The Harder Path
by John Birt
Little, Brown £20, pp320
Is it just me or does the title of this book - The Harder Path - sound like one of those brutal Leninist sects from South America? Certainly, no previous director general of the BBC has given their name to an instant orthodoxy. Birtism is what ruled the BBC in the 1990s and Birtists were the select cadre he chose to drive through his reforms.
This sense of monomania is rather enhanced by a story now doing the rounds of the BBC. John Birt suggested that BBC2 commission a four-part series of his life and times to accompany this autobiography. Even Margaret Thatcher only got four programmes. Jane Root at BBC2 declined. Then Birt wrote to the BBC chairman, Sir Christopher Bland, observing that Root was not up to running a channel. But she had been appointed when Birt was still in charge. Oh dear.
Still, monomania was probably the quality needed to reform an organisation that seemed, in the 1980s, unreformable. And reform it he did. I worked at the BBC 20 years ago and we were a pretty unaccountable rabble. We'd make programmes that stitched people up with a negligible risk of any comeback. We had little or no idea what our programmes cost and didn't really care.
This couldn't go on and chairman Duke Hussey kicked off the necessary campaign by beheading the director general, Alasdair Milne, and replacing him with an accountant. The next step was to import John Birt from London Weekend Television as deputy director general and scourge of the wild west London department, BBC Current Affairs.
In 1974, John Birt and Peter Jay had published three articles in the Times which argued that television news and current affairs promoted a 'bias against understanding' when it should have a 'mission to explain'. They based their thesis on LWT's weekly Sunday lunchtime helping of political All-Bran, Weekend World, founded by Birt and presented by Jay.
These were possibly the most misguided articles ever written about the practice of television. Jay's career is indeed evidence that a double first intellect rarely delivers grade one common sense. The basic error they made was that the amount television can 'explain' is limited by the number of spoken words you can fit into a one-hour slot. Also, programmes have to be delivered in linear fashion at a speed which allows everyone to keep up. Compare that to the properties of, say, a newspaper or website. Television cannot be detailed or profoundly analytical in the same way.
However, it excels at telling stories. This the old boys at Panorama, for all their imperfections, understood. But, at the BBC, the narrative instinct was soon stamped out. By the late Birtist Eighties, a whole series of sterile screen essays by half-literate reporters began to sprout all over the BBC's schedules. Social affairs, economics, politics - no subject seemed safe from the 'mission to explain'. Birt undoubtedly improved the quality of the news but destroyed current affairs as a primetime attraction.
Now I come to a pleasingly perplexing aspect of this book. If you combine Birt's missionary zeal with the famed style of his memos (so often ridiculed in Private Eye) you would expect a fairly indigestible book. But not so. The chapters which tell the stories of Panorama's Princess Diana interview and his lovers' tiff with Michael Grade employ all the techniques that Weekend World discarded. They are strong on narrative and personalities - in other words, an enjoyable read.
He also chronicles pot smoking, pop festivals and standing bail for one of the Oz trial defendants. But I looked in vain in the book for another incident when, as a stunt, he hired a couple of actors to purport to be a warring couple on a Granada chatshow. Birt knows how to use an airbrush.
From those hippie beginnings, John Birt grew to become the most formidable television executive of his era. Duke Hussey fell out so badly with him that Birt, wisely, did not tell his chairman of the Princess Diana interview in advance. Hussey then found himself vacating the position of chairman before he was ready to. This mirrored the experience of Michael Checkland who discovered his deputy director general (Birt again) was to replace him rather before he felt it appropriate to go. And it is difficult to believe, as Birt purports, that he did not have a hand in the appointment of Sir Christopher Bland, his former colleague at LWT, as the new BBC chairman. It is unprecedented for a DG to wield such power. Those who were or became anti-Birtists should have read the history of the Jacobins.
This streak of ruthlessness helped turn the BBC from an organisation derided by the Tory government into the most powerful political lobby in Britain. As the political pendulum swung towards the Labour party in the mid-Nineties, Birt anticipated it brilliantly. Former Tory stalwarts such as Howell James gave way to the bright young things of the Blair tendency. The last and current media policy men in Downing Street (James Purnell and Ed Richards respectively) were both previously recruited into the BBC. Bill Bush, the special adviser to the Culture Minister, Tessa Jowell, also worked there.
Birt was attacked by Dennis Potter as 'a croak-voiced Dalek' and by Brian Wenham, the director general we never had, as 'Pol Pot'. Maybe. But he was arguably the BBC's greatest visionary since Lord Reith. He spotted, earlier than any other broadcaster, the extraordinary possibilities of the web and other digital media. The BBC has led the world with its online news services. He was able to pay for this and a competitive daytime schedule because of his determination to control and reduce the unit costs of programmes. He may not have been popular with BBC staff. Reformers often aren't. But his achievements cannot be denied.
By the time he retired, he left an organisation that was, if anything, too dominant. Birt had negotiated an above-inflation licence fee settlement for digital channels even before it was clear what they were to be. Extraordinarily, half the money spent on programmes for British television now comes from the BBC. Around two-fifths of all original programming is commissioned and paid for by the licence fee. BBC Worldwide is the country's largest distributor and exploiter of media intellectual property. The BBC is set to dominate the digital provision of educational materials to schools, its web services are the most popular in Britain and it retains around 35 per cent of the nation's TV audiences and half of its radio listeners. In addition, it is shortly to co-launch the digital terrestrial TV platform. Can it be that a compulsory tax maintains so much of our media economy? Birt's successor, Greg Dyke, now needs to be seen to spread some of this largesse more widely.
Greg Dyke compares well with Hugh Carleton Greene (misspelt in the book) as a gifted leader. That John Birt was certainly not. But Birt compares favourably with Reith as a rare individual who was capable of changing the culture and direction of a large organisation. The notorious hang 'em, flog 'em judge, Melford Stevenson, once claimed that his doctor had prescribed a subscription to the New Statesman to cure his low blood pressure. John Birt's numerous detractors could derive similar benefits from this book.