The BBC’s new boss must conquer fear with vision

4 July 2012

George Entwistle has a great chance to use the corporation’s popularity to add creative confidence

It’s okay to make mistakes. Greg Dyke and Gavyn Davies shouldn’t have resigned over Hutton. Nor should have the boss of Radio 2 over Russell Brand. Or the controller of BBC1 over the Queen.

As the BBC Trust appoints George Entwistle as its next director-general, its members should be asking themselves how the BBC can rediscover its creative confidence.

Mark Thompson has steadied the ship. Other than the NHS, the BBC is the only British institution to have got more popular over the past five years. Before the digital revolution, many predicted that the BBC would lose audiences and the licence fee become unsustainable. The opposite has happened — with just as many of us using the BBC every week.

But talk to anyone at the BBC — programme-maker, commissioner, presenter — and quite quickly the conversation will turn to fear: that a tabloid attack will lose them their job, that their bosses wouldn’t defend them. This all started with the tragedy of the Hutton inquiry, but it’s got worse.

Creativity involves making mistakes. The greatest risk of all is not taking any risks. And the BBC’s funding gives it a unique ability, and therefore a unique responsibility, to take the risks that others can’t. In the same way that Greg Dyke cheered up the BBC programme-making community in his first few weeks, so should Entwistle, by telling programme makers that they should take more risks, not fewer.

Entwistle has an opportunity that Mark Thompson never had — he has arrived at a time when the ideological tide is running in the BBC’s direction. Ever since Thompson joined the BBC in 1979, it has felt under attack; first from market fundamentalists and then from News International. But after the financial crisis and phone hacking, it already feels inconceivable that anyone would argue today that “the only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit”, as James Murdoch did less than three years ago.

We were lucky over the past few decades to have the BBC and Channel 4 to balance and complement an unregulated press. In his inquiry conclusions, Lord Leveson needs to make sure that neither the press nor broadcasters are chilled, frightened off from tough stories that might get them in a future “public dock”.

What frightens the BBC? The regular possibility that its charter or licence fee might not be renewed. However robust Jeremy Paxman might be on Newsnight, that unspoken fear of alienating politicians is always felt on the tie-wearing floors of the BBC.

After Leveson, Parliament will want to show that it gets it. The Coalition may find it hard to agree on a Communications Bill. But they could agree on the BBC. Entwistle should seize that opportunity to establish a more stable consensus: a BBC funded by the licence fee, without new channels but also without the fear of Radio 1 or BBC3 being privatised. The next Charter Review could take those issues as settled and focus instead on important questions around how the BBC becomes a better partner, how to address devolution and whether to charge for programmes on iPlayer.

Political stability would be the platform for creative confidence. With the sword of Damocles removed, commissioning editors could be given more power to back their own tastes, with fewer decisions being referred up the chain. The BBC has some of the best people in broadcasting and its programmes continue to delight — from blockbusters like Sherlock to gems like the recent Nina Conti documentary or Guy Garvey’s residency on 6 Music. But it should become the place where creative people all around the world want to do their passion project — and then come away saying that was one of the most supportive creative experiences of their life.

But Entwistle will need to do all that without soft-soaping the organisation. The BBC faces a 16 per cent cut in the licence fee — more if inflation rises. The licence fee will end up lower in real terms than it has for years. Mark Thompson was right to say the BBC needed to do fewer things better — but the BBC’s review of its services doesn’t feel like the last word on that topic.

Have the respective roles of BBC2 and BBC4 been sufficiently clarified? Where is the place where the BBC is spiky, brings in new talent, explores radical new ways of making programmes? Have all the opportunities for cost-cutting been taken?

When I worked for John Birt, he used to say that the BBC needed to keep growing because otherwise it turned on itself. Once the day-to-day is all about cuts, people worry more about their jobs than the next great idea. Talent drifts away. The BBC needs to show that it has executed the Government’s tough licence fee settlement but then make an argument for the licence fee to grow. It’s no accident that the BBC is as loved as the NHS — they are part of what make Britain a great country in which to live. As the economy returns to growth, the BBC should too.

And Entwistle will need to take another leaf out of Birt’s book, in which he describes his 1997 trip to Silicon Valley and Seattle. Not necessarily the incident where Birt bounced on a trampoline with Lachlan Murdoch but the embrace of the internet and digital television. Fifteen years later, the BBC is still following essentially the same strategy — be everywhere the audience is.

It’s easy to criticise the BBC’s number of strategy executives. But they were the ones who made sure the BBC got on to those new services early. Channels have survived longer than maybe many would have thought at the time. But we may be at the dawn of the next stage, where downloading a programme becomes the default, rather than the exceptional, way in which audiences use the BBC.

So far, alone among public service broadcasters, the BBC has had the confidence to grow stronger during this technological revolution. Entwistle needs to make sure that this thoroughly modern BBC does it again.

The BBC’s new boss must conquer fear with vision

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