Wednesday 28 January, 1987. A party is underway in the tall, semi-circular Council Chamber at Broadcasting House. Alwyn Roberts, long-serving BBC Governor for Wales, is retiring, and a boisterous, well-meaning crowd have turned out to wish him well. Roberts has accrued a great deal of admiration within the BBC thanks to his track record of supporting programme-makers over management. Recently he stood alone among all the Governors in refusing to call for the banning of a documentary profiling the life of Sinn Fein politician Martin McGuinness. It did no good, but the principle of his resistance was typical and sincere.
Now he is standing down, and many at the BBC are more than a little upset at the loss of "one of us". Midway through the celebratory meal, however, another governor, Sir John Boyd, turns on a group of diners reminiscing with Roberts about the good old days. "You!" he snarls. "You lot think you can do what the hell you like! Well, just you wait! You'll see!" Nobody reads anything untoward into his outburst - until less than 24 hours later, when news suddenly breaks that the remaining Governors have, without forewarning or reflection, sacked the Director-General Alasdair Milne.
"Trustees for the national interest"
On 1 January 2007, precisely 80 years after first being constituted, the BBC Governors ceased to exist. Conceived, in the words of the original BBC Charter, as "trustees for the national interest", the Governors vanished in the same manner they arrived: clumsily and to supreme public indifference. There was no grand ceremony to mark the occasion. No mass demonstrations of aggrieved BBC employees thronged the streets of Shepherd's Bush. Nobody, in fact, batted an eyelid.
Their replacement with a body called the BBC Trust had been heralded as the "right thing" for a 21st century BBC. Those doing the heralding, however, now seemed less than ecstatic at such a move. The government, who ordered the reform, lay low. The BBC, who initially resisted then grudgingly accepted the change, was conveniently tied up celebrating Christmas. The one person who was supposed to supervise the transition, meanwhile, had dramatically fled the scene only weeks before.
To be honest, the Governors' demise had been so long in coming that its arrival could only ever be an anti-climax. The writing had been on the wall since at least 2003, when they proved themselves supremely incapable of resisting political pressure during the Hutton Inquiry into the death of government scientist David Kelly. And rumours of their imminent extinction circulated throughout the 1990s during the long painful years of John Birt's management revolution.
Yet the Governors survived, positively flaunting their success in the face of any who dared to strike against them. Until, that is, they won themselves a leader who, for the first time in their existence, hailed from a programme-making rather than a pen-pushing background - and who promptly set about ensuring they would never be able to wield such destructive influence again.
For their part, the Governors regarded each successive historical flashpoint as further proof of their right, even their need, to exist. In the eyes of their opponents, such incidents merely compounded the argument for their termination. And from such an enduring tension flowed decades of trouble. Unfortunately for all concerned, this conflict of interest was a part of proceedings from the off, and deliberately so.
"Many private individuals, including myself, have failed"
The clue is in the name. When the BBC changed from being a company to the British Broadcasting Corporation on 1 January 1927, thereby moving from private to public ownership, convention dictated a group of unelected, unaccountable personages, the "great and the good", would sit at the top of the organisation separate from salaried management to ensure everything operated in the nation's interest.
Such was the definition of a corporation, and such was the mood of the times. Indeed, hundreds of corporations sprung up throughout the 1920s and 30s, reflecting the prevailing political consensus of leavening big business with representatives of the state. Hence just as your neighbourhood was now blessed with the building of a corporation gas works, or the appearance of the corporation dustcart, so your front room was graced with the transmissions of the corporation broadcaster.
Fast forward to the 1980s, to when corporations had become virtually extinct and the notion of not allowing market forces free rein within public bodies had fallen severely out of fashion. Through their stubbornness to evolve, or to prove themselves indispensable to the BBC, the Governors were now a huge anachronism. Their ranks had been filled with not just right-thinking but Right-thinking nabobs, desperate to justify their relevance. But crucially this manifested itself, not in co-operation, but attrition.
It was, in the words of former Director-General Ian Trethowan, "an extraordinary way to run the most renowned broadcasting organisation in the world." Holding his post from 1977-82, Trethowan was the last of his kind to preside over a BBC largely free of febrile machinations on the part of the Governors. In his view they were, if not the best, then certainly the least worst of their kind. "Several Royal Commissions," he pointedly noted, "and many private individuals, including myself, have bent their energies to finding a better system and have failed."
Trethowan believed any attempt to formalise the constitution of the Governors would also formalise political meddling. Yet this had always gone on anyway, with Governors nominally appointed by the Crown but in practice recommended by the government. The Board had always been loaded with political cheerleaders of this or that colour, but crucially their influence had successfully, and sequentially, been held in check by powerful BBC staffers.
A phalanx of these had trooped through the Corporation since World War II, starting with William Haley, Director-General from 1944-52. "I would tell the Governors," he recalled, "that is my decision or this is my appointment. If you don't like it you can sack me." Haley set up the supremely important counterweight to the Board of Governors, the Board of Management. From that moment on, the power of management rose steadily in inverse proportion to that of the Governors, culminating in the reign of Hugh Carleton Greene as DG from 1960-69.
This was the period when the Governors were really in complete thrall to the whims of the BBC staff, and while this may have been good for morale - and for stoking popular mythology about the Beeb's "golden age" - the Labour government of the day took a different view. Or rather, the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, took his own view.
Convinced the Beeb was out to bring him down in a conspiracy spearheaded by Oxbridge satire and petulant journalists, Wilson connived at the first notable instance of subjecting the Governors to blatant political skulduggery. He moved the former Tory minister Lord Charles Hill from chair of the Independent Television Authority to chair of the Governors in 1967, deliberately hoping to precipitate Greene's downfall. It worked, only for Greene to pop up again as a Governor to carry on the fight from the inside, running rings around Hill in the process.
The whole affair exposed the Governors to a hitherto rarely experienced taste of publicity. Until then they had carried out their business cloaked in not so much anonymity as invisibility. But it also made the role of BBC chairman - and they were all men - something of a celebrity, in turn opening the entire system of BBC governance up for debate really for the first time.
"It is time the BBC put its own house in order"
In fact, just like the Governors had been stuffed with political apparatchiks for decades, so the chair had been shamelessly partisan from the outset. Of the 21 individuals to occupy the role during its 80-year lifetime, the first seven were all practising or ex-politicians with records of high office for the Tory, Labour and Liberal parties, including a former Home Secretary. A full third, in other words, were paid up rosette-wearing placemen.
A shift came when the post-war Labour government dictated public bodies should be served by non-partisan luminaries; in short, civil servants. And it's highly probable this pattern would have continued were it not for Wilson's game of musical chairs resulting in the appointment of Charles Hill. Such a sudden injection of brazen politics back into the role of chairman was brutal but temporary, however, as Hill was succeeded by about as different an individual as you could possibly get: Sir Michael Swann, former Vice-Chancellor of Edinburgh University.
But then Swann gave way to George Howard in 1980, a ludicrously pompous character with a fondness for kaftans, call girls and the Far East. It was here the real trouble began. Howard wasn't the first choice for the job. That had been Mark Bonham-Carter, Swann's deputy and a well-regarded former chair of the Race Relations Board. Unfortunately for him, he was also a member of the Liberal Party. His appointment was vetoed by the new Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, in a sign of things to come.
Aware that he was the runner-up, Howard set out to make his name as a strong chairman in the tradition of Charles Hill. He insisted on overruling the staff, in particular his DGs, at the slightest opportunity. He rubbished Ian Trethowan's recommendation for the job of BBC1 Controller, John Gau, plumping for the pointedly less qualified Alan Hart. He sorely distrusted the current affairs department following an incident in 1979 when Panorama had filmed an IRA takeover of the tiny village of Carrickmore in Northern Ireland. The footage was never broadcast, but stirred up a hornet's nest of controversy. It also elicited Mrs Thatcher's famous proclamation, "It is time the BBC put its own house in order."
George Howard thought he could do this single-handedly, but he ran out of time: Thatcher replaced him in 1983 with Stuart Young, an accountant and brother of cabinet minister Lord Young: just the man, in No 10's eyes, to spearhead radical reform of the whole notion of public service broadcasting. Indeed, in 1981 when the Tories appointed him a Governor, Young argued the Beeb should be funded by advertising revenues.
To Mrs Thatcher's horror, however, as soon as he became chairmen Young "went native" and refused to countenance anything other than a continuation of, and steep increase in, the licence fee. A ghastly showdown loomed.
"I am afraid this is going to be a very unpleasant interview."
Ever since the Board of Management had been instituted after the war, there was a clear, though not formalised, division between who did what at the BBC. The Governors appointed the DG, the Managing Director and the channel controllers; they approved the budget, they signed off the accounts, they met fortnightly to discuss strategy, and from time to time they challenged staff as to the policy behind this or that broadcast.
One thing they most certainly did not do, however, was ever watch a programme in advance of transmission. That would be to cross the line separating the objective view of the licence payer (ie. the public) and the subjective view of the licence spender (ie. the programme makers). Governors were supposed to embody the everyman, albeit in the glorified form of people from the upper echelons of business, the arts and education.
A laudable separation of powers, you would think, and an important unspoken assumption. Except that was just the problem. It was unspoken, and it was an assumption. Moreover, the Governors thought their views, hailing from the most rarefied of ivory towers, were those of the ordinary licence paying public - in other words, the people who paid the programme makers' wages. If the Governors ever felt they should need to view something ahead of transmission, the implication was they were worried about its content and hence would request cuts. Even more alarmingly, the Governors could insist they were acting for the good of the nation.
When all of this actually came to pass in the summer of 1985, over another programme about Northern Ireland, the BBC's roof fell in. An episode of the documentary series Real Lives profiled the contrasting worlds of Gregory Campbell, a member of Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party, and Martin McGuinness, a member of Sinn Fein and recently alleged by the Sunday Times to be the IRA's chief of staff. When a journalist on the paper learned the programme was in the pipeline he decided to run some negative publicity, buoyed by a quote from Thatcher slamming anybody who dared broadcast an interview with the IRA.
She was actually speaking hypothetically, but the damage was done. When Leon Brittan, the Home Secretary, intervened with a request to pull the programme from the schedules, it was inevitable the Governors would cave in Which they did, in the same way the caved in almost 20 years later when the government made less overt but equally stern overtures towards the BBC concerning a "suitable" response to the conclusions of the Hutton Report.
Matters might have proceeded differently were DG Alasdair Milne in the country, his deputy Michael Checkland more robust, the Governors less partisan, and the chair Stuart Young not dying from cancer. By allowing the Governors to view Real Lives, however, a great inferno of hatred was unleashed within the BBC that didn't really dissipate till Greg Dyke took over as DG in 2000. It was hatred of the blundering BBC management, hatred of the rickety antiquated system of regulation, and above all hatred of the Governors, which conveniently became epitomised in the figure of the man chosen to replace Stuart Young on his death in 1986: the doddery, permanently remote, walking fossil that was Marmaduke Hussey.
Here was a return to the BBC chairmen of 60 years ago: a baron, a war veteran, and husband to one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting. Forming a Machiavellian double act with his deputy Joel Barnett, one time Labour Chief Secretary to the Treasury, they plotted to sack Alasdair Milne, promote Michael Checkland and hire John Birt: three decisions which, while logical in theory, were catastrophic in their execution.
"I am afraid," Hussey informed Milne the morning after that good-natured party in the BBC Council Chamber back in January 1987, "this is going to be a very unpleasant interview. We want you to leave immediately." Sir John Boyd's drunken hectoring the night before was more than just hot air. A plot had been hatched months ago, and was now uncoiling with merciless precision. "We want to make changes," added Barnett. They - the Governors - were the masters now.
"Look after Auntie; I am sure you won't need me again."
Hussey was the least appropriate man to chair the BBC at one of its most crucial points of existence. Upon being appointed, he confessed he didn't know where the BBC was and asked his wife to look up its location in the phone directory. He fell out with Milne's replacement, Michael Checkland almost immediately, and then promptly fell out with Checkland's successor, John Birt, when Panorama broadcast an interview with Princess Diana without telling Hussey (or his wife's boss) first.
Matters were marginally improved when Hussey was replaced by businessman Christopher Bland in 1996. Bland had an impressive track record, having first served as Deputy Chairman of the Independent Television Authority way back in 1972 and later as Chairman of LWT. He ran a tight ship, but always knew he was going to outlast Birt and as such played a crucial part in rescuing the BBC from the brink of despair.
Bill Cotton, who spent his life working for the Beeb, once spoke of how it is a supremely lucky organisation: in its moment of greatest need, when all is lost, something or someone always turns up. So it was in 2000 that Greg Dyke, helped by his friendship with Bland dating back to their days together at LWT, took over as DG. Amazingly, the Governors sanctioned his appointment, despite - in Dyke's words - being the only DG "who had not been either to a public school or to Oxbridge."
And yet for all this there remained unfinished business. The Governors were unreformed, unwieldy, unwavering. Dyke noted caustically how, despite there now being a Labour government in power, the Governors were still stuffed with Tories. Their status as an anachronism persisted. The very fact they had survived the rigours of the Birt revolution unscathed said it all. If anyone needed reforming it was the Governors, yet they remained untouchable.
The reason why, down the decades, the Governors had become more bound up in both the actions and the public profile of the BBC was simply one of scale. As the BBC grew, so the problem of the Governors grew. Their legitimacy, tightly sustained at first, became increasingly stretched as the BBC itself expanded to envelop new concerns, obsessions and controversies.
Rather than embrace such evolution and seek to redefine their purpose, however, the Governors did nothing. They stagnated. Faces came and went, but few had any response to what was emerging as the one crucial question: just what, in an age of deregulation, were the Governors actually for?
Michael Grade, the man sought out to replace chairman Gavyn Davies in the wake of the Hutton debacle, believed he had the answer. It wasn't the Governors' responsibilities that were the problem. It was the Governors themselves. A potent illustration of this was how, within 24 hours of Davies standing down, his deputy - a former Tory Whip - appeared on TV to deliver a grovelling "unreserved" apology for the charges laid out by Lord Hutton, thereby undermining the entire case the BBC, and ostensibly the Governors, had been pursuing for the preceding 12 months. This flew in the face of the notion that, despite being a state broadcaster, the BBC was protected from government interference by the statutory role of the Governors.
Unfortunately Grade's proposal to retain the Governors but as a body entirely independent from the Beeb was superseded by the government's insistence, off the back of fierce lobbying from independent broadcasters, to scrap them entirely and replace them with a BBC Trust: a group of people patrolling the Corporation armed with such things as "Purpose Remits", "Service Licences" and a "Public Value Test".
In one final shock twist, perhaps fearing a dilution of his authority beyond the point that his job remained at all interesting, Grade waited until just a few weeks before the Governors were abolished to announce he wouldn't, after all, be chairing the BBC Trust as had been planned. Instead he was off to run ITV.
"In a speech I made when I was at Channel 4," Grade informed his BBC colleagues the day of his departure, "I included the words: 'It's the BBC that keeps the rest of the industry honest.' That is as true today as it ever was." Not, on the balance of evidence, and in the face of history, thanks to the work of the Governors. Nor, to be brutally honest, thanks to the efforts of its numerous chairmen. All, without exception, were the wrong men for the job, being either too qualified (Grade, Stuart Young), not qualified enough, or simply utterly clueless. "Look after Auntie," Grade concluded, "I am sure you won't need me again. And thank you for having me."
"Tell the Governors to fuck off"
Wednesday 28 January, 2004. 17 years to the day since the Governors moved against Alasdair Milne, another meeting is underway. It is one that has been in the calendar for months, but by complete chance is taking place just hours after the publication of the Hutton Report. Behind closed doors, oblivious to the voices of support already being raised on TV, ignorant of the advice of the BBC's own QC sitting patiently outside, the Govenors panic. They have already lost their Chairman. Now they decide that, rather than resign themselves, the Director-General should also go.
Two of them track down Greg Dyke and inform him of the news. Then they return to their bunker and refuse to let anyone else in. As word spreads, high-ranking BBC staff try to gain entrance but are turned away. Dyke calls his wife. "Fight the bastards," she implores, "and if it means you get sacked, get sacked. Who cares?" Next he calls Christopher Bland. His response: "Tell the Governors to fuck off." At 1am, with the Governors still in closed session, Dyke goes home. Snow is falling outside. Feeling isolated and hurt, he decides to avoid giving the Governors the satisfaction of sacking him. He will "resign" instead. "With the benefit of hindsight," he later writes, "I think I should have stayed and dared them to fire me. What I do remember thinking was that if I was to go, I wanted to do so with some dignity."
Something which, time and again, seemed to elude the very body that was set up to enshrine just such a quality at the head of the BBC, and which has now paid the price with its own, unlamented demise.
