The Media Column: Come back, John Birt - we need current affairs, after all

In July 1987, one of the most rancorous meetings in the history of television was held in studio B of the old BBC Lime Grove building. The staff of BBC TV current affairs were there to listen to the new deputy director general, John Birt, outlining his plans for their department.

I wasn't at that meeting. I arrived at the BBC five months later to set up the new political programme that was part of Birt's vision for the BBC, but the lava from the July eruption was still molten. I do not think I have ever encountered so much real hatred in my life as I did from some of the BBC old hands that year. There was real psychic damage there. Perhaps it was the experience of watching the hated Thatcher win her third term just two months earlier.

All this was brought back to me by watching Nick Fraser's witty profile of John Birt (shown on BBC 4 and BBC 2), transmitted to coincide with the publication of Birt's autobiography, The Harder Path. In this film some attacked Birt and some defended him (I incline toward the defence), but most participants spoke of those times with a degree of detachment. Not so the man who was once my favourite Newsnight presenter, John Tusa, who later himself became a grand panjandrum at the Beeb. In the film Tusa said of Birt: "His theory of journalism is almost total rubbish... It has no intellectual curiosity. Everything I always heard about the programmes he made was that he was only interested in his pre-ordained theory. They were either bad, or misdirected and were always completely unviewable."

Listening to that I was suddenly back in Lime Grove, part of a collision of arrogances – the arrogance of the new man with the mission, and the arrogance of the old BBC, which could not see how it was heading for oblivion. And how strange the debate about the "mission to explain" vs "discovering the truth on the ground" now seems. Those ancient convulsions were like a civil war among Atlanteans, conducted as – far away – the great wave grew.

Tusa was quite wrong about intellectual curiosity, and he (and I) didn't realise that we were all about to be condemned as being unviewable. The others – the entertainers, the documentarists, daily news bods and regional day-time schlock-makers, hated us equally. We filled their schedules with stuff they weren't interested in, which pulled down their ratings and which we defended on the basis of its transcending "importance". When competition in the schedules – and especially competition for younger viewers became really intense – they consulted the marketing experts and then swept us all, Birtists and Tusa-ites, away. The cleverest of us became channel controllers ourselves and colluded in the destruction.

But a hole was left behind. Since history failed to end after 1989 (though it has taken nearly a decade for some to realise it), British TV has been struggling with a problem. It has marginalised current affairs, dispersed its best practitioners and spent the money on other things. For the BBC this is a huge existential problem. Better financed and more en-channelled than ever, the BBC nevertheless has no major programme that could – for instance – follow the big question of the week, whether it's Should We Invade Iraq? or Should We Subsidise Farming?

I am told that, far from leading a charge towards triviality, John Birt's successor, Greg Dyke, appreciates this. A populist himself, he may have been expecting his senior staff to push him in the direction of ambitious and difficult programming. That hasn't happened. Now he find himself trying to pull levers to get current affairs back into prominence, only to discover – like Birt did – that some levers have no wires attached to them.

Interestingly, in a report for the Independent Television Commission, published this week, the director of programmes of Channel 4, Tim Gardam (himself present at the Lime Grove debacle), is quoted as calling for the reinvention of the Birt programme, Weekend World. Gardam, with whom I worked at the BBC, is one of the most intelligent and radical executives in TV.

I agree. It's time to give viewers the option of well-funded, well-made, demanding and conclusive current affairs. And sod the demographics – let people make up their own minds. Bring back Birt and Tusa.

david.aaronovitch@btinternet.com