The Harder Path

5 April 2012

John Birt's mum has a lot to answer for. Every day when he was two, he would climb on a chair to reach the top drawer of an old sideboard. Every day his mother looked on as he tidied the jumble of buttons, combs, cotton spools and shoelaces he found there. Every next day, he found it tangled again.

"It gave me immense satisfaction," he tells us early in the story of his life, "to tidy the drawer each day; to bring order to chaos; to create neat, perfect, serried ranks of objects."

This procedure, roughly the opposite of how most kids behave, is no carefree, casual childhood recollection, but a deliberately planted metaphor for a life.

Sure enough, 35 years on and 200 pages later, when the boy from Bootle has become director of programmes of LWT, wrestling with the obduracy of ITV's unwieldy scheduling confederacy, we find this: "Within days of starting my new job, it was clear to me that both LWT and ITV faced huge problems: here was a massive drawer to sort!" And battle commenced.

It would be a pity to skip those 200 intervening pages, because the early years of Birt's life make pleasant reading, lighter in tone and brighter in colour than the struggles to come.

In loving, vivid detail, John Birt paints pictures of parents and grandparents, the streets and schooling, pleasures and punishments that shaped his boyhood, and the Catholic upbringing that grounded his life. Shy, inarticulate at interview, he gained entry to Oxford, where he neglected to study engineering, but made films instead. Still only 21, he married Jane.

He made his mark at Granada producing the frivolous, anarchic Nice Time with Germaine Greer and Kenny Everett, and the feisty, tabloid World in Action. John and Jane, togged out in King's Road finery, attended the first Isle of Wight pop festival: Bob Dylan and The Who, beads, necklaces, nudity and garlands of flowers.

A Sixties child was on his way up. He has good tales of programmes with a postcoital Mick Jagger and of David Frost slugging it out with Richard Nixon.

It was Weekend World, he says, after he moved to LWT, that toughened him. This was the programme with a bias towards understanding, that mapped out its conclusions in advance, using interviewed experts to make the points the editor wanted made.

Not all enjoyed the experience, but it showed that TV journalism could convincingly explain complex issues and won admirers in high places. For Birt, it was an education. "Weekend World was my pivotal, formative, growing-up experience in the worlds of television and politics." He was ready to take on the world.

He chose the harder path: he took on the BBC. Starting as deputy director-general alongside Michael Checkland, after the brutal dismissal of Alasdair Milne, Birt first got a grip of BBC journalism, the governors - Duke Hussey was chairman - believing that if he didn't, then, at the hands of Margaret Thatcher, the BBC was doomed.

From here on, the book becomes overwhelmingly sombre in tone, harder going for the general reader, certain to be criticised by old opponents, but essential reading for students of a turbulent, and, as Birt would claim - no, does claim over and over - a triumphant decade in the history of the BBC.

Chapter headings read like battle honours, as our hero sets about reform. " Producer Choice," the introduction of an internal market, "was the single most decisive change for the better during my time in the BBC, the long overdue and necessary proof that the BBC could sort itself out." But the war has just begun. Still to come The Battle for the BBC, Modernising the BBC and Finishing the Job.

Armanigate, the story of his misguided Schedule D tax-status, at 15 pages quite a saga, doesn't get a chapter of its own; you'll find it sorted under modernisation.

There is self-awareness, even a hint of self-criticism, in his account of perpetual revolution. "Day in day out, we laboured." He was pressing his colleagues " relentlessly and remorselessly, urging every part of the BBC to tackle a great stack of problems of every kind that had piled up over decades.

Under such intense pressure, many managers and staff, understandably, craved a return to laissez-faire. But I had never been able to tolerate-disorder or manifest weakness..." Finally he concedes: "I was certainly driven, better sometimes at identifying problems than applauding success - and, for at least some of my colleagues, I was overzealous."

But in the end, victorious. The BBC won an interim licence-fee settlement; it avoided dismemberment; the Charter - sound the trumpets - was renewed.

Digital channels were approved by government and funded, although the glories promised in his manifesto, Extending Choice, were made available to a modest proportion of licence-fee payers only, while choice on BBC1 and BBC2 narrowed.

Most glorious of all, as John Birt left, the BBC gained an unprecedented seven-year licence-fee settlement above inflation, pocketing an extra £1.5 billion over the period. These are vast achievements. The BBC, an institution he set out to tame, will be long in his debt.

John Birt is certainly the most controversial of the BBC's director generals. He is also, in his own eyes, its most successful. He sums up on leaving: "The BBC remained the most important cultural institution in the world ... but now a lean, skilled organisation in the vanguard of modernity, focused as never before on the interests of its licencepayers; moving with the times; strategic, aware, agile; better positioned for the digital age than any other established broadcaster in the world. The BBC was once again enjoying the confidence of Britain's leading political parties, and was once more in strong financial health."

Well, maybe. The BBC he joined was fat and complacent. I'm not sure the BBC he left isn't a bit that way, too. The institution, now under unabashed populist Greg Dyke, is strong enough; programmes, which are what the BBC are for, are quite another matter - witness Fame Academy all over BBC1, and the arts and current affairs deftly marginalised.

The sledgehammer blows of Birt's self-congratulation may give you a sore head, but you've got to hand it to him. The boy from Bootle has done his side of the story proud.

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