Why I was right to speak out

I CAN'T remember how many times I have woken up in the early hours of the morning during the last four months worrying about my Radio Academy speech. I used to doubt whether I had any right to speak on behalf of my colleagues. Now I know I could have slept soundly. The response has exceeded anything I could have imagined. Of course there have been critics, but I really don't mind if David Mellor thinks I am a 'ranting expatriate' when so many colleagues have thanked me for speaking out.

This is not to say 'What a clever boy am I'. I merely took an opportunity given to me by the Radio Academy to say something that many of my colleagues wanted said. Nor am I a very brave boy, as some have suggested. My anonymous colleague was quite right to tell one reporter 'It's all very well for Mark Tully to have a Viking's funeral at the end of his career. We have our mortgages to worry about.'

So where does that leave me and the BBC? I hope I am free to go back to Delhi and report stories instead of creating them. I see myself as nothing more than a catalyst. I don't know whether the experiment will fizzle out, but there will have to be some reaction from management now, especially after the publication on Friday of the results of a survey of staff attitudes. Ariel, the Corporation's staff journal, nowadays described by some as Pravda, has been forced to concede: 'BBC staff do not trust what is communicated to them about the BBC, nor think that it is 'safe to say what they feel'.' In other words, there is an atmosphere of fear.

John Birt has promised a BBC which is 'a modern, well-managed institution, not afraid to adapt and change, looking forward with confidence and backwards - if not through rose-tinted spectacles - with affection for Auntie and respect for a great programme tradition'. It's some comfort to staff that he has started acknowledging that there is something to be proud of in the BBC's past. If John Birt's dream comes true, does it matter that the staff are afraid, that morale is low? After all, outside the BBC many are suffering the much greater pain of unemployment. Change had to come to the BBC - all the staff accept that - and most would accept management's contention that there can be no change without pain. But I am certain that the revolution will fail unless John Birt can carry the staff with him.

We are told endlessly that the BBC will not get its charter renewed unless it cleans up its act. But a BBC, no matter how lean and trim, which does not produce programmes that the public wants to watch will find its application for a new charter rejected. It's not the way BBC finances are run that will persuade politicans that they would be unpopular if they touched the BBC; it's the programmes. Staff with low morale do not make good programmes.

John Birt knows this. His problem is that he thinks staff morale can be improved through systems. Take the survey. Was it necessary to spend all that money, and cause himself so much embarrassment, to discover what was apparent to those members of the board of management who knew their staff well? Now look at the response to the survey. A detailed timetable has been worked out for consultations with the staff and the devising of 'action plans'. All staff are to have the opportunity to discuss the survey results with their managers. But the survey has shown that staff do not feel that it is safe to say what they think, so they are unlikely to open their hearts to their managers. By the time the information reaches John Birt it will be further garbled by management consultants. Yet this will be the basis for the action plans.

John Birt's second systematised attempt to communicate with the staff has got off to an even more dubious start. He promised that he would meet all the staff. One of those meetings took place last week. The first seven (yes, seven) hours were run by what one producer described as a 'pop-up PR man' whose favourite sentence was 'I don't know anything about the BBC.' At 5pm David Hatch, John Birt's special assistant, and the personnel director, Margaret Salmon, did turn up. They explained how unreasonable it would be to expect members of the board of management to spend a whole day meeting staff, especially as there were some 260 more such sessions to come, and apologised for the absence of John Birt, who was away at the Radio Academy. Yet he had left the Radio Academy at about 11am.

I have been accused of failing to put forward an alternative vision of the BBC and of ignoring the danger that if 'Birtism' fails the BBC fails. I have not put forward an alternative because I do not quarrel with John Birt's basic thesis that the BBC has to reduce assets, cut back on overheads, and lose some staff. I don't have the facts and figures to make a judgement on how that should be done. But I can't believe there is only one way. Nor do I believe that it will be successful if management is unwilling to make adjustments when it becomes clear that the reality is different to the plan on the drawing board.

In an appeal to his critics at the end of his Radio Academy speech, John Birt said: 'If you really care about the BBC, for once listen to the facts and our arguments.' This is the heart of the matter. John Birt thinks that we should do all the listening and he should do all the talking. Why doesn't he listen directly to staff who have valid and sincere doubts about the wisdom of some of his reforms? Why does he only listen to information filtered by managers, many of whom are regarded by the staff as his cowboy commissars? Why does he need PR men to talk to his own staff? A good general addresses his soldiers directly, and listens to them too. He does not despise his old soldiers.

(Photograph omitted)