Good ideas

Here's a bit lifted from a Guardian blog written by Sir John Tusa, former Newsnight presenter, World Service boss, and big cheese at the Barbican and other arts organisations. He commends a range of Lord Hall's initiatives designed to drive towards Charter renewal for the BBC, but thinks more could be done...

There are still signs that it is an anxious organisation internally, beset by processes, mired in meetings, laden with permissions. How might it be freed to be and appear the hugely innovatory creative organisation it really is that will win and deserve charter renewal ? 

Such a liberation would involve a transformation of attitudes the BBC expects of itself and its staff. It would include restoring the notion of trust in its working relations rather than the demands of accountability. It would insist on programmes as programmes, not products or “units of resource” bundled up as programmes. It would rely on ideas as the yardstick for accepting programmes instead of judging them by genres, categories or quotas. It would replace repetition and formulae – however successful – as the impulse for programmes with plain “ideas”. It would demand “originality” in programmes, replacing the bureaucratic notion of ”distinctiveness”. 

It would restore belief in audiences as listeners, viewers, even participants, and stop regarding them as customers and consumers, the concepts of marketing. The BBC would have ambitions not targets, a sense of purpose not a list of objectives. The BBC should ask staff to take responsibility not take refuge in compliance, use judgment in decision-making rather than risk analysis, and cling to quality over benchmarking.

Hope they read the whole piece at The BBC Trust.