Grade must save the BBC

The last time Michael Grade was up for the BBC chairmanship, three years ago, he issued a quixotic public appeal. "I'd like to see politics taken out of the top BBC appointments," he said, before being brushed aside contemptuously for a New Labour time-server, Gavyn Davies.

Just how far we have come in three years was signified last night when Tony Blair approved the appointment of the politically incorrect and smokingly unsound Grade to be the man in charge of restoring the BBC's battered independence. It has taken a leap of faith or, maybe, desperation.

The Government, remember, were in a mess after Hutton. More than half the public believed the BBC had been unfairly punished with a double beheading while the official hounders of David Kelly had been let off without so much as a caution. Alastair Campbell's eagerness to put the boot in, along with the sinister recruitment of Lord Birt's hiking chum, the former Treasury boss Lord Burns, to advise the Culture Secretary on the terms for renewing the BBC's Charter, aroused sweeping fears for the Corporation's independence.

The BBC, like the NHS, is the personal property of 60 million people. Politicians tamper with it at their peril. Having lopped off its leadership, Tony Blair was in a pickle. He needed, in the shortest possible time, to re-establish public confidence in BBC autonomy and restore internal morale. That called for a chairman who was light-years removed from any taint of New Labour cronyism, a broadcasting professional who could automatically claim majority support on the BBC's 16-strong Executive. Only one name fitted both bills.

Michael Grade, during the mid-1980s, was director of programmes at the BBC, a title held with rather less distinction by John Birt at London Weekend Television. The two men conceived an unnegotiable mutual loathing, almost a physical revulsion, ancestral in origin. Born into a London showbiz family, Jewish on his father's side, Grade grew up learning how to make people laugh and cry. Birt had spent his career behind a desk in current affairs. He needed to have jokes carefully explained before he allowed them on air.

John - now Lord - Birt arrived at the BBC as deputy director general in 1987, shortly before Grade left in a cloud of cigar smoke to run Channel 4. Their paths barely crossed, but hostility persists. Birt is now a special adviser at Downing Street, a man who was widely expected to sway the choice of BBC chairman.

But the appointment of Grade, at 61, to be chairman of the BBC amounts to a final defeat for Birtism and the clearest possible signal that, in a control-crazed Government, this has been a truly independent appointment taken against the best Downing Street advice. It was not a decision taken lightly on either side.

GRADE had to be heavily ear-bashed before he agreed to run. Last time round, in 2001, he was humiliatingly passed over in favour of, a man whose broadcasting experience amounted to membership of a government think tank on BBC funding. Davies proved better than predicted and Grade gave up the BBC ghost, applying himself to yesterday's stock market flotation of Pinewood Shepperton studios, which will make him a fortune, and the chairmanship of Lottery company Camelot, which he will almost certainly have to give up on taking the £80,000 BBC post.

He is not a man who is short of things to do. He is director of half a dozen charities and arts institutions, of Charlton Athletic Football Club and the Royal Albert Hall. What pushed him into applying were urgent appeals from Sir Richard Eyre, former director of the National Theatre, who insisted he was the only man who could save the BBC, and from the broadcaster Lord Bragg, representing the upper echelons of the profession.

News of his appointment burst this morning like a sunbeam across the BBC, where he is remembered as a champion of populism and creativity - the man who gave EastEnders its head and Dennis Potter carte-blanche to write whatever plays he liked. He has intimate knowledge of the arts and entertainment industries, and for those who question his experience in news and current affairs - the area most damaged by Hutton - he can point to an early traineeship at the Daily Mirror and a clutch of social contacts in the main political parties.

Excitable and sentimental, he will govern the BBC more by instinct than by science. He will support programme makers and the founding tradition of reflecting the nation to itself. But the task is herculean. BBC is losing major spectator sports, one by one, to higher bidders. Its arts programming is pathetic and its news coverage is under fire from many quarters. Confidence is the first quality that Grade must restore to these shaky sectors, and he will do it by taking risks. What Grade's BBC will be, it will not be bland.

HIS immediate priority is to appoint a director- general to nurture internal re generat ion. The interim incumbent need not apply. Mark Byford, in his PC Plod size-12s and perpetual mode of hangdog apology, may be conserved in some BBC archive as a Birtian anachronism, but the next DG will need an upbeat outlook to match the chairman's. Both will have to argue for Charter renewal on rickety grounds - a digital policy that has gone dreadfully awry and a sense of purpose that has blurred in a multichannel universe.

The external candidates are led by Michael Jackson and Mark Thompson, both BBC bods who, like Grade, went on to run Channel 4. Another is Tony Hall, former head of News who now heads the Royal Opera House. Their time may yet come. But the immediate call is for a senior insider who has been through the Hutton darkness and emerged without blame.

Grade's eye will fall at his first Executive meeting on Jenny Abramsky, head of radio and music, a clean pair of hands with no outsized ego and a quiet capacity for keeping orchestras, Archers listeners and rap-DJs generally content. Under BBC rules, and this is another of her advantages, Abramsky will have to retire at 60 at the end of 2006, just as the new Charter kicks in. Hers is the calming touch the Corporation needs in the first instance to temper the inevitable combustions of its colourful, independent new chairman.