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Other bits about Samir Shah

From late 2014 to its demise, Samir Shah and Robbie Gibb were co-executive producers of the BBC1 politics chat show, This Week, presented by Andrew Neil.

Yesterday Mr Neil wrote: "Some good news for Aunt Beeb at last. Samir Shah to become Chairman of BBC. Superb appointment. I’ve worked on and off with Samir for decades. He gave me my start in BBC political shows. His production company made the legendary This Week on BBC1. That alone qualifies him! He’s a brilliant broadcaster. Smart, focussed, across the issues, fiercely independent. I wish him all good fortune in the job. He’ll need it!"

In 2021 Dr Shah was the broadcast face of the Sewell Report, which broadly concluded that the “claim the country is still institutionally racist is not borne out by the evidence”. Mr Shah has been an occasional columnist for the Spectator (chairman Andrew Neil). This is from 2021:

"In the 1960s, my brother Asim and I were smitten by the magical Manchester United trio of Law, Best and Charlton. We became London Reds and travelled on the MU Supporters’ Club coach to Old Trafford to watch our team — and we always went to see them play London clubs. But we stopped going in the 1970s; we feared for our physical safety. Marauding bands of skinheads outside the grounds were on the lookout for a spot of Paki-bashing."

The book Fuzzy Monsters recalls the The Birt Approach to tv journalism, including ''pre-scripting'' (writing the story before you film it) well in advance of transmission. In 1987 a Panorama reporter was promised an exclusive interview with Peter Wright, of Spycatcher fame, who was living in Australia. The reporter's first instinct was to jump on the next plane but Samir Shah, the Birt-appointed head of weekly current affairs programmes, decided a researcher should interview Wright first so that a script could be written, and ''shown to Birt for approval''. This was done, with the script redrafted several times, while Birt supplied ''the phone numbers of some intelligence officers he knew''. After hours of filming Wright finally confessed that he had invented several allegations in his book. This, the authors say, was the story the reporter had in the first place.

"LWT was an extraordinary place in the early eighties, a good clue to that I was interviewed for a lowly researcher’s job, which is the lowest in the food chain, my final interview panel consisted of John Birt who went on to be Director General at the BBC, Greg Dyke who went on to be Director General of the

BBC, Barry Cox who is the Vice Chair of Channel 4, David Cox who saved Weekend World and Nick Evans who went on the write The Horse Whisperer that became a massive thing, so it was an extraordinary place. Very interesting was the recruitment procedure at LWT, the top people interviewed the most junior people coming into the company and they left everybody else to promote them. At the BBC it is the other way around; the more senior you are the bigger the knobs that interview you. At LWT it was the other way round, they wanted to make sure that they had a real hold on

the people arriving." 

Communities Secretary Michael Gove has appointed three expert panellists to sit on an independent review into the unrest that occurred in Leicester in September 2023, and yes, Dr Shah is one of them. 

In October this year the Government published its ‘Retain and explain’ guidance on historic statues; Dr Samir Shah helped. 

Online copies of Dr Shah's 2008 RTS Fleming Memorial Lecture, entitled "Equal Opportunity-itis: a suitable case for treatment" are not available. This is a key part:  "The difficult truth I want you to accept is this: the equal opportunity policies we have followed over the last 30 years simply have not worked. Despite 30 years of trying, the upper reaches of our industry, the positions of real creative power in British broadcasting, are still controlled by a metropolitan, largely liberal, white, middle-class, cultural elite - and, until recently, largely male and largely Oxbridge.

"The fine intentions of equal opportunities - and they are fine intentions - have produced a forest of initiatives, schemes and action plans. But they have not resulted in real change. The result has been a growing resentment and irritation at the straitjacket on freedom such policies impose and, paradoxically, the occasionally embarrassing over-compensation in an effort to do the right thing."