The BBC and ME: A LOVE-HATE THING Part I

It’s been a tumultuous year for the BBC, with the autumn debacle surrounding the Corporation’s role in revelations about the child abuse practised by its long-time employee Jimmy Savile costing the new Director-General his job after fewer than eight weeks in post. I would hardly call it, with veteran World Affairs editor John Simpson, “the worst crisis that I can remember in my nearly fifty years at the BBC” – perhaps my memory is sharper than Simpson’s – but it has certainly not been an edifying spectacle.

The BBC has always been an unwieldy institution, even when it was considerably more collegiate and streamlined than it is now. Corporation lifers (of whom there are still many more than in most enterprises, even though it can never again be depended upon as a secure haven by those to whom the mores are palatable) are apt to insist (a verb much loved by BBC news scriptwriters) that “the Beeb” is still broadly “trusted” by the public and always has been. I’m not so sure. Equally, my own dealings with the BBC have often been complicated and thwarted by manoeuvrings that seem peculiar to intensely bureaucratic ivory towers.

John Simpson at the outset of his BBC career

The first television broadcast I ever saw was the BBC’s coverage of the coronation of HM Queen Elizabeth II on June 2nd 1953. Along with a majority of British households (56 percent of the population, plus another 12 million following it on the wireless), we joined in the very first exercise in mass media communication in Britain. If you include the audiences for relays and recordings shown in other countries, the total viewing audience topped 277 million. The coverage cost the BBC £44,000.

Like so many others, we had to up sticks for the duration and squeeze into the living room of a neighbour’s house to gaze at that tiny black and white picture on the large and cumbersome but elegant wooden set. It was television that fixed the image for us: “Miss Jones: What colour was the Queen’s coach? – Michael: Grey, Miss” [The Golden Pathway Annual by John Harding and John Burrows].

My Dad was one of the million householders who bought a set in the year following the coronation. And our lives changed forever. The pattern of viewing began to dictate family life. I especially was entranced by this lively source of information, education and entertainment available (after a delay while it warmed up) at the touch of a button. The wireless could always be playing while you did other things, but the goggle-box demanded your full attention (at least, we thought so).

Until 1955, there was only the BBC’s single channel to watch and its hours were very restricted. ‘Closedown’ (when the national anthem was played and some viewers dutifully got to their feet) came early enough to allow even the petit bourgeoisie to have a glance at the evening paper before turning in. A smattering of items for children in the late afternoon was followed by a suspension of transmission between 6.00 and 7.00pm, to allow parents to pack them off to bed or to homework; this period became known as “the toddlers’ truce”. With such limited hours, it was feasible to watch everything broadcast. In our house, we often did.

Apologists for ITV are wont to claim that the BBC was staid and safe until the commercial channel gave it competition. The press had dubbed the BBC ‘Auntie’ but many newspaper owners nursed hopes of involvement in ITV franchises; they were far from disinterested. My Dad, himself a businessman, distrusted the commercial interests and “wouldn’t have ITV in the house” till he relented in 1961.

Joan Miller, the so-called switchboard girl, on Picture Parade

BBC producers established the conventions that subsequent services emulated and that still make up the major genres of the medium: one-off and serial drama, variety, sketch comedy, sitcom, panel games, quiz shows, children’s programmes, documentary, current affairs, news, magazine programmes, relays of outside events and what Homer Simpson would call “edumacation” programmes. While most of these forms derived from television services elsewhere (especially the States), from wireless and from entertainment sources of other kinds, little of substance has been added since.

Pre-ITV, the BBC produced the first magazine programme, Picture Page; Come Dancing; Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass serials and his dramatization of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four; The Good Old Days; Sportsview; David Attenborough’s Zoo Quest; Watch with Mother; Panorama; Mr Pastry; Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?; the first British serial to embrace soap-opera values (The Grove Family); regular news bulletins and the basis for a network of schools programming. ITV introduced two ingredients of which the BBC knew nothing: advertising and showbiz. The impresarios who owned the companies that built ITV – the Bernsteins, the Grades, the Rank Organization, Associated British Pictures – had long experience of and wide links with the native film industry, the variety circuit, the popular press and myriad talent agencies. ITV aimed for and achieved a populist stance that the BBC felt (often with justice) was vulgar and down-market. Even its news service, ITN, had a more sensationalist approach than BBC News.

Over the years, the populist approach has utterly routed the thoughtful approach. By the 1970s, media analyst Anthony Smith was able to note that BBC1 and ITV were “moving towards a point of convergence”. Since then, the rush away from serious programming has accelerated. What was once thought perfectly accessible on BBC1 began to be shunted to BBC2 but now that channel is just as down-market. What the biz calls ‘quality’ programmes are found on BBC4, but in recent times that channel too has lowered its sights. Its bill of fare tonight – The Bridges That Built London; … Sings Disney Songs!; The Best of Kenny Everett’s Television Shows; Numb: Simon Amstell Live at the BBC; More Old Jews Telling Jokes; The Art of Tommy Cooper; How the Brits Rocked America; Sounds of the 70s – would have readily been scheduled on BBC1 thirty years ago.

Tommy Cooper, present-day BBC4 fare

That the media generally have dumbed down is beyond dispute. I never trust surveys but when their findings agree with one’s own view … and it so happens that an ICM poll in 2004 did find that of those questioned “54 percent agreed the BBC had ‘dumbed down’ or lowered quality”. I have no way of knowing how credible or properly worded the survey was, but in the end it matters little what proportion of people think that the BBC and other mediums of news and diversion have dumbed down. I know they have.

I turned 13 in 1960 and my teens happily coincided with what is unarguably remembered as the Golden Age of British television. I became particularly drawn to BBC1’s contemporary drama strand, The Wednesday Play, which ran from 1964 to 1970. My father’s resistance to ITV meant that I only discovered ABC Television’s Armchair Theatre in retrospect. This slot, which began in 1956, was in every way the forerunner of The Wednesday Play – Harold Pinter was among the playwrights to cut their teeth on it – and, in setting up its rival, the BBC even poached the presiding genius of ITV drama, Sydney Newman, to be its Head of Plays. Newman’s lethal combination of progressiveness, fearlessness, non-conformity and showbiz instincts ensured that the BBC’s contemporary drama was never out of the headlines.

I was at university and tinkering with a teleplay of my own when the BBC announced a play-writing competition open only to college students. Over the Easter vac, I settled seriously to the task and got my entry off just inside the deadline. By the summer, I had forgotten about it, so the letter telling me that my play had won the competition was a complete surprise. At a small and – as I was to discover – a very BBC ceremony in the Bridge Lounge at Television Centre, I was presented with a head-spinningly large cheque for £500 by the Head of Drama, Gerald Savory, attended by my proud parents. I don’t think either of them had actually read the play – certainly my father hadn’t – so they may not have been as braced for the ensuing events as they might have been.

The two runners-up were also at the ceremony, Catherine Itzin and Andrew Dickson. Both went on to do intriguing things. Itzin became a highly respected theatre academic and a formidable campaigner against pornography. Dickson had a varied career in journalism and became the lover of BBC drama producer Irene Shubik. Both died much too young.

The charismatic Sydney Newman

My play was called Circle Line. I actually entitled it Circle/Line which I fancied made it sound like the name of a modernist painting but the producer and script editor who subsequently put it into production briskly scotched that notion. Though (as regular readers of this blog will testify) I have a gift for nicely judged titles, almost nothing by me of substance that has been set before the public has been allowed out under my chosen title.

My protagonist was, like me, a London University student of philosophy. He was, in Peter Fiddick’s succinct assessment in his smart review for The Guardian, “a moral blank-sheet”. In the play’s overarching conceit, he viewed life as “like travelling round the Circle Line”. In a climactic scene, the Circle Line passengers panic when the train is stalled in a tunnel. My hero watches them dispassionately. Then the train restarts and they settle down. As an image of modern life, it was … well, serviceable.

The play was an active project within a few weeks of its prize: production turnaround was much faster then than now. Despite my inexperience, I was given full access to every stage of the process and even allowed by the director to choose the actor I favoured for the lead over his preferred candidate. There was some shooting on the underground for telecine drop-ins. One shot through the opening doors was ruined by a London Transport official standing in mid-shot barking “not this train”. But it was thrilling to be part of a location movie shoot in the city. The director even cut a shot of me into the final edit, my Hitchcock moment.

A lot of drama was still made with multiple cameras in the studio and that was how mine was recorded in the two days before Christmas in 1969. My mother and I sat in the back of the gallery and watched the whole process. Occasionally I was consulted – not, I felt, merely for form’s sake. However, at one point a note came from Gerald Savory who was in a viewing room somewhere above the studio. He couldn’t allow one of my more literary jokes.

My student hero, grumbling about some aspect of the service in a café, was to utter: “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a Wimpy and chips” (if this quip leaves you struggling, I suggest you put “this is the way the world ends” in Google Search and “Wimpy” in Wikipedia). Gerald declared that we couldn’t use the word Wimpy, both because of the BBC’s barring of brand names and because it might be defamatory. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why this problem had been overlooked until the moment of recording. But, to my intense chagrin, the actor had to go with “not with a bang but with a cheese omelette” which, those of you who now have the joke under your belts will concur, lacks something by comparison.

Gerald Savory, long before the days when I knew him

It was more than a year before the recording was actually broadcast. Higher up in the management structure, there were concerns about the play’s content. Again it seemed to me that the proper time for these concerns was much earlier in the process. But I had the misfortune to coincide with a turning of the tide. Sir Hugh Greene, the most progressive and imaginative DG the BBC has ever had, was eased out of office in 1969 by the new Chairman of the BBC Board, Lord Hill. His replacement, Charles Curran, was a conservative placeman. The Golden Age was over.

In the 1970s, there was a long, brutal struggle over what writers and producers called ‘censorship’ and what managers called ‘editorial control’, fought in the corridors of television companies, especially the BBC. Many of the battles were about language. In Circle Line, some language detail was conceded by Savory, provided a brief discussion about masturbation was removed. On the other hand, a scene depicting my student hero post-coitally in bed with a 14 year-old boy was shown intact and, on that count alone, the play wouldn’t get accepted for production now, certainly not as written.

The language battles were often as trivial as that once described by Peter Cook, in which you would be, as it were, trading three ‘bloodies’ for a ‘shit’. The agent whom I had acquired, Clive Goodwin, argued that nobody who watched a Wednesday Play had cause to complain if she found it ruffled her sensibility. But if Cilla Black swept in at the top of her variety show and cried “Hello, you fuckers”, that would be an outrage. It was, I thought, a seductive if also reductive example. The point – that context is all – was pertinent, however. Now, of course, expletives that would embarrass a navvy are routinely included in the most humdrum, mainstream programmes, provided a warning about “strong” language has preceded the broadcast.

By the time that Circle Line was transmitted, The Wednesday Play had been axed. The rationale was that the new strand title, Play for Today, allowed greater transmission flexibility. But we one-off drama aficionados sensed that the writing was on the wall. Even though the leading teleplaywrights – Dennis Potter, David Mercer, Alun Owen, John Hopkins, Julia Jones, Jim Allen, Trevor Griffiths – were now taken as seriously as their equivalents in the theatre, the inevitable result of the increasing competitiveness of scheduling was that one-off programmes could not justify their comparatively high budgets.

After Circle Line, which was pretty well received, the BBC turned down the next eight plays that I wrote. Eight! I’d like to be able to say that this was a learning experience but the standard rejection letter that I received vouchsafed no more explication than the stock line “it’s not for us”.

Graeme McDonald during his uneventful spell as BBC2 Controller; he later nominally ran Prince Edward's production company Argent while drinking himself to death

After eighteen months, I was offered a consolation prize, a contract as a trainee script editor. The first three months of this were the best. I was sent on attachment to the Script Unit, which was based in the East Tower on the Television Centre site (the Drama Department was on the fifth floor of the main block, “the doughnut”). The legendary producer Tony Garnett also kept his office in the East Tower because, as he told me, it removed the temptation to get embroiled in the politics of the Drama Department. He also gave me some wise advice: "if you have to see a member of the management, always make the appointment for after half past five. Then they'll think you're working terrifically hard and there's a good chance you'll be offered a drink". Garnett was definitely one of the Corporation's survivors.

The Script Unit was staffed within and served from without by a bunch of delightful, generous people. Its function was to assess all the unsolicited scripts that poured into the BBC and to reply to them, often in remarkable detail. Those submitting their scribblings mostly had little appreciation of this extraordinary free tuition; indeed, some would argue fiercely with the findings. But all submissions were read, either by the in-house assessors like me or by wise old owls outside to whom scripts were farmed out. Of course it was a very useful exercise for me too. I learned a lot about how to read a script – a considerable skill now rarely encountered in the business – and how to structure and project material. Needless to add, the unit was closed down before the decade was out.

After that, I was attached to Graeme McDonald and Ann Scott, respectively producer and script editor of Circle Line, for the rest of my contract. This was a frustrating experience. The script editor’s function – nominally to look after the writer’s interests throughout the production – is in practice a nebulous job, wholly dependent on the relationship with the producer, whose strengths the script editor should ideally complement. Graeme and Ann had a well-established modus operandi that left little for me to do but pad around after them, making more or less unhelpful suggestions.

Moreover, they were not cut from the same generous cloth as Robin Wade and Betty Willingale in the Script Unit. There was an outsize character with whom I would sometimes have a lunchtime drink in the BBC Club. Derek Ingrey was small and dynamic, affecting an Aristide Bruant fedora and red scarf (long before those were a cliché) and expressing forthright opinions on everything. Bizarrely he was the script editor on Dixon of Dock Green (on the surface at least, a most unlikely piece of casting) and allegedly he would spend the autumn, winter and spring tending to Ted Willis’s workaday scripts and the summer in France having outrageous affairs with local schoolgirls. Anyway, Derek asked me one day how I was getting on with Graeme and Ann. He caught my moment of hesitation and observed shrewdly: “yes … costive, aren’t they”. I agreed for form’s sake and, having looked up the word later, agreed whole-heartedly.

David Rose, a lovely man, later C4's first drama controller

At the end of my contract, Cedric Messina (“the African queen” as one or two unkind souls called him) wanted me to become his script editor on Play of the Month, the slot for splashy production of theatre plays, typically Shakespeare, Shaw or Chekhov. I had got to know Cedric and liked him, had been to the house – very grand, as was everything of Cedric’s – and met his unexpected wife and even more unexpected tiny, ringleted daughter, had made some suggestions for the strand that had intrigued him: Morecambe and Wise in Waiting for Godot, Olivier in a role he had yet to conquer, Lear (which he famously did some years later for Granada). But Chris Morahan, the Head of Plays, declared that Cedric needed a mature script editor (he got Alan Shallcross) and that I ought to go off and run a theatre. “Oh yes,” I thought, “I’ll just nip into the Royal Court and stage a coup”.

It was five years before I returned to the BBC. At the time, I was writing television previews and a news column for The Observer, sharing a page with Clive James. Just before Christmas, I went up to Birmingham to attend the launch of Pebble Mill’s contribution to network drama which regularly launched the new year. After the main presentation and a buffet lunch, I sat down with a cassette of a complete play (I was always a diligent previewer). Throughout, I kept receiving messages that I must call in to the office of the Head of English Regions Drama, David Rose, before I left.

When I finally got to David’s office, it was packed with very noisy and drunken writers and directors. David, himself well away, hauled me into his inner sanctum and asked if I was ready to come back into television. This was very unexpected. He said he had a producing job that he hoped I would like to do and that we should have lunch in the new year. And in the new year I will continue the story.