘croak-voiced Daleks’, as the writer Dennis Potter memorably described Birt and Hussey, in his bilious MacTaggart lecture of 1993), and Birtistas, the cadre of loyal shock troops.

It was Reith’s great achievement to shape the pragmatic decisions that went into the creation of the BBC into an ideology, which he outlined in
Broadcast Over Britain
. The BBC’s powers as an educative tool were sketched out (‘to have exploited so great a scientific invention for the purpose and pursuit of “entertainment” alone would have been a prostitution of its powers and an insult to the character and intelligence of the people’). It was activated as an equalising, democratic force: ‘It carries direct information on a hundred subjects to innumerable men and women who will after a short time be in a position to make up their own minds on many matters of vital moment.’ (Reith importantly invoked women, newly enfranchised.) ‘The whole service … may be taken as the expression of a new and better relationship between man and man,’ he wrote, a wonderfully hopeful thing to say. Its purpose was, he declared, to carry ‘the best of everything into the greatest number of homes’. This ringing statement has
been refined and rethought over the years – as in Huw Wheldon’s formulation about making the good popular and the popular good. As a founding idea, it lies deep in the BBC’s psyche. Hall himself referred to it in his first speech as DG in October 2013: ‘At the core of the BBC’s role is something very simple, very democratic and very important – to bring the best to everyone,’ he said.

Reith was a complex person: as a father, he was distant; as an employer, terrifying. He was given to sometimes obsessional, one-sided relationships with younger women, and, as a young man, with his friend Charles Bowser, whom he clearly adored (‘very good-looking and awfully pretty eyes,’ he told his diary). Richard Lambert, at the
Listener
, recalled that when one met him in the corridor of Broadcasting House, ‘he would look through you … like a dowager duchess meeting a chimney sweep in her boudoir’. Whenever he received a summons to Reith’s office, ‘I had to go apart for a minute in order to control my heartbeats and allow the mist which rose up in my brain to clear away’. Once inside, there was a strict hierarchy of spatial arrangements: ‘a hard solitary chair for nobodies, or offenders; an upholstered armchair for senior subordinates or persons of standing; and a sofa, reserved for high dignitaries, or for individuals whom the interviewer wished to impress by close personal proximity’. When interviewed for his job by Reith, wrote Lambert, the first question was: ‘Do you accept the fundamental teachings of Jesus Christ?’ (Lambert made appropriate and unspecific noises.) Reith, all six foot six inches of him, strode about his office as he conducted the conversation. ‘He
reminded me somehow of a giant bird, moving restlessly and jerkily on its perch.’ Like many in the 1930s, Reith had a weakness for a strong, Continental leader. He admired Hitler’s efficiency and, in November 1935, noted in his diary that he had told Guglielmo Marconi that ‘I had always admired Mussolini immensely and I had constantly hailed him as the outstanding example of accomplishing high democratic purpose by means which, though not democratic, were the only possible ones.’ Reith is the single most significant figure in the history of the BBC, but by no means a wholly reassuring one.

I arranged to meet Lord Birt in the House of Lords. When he met me at the peers’ entrance I was momentarily flustered – a tall man, he none the less seemed to materialise silently behind me – and when, after walking a great distance through the corridors of the Lords, we reached the room he had reserved, a resplendent chamber decked in elaborate Pugin wallpaper, I realised I could not find my digital recorder. Birt politely but firmly instructed me: ‘Be systematic. Empty your handbag.’ He might as well have asked me to remove my clothes as turn out that intimate cavern of scuffed paperbacks, topless Biros, dubious tissues and worse. But it struck me that this is precisely the approach he has adopted in professional life; and if it seems a bathetically domestic metaphor, then he himself in his own memoir twice described his work at London Weekend Television (LWT) – where he worked before the BBC – as ‘tidying the drawer’.

Birt was born into a working-class family in 1944 and raised in Bootle and Formby; his autobiography conjures
a world of whippets and terriers, football and redtops, polished doorknobs and scrubbed front doorsteps. He was educated a Catholic, was a bouncer at an early Beatles concert, and was the first member of his family to study at university when he went up to Oxford in 1963.

At Oxford, he was, by his own account, an unenthusiastic student of engineering. He fell in love with a glamorous American art student who would become his first wife, and became entranced by the cinema. He made an experimental film called
The Little Donkey
– in which a young man, having been taunted by various vampish and virginal women, turns into a toy donkey when a girl begins to touch him. ‘
The Little Donkey
was not an enduring masterpiece,’ he acknowledged in his autobiography. But he had worked out what really caught his imagination – and it was not thermodynamics. After Oxford, he became a trainee at Granada, where, at twenty-two, he persuaded Mick Jagger, fresh from the quashing of a drug conviction, to be flown by helicopter into the grounds of a stately home to join a
World in Action
discussion about youth culture with a row of besuited establishment figures.

He moved to LWT and rose through the ranks, via its high-end current affairs programme
Weekend World
, to become director of programmes – having also taken leave to produce the famous interviews of the former US president Richard Nixon by David Frost. He operated at LWT in a labour-relations ‘war zone’ that made him ‘hard-hearted about unionism’, he recalled in his memoir. Restrictive practices and crew sizes grew. Despite his
instinctive belief that the trades union movement was a progressive force, the TV unions were, he concluded, ‘destructive … greedy for money, frustrating creativity, raising costs and reducing the number of programmes made’. As he prepared to join the BBC, he had, he wrote, ‘become a convert to the value of markets, while maintaining a strong commitment to public service. I was hostile to vested interests. I had fostered my instinctive desire for reform and improvement, for tidying the drawer …’