A grand day yesterday at Broadcasting House. It's tricky stuff, big buildings, and there were times in my life when I thought the BBC wasn't really the sort of organisation that could do it anymore - playing variously small and larger parts in Norman Foster's Radio Centre, planned for the Langham Hotel site, and RHWL's designs for a News, Radio Centre and Concert Hall as Phases 2 and 3 at White City; both cancelled by people who thought they knew better.
The redevelopment of Broadcasting House as a project has spanned five DGs (and two acting DGs). Lord (Tony) Hall beamed throughout the Queen's visit - probably remembering his part-time task whilst Director of News, creating a "2020 Property Vision", which set the strategy. Lord Patten was also chipper (morning, m'lord - I get the feeling he's a reader).
Many more could and should take pride in the day. Over a decade there've been at least 4 Project Directors and many more mini-Project Directors across the organisation. (I ate at the pompous tree, too, calling myself Editorial Director for a period, in the misguided hope that I might stand out). Five different finance directors kept an eye on the books. Three lots of architects took part, MJP, Sheppard Robson and HOK - and it was sad not to see Sir Richard MacCormac there. [Bovis] Lend Lease were the builders throughout - they also got through a fistful of project directors.
But there's a handful, inside and outside the BBC, who've been there throughout or almost throughout (they know who they are), plugging away, committed, "delivering", trying to take intelligent decisions and make sensible, inevitable compromises to keep the thing going, when opponents of Auntie turned their fire (and some executives looked the other way).
If staff morale at the BBC is at rock-bottom, it wasn't apparent yesterday. At Broadcasting House, there's a new generation and a renewed buzz. It's unsteady, and a little fragile and confused. How come all these pinkoes flash-mobbed a constitutional monarch in a bizarre sort of Journalist Spring ? Told to behave, they just didn't.
The new Executive would do well to capitalise on the mood and the building, announce new structures, sort pay, and set a new, more convincing and transparent direction for the savings they still have to make, so that the buzz can get louder, and through to licence-payers and the world.
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Yes, I was beginning to feel the BBC had forgotten how to do anything properly. Of course, there have been some bad choices made in equipping the new building, but on the whole the management of the move was an order of magnitude better than the move out of BH to TVC Stage 6 in 1998.
ReplyDeleteI'm really glad the newsroom rose up against their instructions and mobbed HMQ. Not my sentiments about the monarchy, but hopefully it will take some of the glue off the 'BBC lefties' label for a while. Not that it's impossible to be a lefty and support your Queen, just difficult.
Boy, do we need the good publicity. I still can't believe we got past the John Sweeney excursion into North Korea without resignations. How on earth did that not become a bigger scandal? Only, I suspect, because we 'got away with it', i.e. no-one got imprisoned or interrogated. But the sight of a senior News executive on the telly answering the question 'Do you feel it was justifiable to endanger the lives of the LSE students for this story?' with 'Yes. Yes, we do' was just gobsmacking. 'It had all been carefully considered and approved by our High Risk Team.' Well, the High Risk Team got it wrong, then. No way do you ever endanger lives for a story, not paid BBC employees, and certainly not members of the public to whom you've been quite literally economical with the truth. That could so easily have been Tony Hall's George Entwistle moment. We got lucky.