BBC Governance and Regulation: Communications Committee Report

Baroness Bakewell Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bakewell]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, and the Select Committee on the valiant work that they have done and the excellent report that they have produced. I wish to address two issues in this report. But first I declare an interest: I first worked for the BBC in 1955; I last worked for it last week. Between those dates, I have had a freelance relationship with both BBC television and radio, and, occasionally, the World Service. I have never held any post as director, editor, producer or other member of the hierarchy. My sole BBC experience has been as relating to the viewer and the listener directly. My contribution should be understood as something of a report from the coalface.

I want to address the matter of the current internal compliance regime. The landmark catastrophe in the BBC’s history was the Andrew Gilligan and the so-called dodgy dossier affair, which led to the Hutton inquiry and the resignations of the director-general and the chairman. For broadcasters, things have never been the same since. More trivial matters, such as the idiocy of the Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand affair, have further tightened the controls exercised within the BBC on the freedom of its broadcasters. Some of this may well indeed be appropriate but it is certainly a fact that the compliance process now in place is cumbersome, excessive and inhibiting of the trust placed in experienced broadcasters to comply with the BBC guidelines.

I will give a recent example. Last week, as part of the BBC Radio 3 series “Belief”, I interviewed at length the writer and poet John Burnside who is this year’s winner of the TS Eliot prize. Burnside has written at length in his autobiographical A Lie about My Father of his personal involvement with heavy drinking and drug taking. This featured in the interview. I put it to him that he did not so much struggle against drink and drugs as embrace them deliberately—with which he agreed. We went on to discuss the mind-altering consequences of each. I had already been forewarned by my producer that this would be a difficult topic. She had already been alerted by her editor to “Tell Joan that this would indeed be a difficult topic”. Therefore, in the middle of our discussion, I interjected, “This being the BBC, we must of course state that heavy drinking and drug taking are bad for you”. Burnside agreed. I understand from my producer that this exchange will now be entered on the compliance document to signal alert about the content. This will be referred to my producer, then to her superior up the BBC ladder of authority, to decide whether it can indeed be broadcast at all.

The effects of such compliance rigmarole are threefold. First, it deskills the broadcaster. I must just as well have asked Burnside, “Tell us what fun it is to take LSD”, knowing that I could trust to the safeguards higher up the system to impose its own censorship and relieve me of any judgment of my own. Secondly, it risks creating sameness about programming in which everyone self-censors and creates an anodyne sort of discourse. Thirdly, it consumes layers of bureaucracy’s time and attention, not to say ever-mounting reams of paper. The report’s recommendation urging the BBC Trust to reconsider the existing compliance culture will, I believe, have the hearty support of the creative community.

Now to the issue of how the BBC deals with complaints. As I was thinking about what to say on this, I received a letter in this place from a viewer. The letter she enclosed is from the BBC Trust which summarises her dealings with it. It goes like this: “You wrote to the BBC complaints department on 12 April. BBC Audience Services replied on 21 April. You wrote again on 10 May. The executive producer of the programme replied on 11 June. You wrote again to the Editorial Complaints Unit. Alison Wilson, the complaints manager of the unit, replied on 2 August. You have now written to the BBC on 31 October”. There is no answer to this complaint, and I will explain why. The writer who sent her letter to me ends with this statement, written in capital letters: “The BBC is a corrupt institution. Evolution is the greatest hoax ever known to man. To God be the glory”. Such complaints can have as many replies as you wish, but they will not solve the problem.

In the report discussion of how complaint procedures are shared between Ofcom and the BBC, one platform available to the BBC was not discussed. By that I mean the transmission times available to it on both radio and television. Back in the 1960s when television was still seen as a new and exciting medium, I had the good fortune to be part of a radical programme enterprise. It was called “Late Night Line-Up”, a programme that went out every day of the year, bar Christmas day, and whose remit was to discuss the nature, range, style and structure of television itself. Every night we would broadcast critiques of programmes, analysis of what had been good or bad, and what was right or wrong about facts, policies and practice. We gave a platform to a vast range of critical voices. Even at a time when the BBC informally sought to keep Mrs Whitehouse off its screens, we went out of our way to give her a voice. In fact, we asked her to review “Oh, Calcutta!”.

If the issue of how the BBC deals with complaints is still as tricky a matter as this report suggests—it offers three alternative options to the noble Lord, Lord Patten—then one option it has not included is the programme schedules themselves. BBC television has a channel devoted entirely to parliamentary affairs which, though enjoying relatively low viewing figures, is seen as an important contribution to our democratic system. I suggest that the integrity of the BBC’s impartiality deserves regular and direct exposure to the public. There already exist lively but short programmes such as Radio 4’s “Feedback” and television’s “Points of View”, but they are relatively light-hearted and not broadcast consistently enough. Channel 4’s “Right of Reply”, presented by my friend Gus Macdonald, now my noble friend Lord Macdonald, ran for 18 years until it was axed in 2001. If Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand had been around in the 1960s, “Late Night Line-Up” would have hauled them over the coals, if not that very night, then within days.

Issues around the so-called dodgy dossier might have taken a little longer but they would have been given important gravitas. In both cases, the viewers and listeners, addressed directly from the screen, would have seen an honest, transparent and immediate attempt to deal with complaints. This makes far more sense and is of more immediate interest to the licence payer than any amount of referrals to editorial standards committees and Ofcom.

I am certainly not suggesting that such bodies have a crucial role in the solution of this problem. I am merely suggesting an auxiliary way of satisfying both complainants and licence-fee payers simultaneously.