Pinkoes and Traitors: the BBC and the Nation, 1974-87, by Jean Seaton (Profile, £30)
The New Noise: the Extraordinary Birth and Troubled Life of the BBC, by Charlotte Higgins (Guardian Books/Faber & Faber, £12.99)
When the BBC’s charter—the document that sets out its public role—comes up for renewal next year, its managers will have to define the purpose of a national broadcaster to a sceptical Tory government. How will they justify the licence fee in an age of media fragmentation, where the BBC is competing not only with fellow broadcasters ITV and Sky, but also with websites such as YouTube and Netflix? Are its most successful services—notably the BBC news website—unfairly dominating the media landscape? What kind of relationship should the BBC have with the government of the day? How does it get the balance right between elitism and populism, the familiar and the original, the unpredictable and the stale? More broadly how can it steer between its own tendency to smug complacency and compulsion for neurotic self-criticism?
Two new histories of the BBC offer a long perspective on these questions. Jean Seaton’s Pinkoes and Traitors: the BBC and the Nation, 1974-87 is the sixth volume in the official history of the BBC begun by the historian Asa Briggs. The book’s title is a problem. Denis Thatcher never called the BBC “a nest of Pinkoes and Traitors.” That’s what Private Eye imagined him saying. More importantly, Seaton records the post-Falklands War dinner when Margaret Thatcher accused the BBC’s Board of Management of “failing the nation.” Bill Cotton, the Managing Director of BBC Television, challenged her. “Prime Minister, are you calling the BBC traitors?” Thatcher was silenced. Is the title the publisher’s catchpenny fabrication?
Charlotte Higgins’s The New Noise ranges from John Reith to the present rule of Director-General Tony Hall. While lacking the analytical depth or originality of Seaton’s work, it is a useful reminder of some of the more lurid contemporary BBC crises and offers a broader framework for Seaton’s study of 1974-1987. How has the BBC survived the rows—with governments, the audience, itself? And the resignations? Each book ends with the fall of a director general, Alasdair Milne in 1987 and George Entwistle in 2013.
Whenever the BBC gets something wrong, whether a programme or a policy—neither Seaton nor Higgins are sparing about BBC errors—it immediately escalates into a debate about the BBC’s right to exist. In Seaton’s account Blankety Blank, a quiz show, and The Thorn Birds, a drama, were judged by some to be too populist. The list of dramas accused by press and politicians of left-wing bias was far longer. It included Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff (too socialist), Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle (blasphemous), Cathy Come Home (too campaigning), Grange Hill (too realistic), Bleasdale’s drama about a First World War deserter The Monocled Mutineer (a fabrication), and the thriller about nuclear espionage Edge of Darkness (too bleak). Most are now regarded as landmark television dramas.
At the time these rows felt minor compared with the arguments over the coverage of Northern Ireland in the 1970s and the Falklands War of 1982. Seaton rightly gives each an entire enthralling chapter. Why wasn’t the BBC “backing our boys” in the Falklands, asked Mrs Thatcher. Why did Newsnight’s Peter Snow appear to question the accuracy of the Ministry of Defence’s account of fighting in the South Atlantic?
In the case of Northern Ireland, Seaton concludes that over the 1970s, the BBC arrived at a “proper policy of creating a mature, informed debate... It drew lines around accuracy that helped create a shared public space.” Yet reaching a position where 98 per cent of Northern Ireland’s population tuned into BBC news because it came, in Seaton’s words, “close to a shared set of facts” was a bitterly disputed process. A BBC cameraman told me about a woman shouting at him as he filmed a riot in Belfast: “youse are showing things that aren’t happening!” The army tried to tell the Belfast newsroom how events should be covered. Roy Mason, the pugnacious Secretary of State for Northern Ireland between 1976 and 1979, threatened to cut the licence fee and rewrite the BBC charter to make it more “responsive to security considerations.” While resisting such incursions, the BBC re-calibrated its coverage. Mark Bonham Carter’s 1972 report concluded that it was not Protestant anxieties that were under-reported but those of the Catholic community. He told Mason bluntly: “You must choose between managed news and freedom of speech.”
As Higgins notes, “the government and the BBC will always dance a curious dance together—a delicate waltz that might slide into a sparring match or occasionally a death grip.” Thatcher thought the BBC should have “higher standards” but also be exposed to market forces. The economist Brian Griffiths, to whom she confided these views, once said to me: “Mrs Thatcher thinks the BBC is too much like a university.” This was not a compliment. Seaton refers to her attendance at the World Service men-only dining club, the “Bushmen.” Thatcher devoted much of her speech to establishing her intellectual credentials by expressing her admiration for Friedrich Hayek. If she felt at home on that occasion, it was not, as Seaton asserts, because “the keen Cold War antennae of Bush House suited her.” In my time as Managing Director of the World Service, largely beyond the scope of this book, Thatcher did not cut our budget and took the considerable risk of taking part in a live phone-in with Soviet listeners. She then listened to an extended briefing over her customary double Scotch and water. I found no hint of a person seeing the world through the narrow prism of propaganda. Seaton argues that the BBC misunderstood, underestimated and patronised Thatcher. The Tory Prime Minister enjoyed being a combative outsider and the BBC gave her plenty of scope to play that role. The corporation was probably saved by that wise Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw, whom Thatcher trusted. It was almost more than the BBC’s leaders deserved.
Seaton reserves her worst condemnation of BBC managers for their behaviour during the economic crisis of 1974 under a newly re-elected Labour government. First, BBC staff were given a 20 per cent wage increase while the government was preaching wage restraint. Worse, the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, got just two hours’ notice. Worst of all, the BBC marched in with a request for an above-inflation licence fee increase. This chapter should be compulsory reading for Tony Hall as he prepares for charter renewal.
The BBC has survived because of several heroes, including the economist Samuel Brittan. He turned the Peacock Committee on the financing of the corporation in its favour because he believed relations between the government and the BBC had to be de-politicised. This shift was made easier by the clever, cynical and world-weary Brian Wenham, the controller of BBC2 from 1978 to 1982. His orchestration of the BBC’s evidence for Peacock persuaded them that introducing advertising would not save the BBC and would undermine ITV. (Higgins has her heroes, too, rightly lauding the BBC’s first ever Director of Talks in 1929, Hilda Matheson, lover of Vita Sackville-West and pioneer of searching political broadcasting.)
Seaton’s real hero is Michael Checkland. From 1980, as Director of Resources, Checkland and a small group of tough-minded but broadcasting-oriented colleagues “transformed the way the BBC did business, rationalising, simplifying and changing management style from the inside.” This is right. Checkland, a clever, subtle, pragmatic leader, became Director-General in 1987. Though an accountant by training, programme-makers came to value him hugely. He was undermined by the arrogant BBC Chairman, Marmaduke Hussey—overrated by Seaton—who was egged on by the manipulative Vice-Chairman, Joel Barnett. The grim years when the governors plotted against Checkland fall outside the scope of Seaton’s book. I recorded them in my journal. In time the tale will be told.
The brutal sacking of his predecessor, Alasdair Milne, in January 1987 does fall within Seaton’s period. I always found Milne an uncomfortable mix of the remote, the offhand and the engaging. I did not mind his dismissal of my application to be Managing Director of BBC World Service as “irrelevant.” It got in the way of his plans. But I found his later breezing in to my new office at Bush House with the words “Contrary to what you may have heard, old boy, I was never against your appointment,” both incredible and unnecessary.
At the Board of Management and Board of Governors in the autumn of 1986, I observed Milne walking into a death trap. Nobody believed his repeated assurances that the two Tory MPs charged with links to far-right extremism in a 1984 Panorama programme would settle their libel case against the BBC, as he said, “on the steps of the court!” (During the trial, the BBC withdrew the case and the court awarded each MP £20,000 in damages.) At a pre-Christmas dinner for the Board of Management, jaws dropped when Milne announced that he expected to remain as Director-General for several years to come. He had no sense of danger. After his sacking the following day, Seaton quotes me as asking myself why none of us asked Hussey for an explanation during the official lunch the next day. My reply was, “because it was a staggering surprise and no surprise at all.” I now think that is wholly inadequate. I am ashamed at my silence and always will be.
I have no doubt the BBC will present a technically polished case for charter renewal. My fear is that the necessary language and vision is lacking. On one side there is the rich vocabulary of trust, values, programmes, ideas, curiosity, originality, audiences, beliefs, ambitions, purpose, responsibility, judgement and quality. Can such notions supersede the reductive vocabulary of accountability, systems, process, genres, consumers, marketing, platforms, objectives, distinctiveness, compliance, bench-marking and risk analysis that has come about due to government demands for proofs of efficiency and neutrality? I believe such a shift would lead to a huge upsurge of energy, originality and creativity. Staff would welcome it, audiences respond to it and governments could not ignore it.
Can the BBC pull it off? Both Seaton and Higgins hope they will. Yet Higgins’s account of the corporation’s handling of contemporary crises, from the Iraq war to Jimmy Savile, is worrying. In the years between 1974 and 1987, Seaton finds BBC leaders engaging with the great issues of war, peace and national identity and holding the line on freedom of speech and public service. In Higgins’s interviews, the current management seem to me to be basing their arguments on the convenient and the practical. Has some vision been lost? If so, the BBC has indeed changed.
A final thought. Seaton’s book has a dismal array of errors—incorrect names, titles and events—that diminish its authority. (For example, she says the IRA hunger strikes were in 1982 when they were in 1981.) There should be an immediate reprint with corrections. The BBC deserves it; this book deserves it; Jean Seaton deserves it.
John Tusa was Managing Director of the BBC World Service from 1986 to 1992
The New Noise: the Extraordinary Birth and Troubled Life of the BBC, by Charlotte Higgins (Guardian Books/Faber & Faber, £12.99)
When the BBC’s charter—the document that sets out its public role—comes up for renewal next year, its managers will have to define the purpose of a national broadcaster to a sceptical Tory government. How will they justify the licence fee in an age of media fragmentation, where the BBC is competing not only with fellow broadcasters ITV and Sky, but also with websites such as YouTube and Netflix? Are its most successful services—notably the BBC news website—unfairly dominating the media landscape? What kind of relationship should the BBC have with the government of the day? How does it get the balance right between elitism and populism, the familiar and the original, the unpredictable and the stale? More broadly how can it steer between its own tendency to smug complacency and compulsion for neurotic self-criticism?
Two new histories of the BBC offer a long perspective on these questions. Jean Seaton’s Pinkoes and Traitors: the BBC and the Nation, 1974-87 is the sixth volume in the official history of the BBC begun by the historian Asa Briggs. The book’s title is a problem. Denis Thatcher never called the BBC “a nest of Pinkoes and Traitors.” That’s what Private Eye imagined him saying. More importantly, Seaton records the post-Falklands War dinner when Margaret Thatcher accused the BBC’s Board of Management of “failing the nation.” Bill Cotton, the Managing Director of BBC Television, challenged her. “Prime Minister, are you calling the BBC traitors?” Thatcher was silenced. Is the title the publisher’s catchpenny fabrication?
Charlotte Higgins’s The New Noise ranges from John Reith to the present rule of Director-General Tony Hall. While lacking the analytical depth or originality of Seaton’s work, it is a useful reminder of some of the more lurid contemporary BBC crises and offers a broader framework for Seaton’s study of 1974-1987. How has the BBC survived the rows—with governments, the audience, itself? And the resignations? Each book ends with the fall of a director general, Alasdair Milne in 1987 and George Entwistle in 2013.
Whenever the BBC gets something wrong, whether a programme or a policy—neither Seaton nor Higgins are sparing about BBC errors—it immediately escalates into a debate about the BBC’s right to exist. In Seaton’s account Blankety Blank, a quiz show, and The Thorn Birds, a drama, were judged by some to be too populist. The list of dramas accused by press and politicians of left-wing bias was far longer. It included Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff (too socialist), Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle (blasphemous), Cathy Come Home (too campaigning), Grange Hill (too realistic), Bleasdale’s drama about a First World War deserter The Monocled Mutineer (a fabrication), and the thriller about nuclear espionage Edge of Darkness (too bleak). Most are now regarded as landmark television dramas.
At the time these rows felt minor compared with the arguments over the coverage of Northern Ireland in the 1970s and the Falklands War of 1982. Seaton rightly gives each an entire enthralling chapter. Why wasn’t the BBC “backing our boys” in the Falklands, asked Mrs Thatcher. Why did Newsnight’s Peter Snow appear to question the accuracy of the Ministry of Defence’s account of fighting in the South Atlantic?
In the case of Northern Ireland, Seaton concludes that over the 1970s, the BBC arrived at a “proper policy of creating a mature, informed debate... It drew lines around accuracy that helped create a shared public space.” Yet reaching a position where 98 per cent of Northern Ireland’s population tuned into BBC news because it came, in Seaton’s words, “close to a shared set of facts” was a bitterly disputed process. A BBC cameraman told me about a woman shouting at him as he filmed a riot in Belfast: “youse are showing things that aren’t happening!” The army tried to tell the Belfast newsroom how events should be covered. Roy Mason, the pugnacious Secretary of State for Northern Ireland between 1976 and 1979, threatened to cut the licence fee and rewrite the BBC charter to make it more “responsive to security considerations.” While resisting such incursions, the BBC re-calibrated its coverage. Mark Bonham Carter’s 1972 report concluded that it was not Protestant anxieties that were under-reported but those of the Catholic community. He told Mason bluntly: “You must choose between managed news and freedom of speech.”
As Higgins notes, “the government and the BBC will always dance a curious dance together—a delicate waltz that might slide into a sparring match or occasionally a death grip.” Thatcher thought the BBC should have “higher standards” but also be exposed to market forces. The economist Brian Griffiths, to whom she confided these views, once said to me: “Mrs Thatcher thinks the BBC is too much like a university.” This was not a compliment. Seaton refers to her attendance at the World Service men-only dining club, the “Bushmen.” Thatcher devoted much of her speech to establishing her intellectual credentials by expressing her admiration for Friedrich Hayek. If she felt at home on that occasion, it was not, as Seaton asserts, because “the keen Cold War antennae of Bush House suited her.” In my time as Managing Director of the World Service, largely beyond the scope of this book, Thatcher did not cut our budget and took the considerable risk of taking part in a live phone-in with Soviet listeners. She then listened to an extended briefing over her customary double Scotch and water. I found no hint of a person seeing the world through the narrow prism of propaganda. Seaton argues that the BBC misunderstood, underestimated and patronised Thatcher. The Tory Prime Minister enjoyed being a combative outsider and the BBC gave her plenty of scope to play that role. The corporation was probably saved by that wise Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw, whom Thatcher trusted. It was almost more than the BBC’s leaders deserved.
Seaton reserves her worst condemnation of BBC managers for their behaviour during the economic crisis of 1974 under a newly re-elected Labour government. First, BBC staff were given a 20 per cent wage increase while the government was preaching wage restraint. Worse, the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, got just two hours’ notice. Worst of all, the BBC marched in with a request for an above-inflation licence fee increase. This chapter should be compulsory reading for Tony Hall as he prepares for charter renewal.
The BBC has survived because of several heroes, including the economist Samuel Brittan. He turned the Peacock Committee on the financing of the corporation in its favour because he believed relations between the government and the BBC had to be de-politicised. This shift was made easier by the clever, cynical and world-weary Brian Wenham, the controller of BBC2 from 1978 to 1982. His orchestration of the BBC’s evidence for Peacock persuaded them that introducing advertising would not save the BBC and would undermine ITV. (Higgins has her heroes, too, rightly lauding the BBC’s first ever Director of Talks in 1929, Hilda Matheson, lover of Vita Sackville-West and pioneer of searching political broadcasting.)
Seaton’s real hero is Michael Checkland. From 1980, as Director of Resources, Checkland and a small group of tough-minded but broadcasting-oriented colleagues “transformed the way the BBC did business, rationalising, simplifying and changing management style from the inside.” This is right. Checkland, a clever, subtle, pragmatic leader, became Director-General in 1987. Though an accountant by training, programme-makers came to value him hugely. He was undermined by the arrogant BBC Chairman, Marmaduke Hussey—overrated by Seaton—who was egged on by the manipulative Vice-Chairman, Joel Barnett. The grim years when the governors plotted against Checkland fall outside the scope of Seaton’s book. I recorded them in my journal. In time the tale will be told.
The brutal sacking of his predecessor, Alasdair Milne, in January 1987 does fall within Seaton’s period. I always found Milne an uncomfortable mix of the remote, the offhand and the engaging. I did not mind his dismissal of my application to be Managing Director of BBC World Service as “irrelevant.” It got in the way of his plans. But I found his later breezing in to my new office at Bush House with the words “Contrary to what you may have heard, old boy, I was never against your appointment,” both incredible and unnecessary.
At the Board of Management and Board of Governors in the autumn of 1986, I observed Milne walking into a death trap. Nobody believed his repeated assurances that the two Tory MPs charged with links to far-right extremism in a 1984 Panorama programme would settle their libel case against the BBC, as he said, “on the steps of the court!” (During the trial, the BBC withdrew the case and the court awarded each MP £20,000 in damages.) At a pre-Christmas dinner for the Board of Management, jaws dropped when Milne announced that he expected to remain as Director-General for several years to come. He had no sense of danger. After his sacking the following day, Seaton quotes me as asking myself why none of us asked Hussey for an explanation during the official lunch the next day. My reply was, “because it was a staggering surprise and no surprise at all.” I now think that is wholly inadequate. I am ashamed at my silence and always will be.
I have no doubt the BBC will present a technically polished case for charter renewal. My fear is that the necessary language and vision is lacking. On one side there is the rich vocabulary of trust, values, programmes, ideas, curiosity, originality, audiences, beliefs, ambitions, purpose, responsibility, judgement and quality. Can such notions supersede the reductive vocabulary of accountability, systems, process, genres, consumers, marketing, platforms, objectives, distinctiveness, compliance, bench-marking and risk analysis that has come about due to government demands for proofs of efficiency and neutrality? I believe such a shift would lead to a huge upsurge of energy, originality and creativity. Staff would welcome it, audiences respond to it and governments could not ignore it.
Can the BBC pull it off? Both Seaton and Higgins hope they will. Yet Higgins’s account of the corporation’s handling of contemporary crises, from the Iraq war to Jimmy Savile, is worrying. In the years between 1974 and 1987, Seaton finds BBC leaders engaging with the great issues of war, peace and national identity and holding the line on freedom of speech and public service. In Higgins’s interviews, the current management seem to me to be basing their arguments on the convenient and the practical. Has some vision been lost? If so, the BBC has indeed changed.
A final thought. Seaton’s book has a dismal array of errors—incorrect names, titles and events—that diminish its authority. (For example, she says the IRA hunger strikes were in 1982 when they were in 1981.) There should be an immediate reprint with corrections. The BBC deserves it; this book deserves it; Jean Seaton deserves it.
John Tusa was Managing Director of the BBC World Service from 1986 to 1992
