Birt's brutalism will bastardise our broadcasting culture for ever

john tusa ON turmoil at the bbc

It was an audibly distressed senior BBC editor on the phone. "Have you heard about the changes?" he asked. I said I had. Could he come and talk things over? Of course, but why? "It destroys everything in broadcasting that I believe in. It is appalling." He is not alone in feeling as he does. Sounds of distress and anger have been erupting from the belly of the BBC whale in the past 48 hours. By all accounts, the roasting handed out by Today staff to the authors of the plan - Richard Clemmow and Stephen Mitchell - was blistering.

This is not run-of-the-mill journalist whingeing. The anxieties are professional and personal. They are about the entire tone and structure of the BBC, about the way it sees, reports and presents the world, and about the nature of the material it offers to viewers and listeners. They are not selfish anxieties about jobs and careers though most of the former will change, many of the latter will disappear. They reflect deep concern about the service the BBC will provide under the new dispensation.

But whatever the rows internal and external, no one should have any illusions. The Birt Plan will not be derailed, overruled, or modified. The Government will not intervene; the Governors will not lift a finger or utter a word of reproof or concern. The authoritarian chairman, Christopher Bland, will bark at them in his usual manner and they will lie down as they always have done.

Staff, however despondent or outraged, will not resign, or only in very small numbers. It is a cold, competitive world outside the BBC and the prospect of being jobless and penniless within 14 days concentrates the mind and subdues the heroics wonderfully. But it is still worthwhile - indeed essential - setting out what the consequences of the upheaval will be for listeners and viewers. They are not small; they are serious; they will be long lasting.

First, a word about Birt's tactics. They are those of the management shock troop. The comparisons with his 7 June putsch against the BBC World Service in 1996 are instructive. Now, as then, there was no prior consultation; he knew the resistance would be too big, the objections too weighty to permit them to be aired. Now, the timetable for implementation is even tighter than it was with last year's dismantling of autonomous BBC World Service programme making. For the biggest shake-up in BBC news broadcasting, the timetable for implementation is just two weeks. To call it dictatorial is wholly inadequate.

In 1996, neither the Deputy Director General, Bob Phillis, nor the Managing Director of the World Service, Sam Younger, were told of the changes affecting the World Service until 48 hours before they were announced. Bob Phillis has now belatedly parted company with Birt; but did he know of the changes before he left, or was he again left "out of the loop"?

The tragedy is that a once great organisation - one of the finest creations of the liberal mind, one dedicated to an open and humane dialogue with its listeners and viewers, one that could only carry out such a dialogue because it conducted it internally first - has been subjected to such brutalising so-called "managerialism".

For as long as anybody can remember, BBC networks were characterised by individual programmes. The prospect of running one such - whether Tonight, Newsnight, The World at One, Today or Panorama - was the supreme challenge into which a generation or more of Britain's best broadcast journalists threw themselves. Each of these programmes, and many more, became great because it was distinctive, independent, unorthodox and frequently unpopular with the BBC hierarchy. As one of those who started Newsnight in 1980, I can confidently state that it was the vision of its original editors that created the programme that is now a pillar of the schedules. It would not have been able to develop as it did had it been part of some homogenised view of what BBC current affairs was. It succeeded because it threw over those existing conventions.

Birt's response is that a special executive editor can effectively be responsible for "programme distinctiveness", as if that were a definable, marketable and deliverable commodity. Such an assumption illustrates the depth of the chasm of incomprehension that underlies these proposals.

From now on, producers and broadcasters will not fight to the death to be first "for their programme". They will be told who comes first. They will need to get permission to be original. Listeners and viewers will lose variety, inspiration, and difference. The differences between radio and television news will wither. Television news stories will increasingly consist of - as they do now - the radio story with pictures; radio journalism will be reduced to the tv story in sound only. Both represent a bastard diminution of two great and once distinct communication cultures.

The days of internal competition between BBC programmes - once a critical ingredient in the BBC's success - will be gone. The Birtites insist on the internal market for resources; but at the same time they are killing the internal market in competition for ideas and excellence. But that is no accident. Ideas cost money; you have to pay the people who have them. Ideas cannot be tidied into neat business plans. Birt's answer is to destroy the structures that created ideas - the programmes and the journalists behind them.

Much of this is happening already. A very senior TV journalist who recently resigned from the BBC told me that he did so in despair at the fact that whereas he had once been an active creative journalist, all his editors wanted now was for him to sit in his expensive foreign bureau and comment on what the news agencies wrote. The result is inevitable and wholly predictable; BBC journalism will be turned from a craft, an essential part of a nation's dialogue, into a marketable commodity.

But there is a further aspect to the transformation. If the whole historic concept of the "programme" as the core of BBC broadcasting has gone, its replacement will be the network - the unified, homogenised delivery of a single commodity, whether sport, or films or news. The BBC's contribution to world broadcasting was the idea and the execution of the individual "programme". That is now being thrown away.

No one should be surprised. A year ago, some of us warned that the Birt putsch would destroy World Service journalism. Despite protestations to the contrary, the Birtites have closed the repository of World Service excellence - the news reference library, and now give priority in breaking news stories to every outlet, including Radio Five Live, over World Service news. These people mean what they say. And what they say is awful.