Unnatural order

It's getting a bit rufty-tufty in BBC News under James Harding.

Sports Editor David Bond has left; Religious Affairs Correspondent Robert Piggott is going back to general reporting; Caroline Wyatt moves in from the Defence brief.

Now Tom Giles has been shifted from his role as Editor of Panorama, to what looks like "a special project", beloved of the BBC when needing to oil the wheels of job movement. From June, for six months, the programme will be run by Ceri Thomas, currently Head of News Programmes, on a package of £166k. This will produce an entertaining organogram where Ceri reports via his current Deputy, Jim Gray, who also holds the title of Head of TV Current Affairs, on a package of £155k.

Diary note

On Tuesday 29th April the Trust will publish the conclusions of its service review of BBC News and Current Affairs. 

To mark publication, BBC Trustee Richard Ayre and Director of BBC News James Harding will discuss the review’s findings and the actions the BBC will be taking in response, as part of the BBC’s News Festival. 

The event will be broadcast live via the Trust’s website www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust from 1.30pm – 2.15pm.

Rats - I'll be down the pub. You'll have to watch this carefully-choreographed gavotte yourselves.

Fatty substances

Here's my two-penn'orth on the "size of the BBC" debate. I'm prepared to campaign to maintain the current number of outlets as long as we get an explicit guarantee that one radio network and one tv channel make no mention of anniversaries or anniversary events. 

The current "monstering" of Dr Who and JFK is a legacy of a Thommo-Byford quest for "impact", achieved not through quality, but quantity - and clogs the arteries of news and current affairs, at the expense of information about things that matter.  Gawd knows what it's going to feel like next year with World War 1.

Comedian Al Murray's Twitter timeline, if you have access, is very dry on the subject. I hope it turns into a feature of his stage routine. 

Ken Goudie

Ken Goudie, a big and gentle man, who was Editor of Today at a pivotal time in the programme's history, has died in a nursing home in Malmesbury, in his late eighties.

Ken was a senior editor in BBC Radio News in the 1970s. In 1976, the Today programme was edited by Mike Chaney, launch editor of Newsbeat, whose "big idea" for Radio 4 was to have Brian Redhead present from Manchester, with John Timpson in London. A third of the production team were sent north in an eerie precursor of the Salford move.

For Chaney, it meant he could get more presentation out of Macclesfield-based Brian, who moved up from three to five days a week. Chaney has said the idea was a "conspiracy" between himself, Redhead, David Hatch (then in charge of network production from Manchester) and Chaney's deputy, Colin Adams. The concern was then (as now) that Radio 4 was not doing much business beyond the famous Bristol to The Wash line.

This format was struggling on in 1977 (the programme's 20th birthday) when a new Controller arrived at Radio 4. Ian "Mack the Knife" McIntyre (who went to my old school, Prescot Grammar !) had been making documentaries for Radio 3 and 4, and was the first presenter of Analysis. His analysis of Radio 4 was that news and current affairs programmes could be improved if they concentrated their efforts on much less output.  Thus Today was cut into two 30 minute pieces, with the remainder of the breakfast output filled up with two editions of the ludicrous "Up to the hour", a rag bag of trails, Thought for the Day, weather and sport, hosted in turn by Radio 4 announcers. Cue pretty much open revolt, inside and outside Broadcasting House. Fearless Peter Donaldson on-air thanked listeners for their bravery in sticking with Up To The Hour, though expressing surprise they hadn't retuned to BBC Radio 2.

MacIntyre lasted until 1978, when he was shoved sideways to Radio 3. News were ready to act. Ken Goudie was moved into Today from the radio newsroom, for a relaunch on Monday 3 July 1978. Out went Up to the Hour, and Today was back, longer than before - running from 0630 to 0835 (and 0845 when there was no Parliamentary business). The bulletins at 0700 and 0800 were longer, and in came summaries on the half-hour and headline updates. Brian Redhead was provided with weekday accommodation in London, Libby Purves formally joined the presentation team, and things were all jolly again.

Ken's job was done by 1981, when he was moved to the calmer waters of The World Tonight, and Julian Holland arrived to further sharpen Today, to ward off the threat of breakfast television. That seemed to work, too.

1800 update: It was Julian Holland who got Prayer for the Day shifted out of the Today running order, not Ken, as I wrote earlier.

Twitter break-up

So far, no sign of re-tweets for these two items below from the usually omni-present @iankatz1000, Editor of Newsnight.

Told Thursday, Newsnight's editor is closing programme's post of Science Editor. Disappointing, professionally and personally.
— Susan Watts (@susanwatts01) November 16, 2013

The new #Newsnight doesn't need 2 dedicated foreign reporters so sadly after 12 yrs from Afghan war to Arab uprisings I'm off the show
— Tim Whewell (@BBCTimWhewell) November 17, 2013

Susan Watts has been with Newsnight for 18 years, and messages of alarum at her post closure have come, so far, from Harriet Harman and Lisa Jardine.  Katz responded, eventually.

Newsnight's commitment to covering science - including climate change - as strong as ever. Just want to do it in a different way.
— Ian Katz (@iankatz1000) November 17, 2013

Tim Whewell's quietly tenacious but illuminating reports will be missed by this viewer.

Meanwhile I expect more glittering announcements from Katz next week, as he fills Allegra Stratton's post during her maternity leave.

Katz eyes problem

Trying too hard on things that don't matter. Ian Katz and his top team clearly spend quite some time every day seeking visual excitement for Newsnight, and lack judgement on quality, impact and value. It may be fun charging round Plumpton looking for a giant conservatory to make a one-off sight gag, but I worry about the man-hours and hire charges spent lighting the thing and de-rigging. It even failed to stimulate Paxo at the start, and I feel sure we'd have got a more forensic Damian McBride interview in a more conventional setting. Later in the same show, Mark Urban, left in London, was standing in the worst virtual reality set I've seen on screen, getting nowhere near explaining what was happening in the Westgate Mall in Nairobi.

The conservatory set came after the pipes and mock vote on the Union Bridge, hosted by Kirsty Wark. It feels like the early days of Nationwide, when young tyro producers would vy with each other to get the biggest piece of meaningless kit into the lifts at Lime Grove to put on the set for some bootless item - tanks, elephants, dead trees etc.

Strong interviews, well-made films and inventively-cast discussions are what makes a good Newsnight. Forget the slash and glitter, please.

Be gentle

It's been a busy year for the BBC Trust - so six months after they said it was coming, they have today launched a public consultation about BBC News and Current Affairs. You're invited to fill in a survey, online or on paper, and apparently we can expect results in "Spring 2014".

Here's one of the questions - your cumulative response will have them twitching in the specialist clusters of Broadcasting House.