An long interview with BBC Chairman Samir Shah in the Sunday Times suggests more dynamism that the Doctor managed to display in front of the Culture Select Committee.
Wading into areas normally reserved for the Executive, he suggests the creation of "an internal affairs unit, like in Line of Duty" to tackle workplace bad behaviour. “We need to have some way of preserving whistleblowers’ anonymity, so we can throw people out and do it quickly. I’m absolutely determined. This is a cancer we need to cut out.”
For the World Service and other BBC services outside the UK, a new target - amid all the cuts: "We reach just under half a billion people. We should reach a billion.” It was Tony Hall who set the half-billion target, and failed to reach it on time.
He says news presenters shouldn't take on outside work. “It’s a privilege to work for the BBC. You should just stick to it.”
On recruitment he says the BBC “needs to do a lot more to ensure our staff reflects the country as a whole"; it should seek "more diversity of thought. It’s on, frankly, the northern working class where we’re poor. That’s where the focus should be.”
As a working class northerner who once worked for the Corporation, I would sound a warning klaxon. Middle class media executives tend to look upon diverse groups in society as being wedded to their own cultures. Now Dr Shah is a very brainy guy whose doctoral thesis in Anthropology & Geography at Oxford in 1979 was titled 'Aspects of the geographic analysis of Asian immigrants in London'. He'll be well aware that many parts of UK society have seen themselves as embattled, because of endemic discrimination.
ReplyDeleteI'm not convinced, though, that the northern working classes see themselves as an identifiable, homogenous group in the same way that British Asians, Jews or Muslims might.
This northerner wanted the BBC to give him a job, sure. And it did, despite his accent and ridiculously baggy suit borrowed off his big brother because he didn't own such a thing. But he has never wanted the BBC to see him as thinking distinctively northern thoughts or having distinctively working class tastes.
I believe northerners - and Jews, Muslims, southerners, Scots etc - want to join the BBC for the same reasons as everyone else - to work on comedy, music, current affairs, sport, education. This northerner was inspired by old luvvie Ned Sherrin being arch and metropolitan on 'Loose Ends'. I don't want 'working class culture' - whatever that might mean - to have a carefully preserved space. I don't want anyone to expect me to be some version of northern or working class that they can recognise. This is like expecting women to concentrate on 'women's issues'. Come on, we've let you in; where's your item about menstruation, then? I want to have access to & contribute to The Culture, be it high, low or middlebrow (I'm giving my age away with terms like that). Step AWAY from the pigeonhole.