What Tony Hall needs to do to revive the BBC

The new BBC director general starts this week. The Observer canvassed experts on how to tackle the challenges he faces
Tony Hall
Tony Hall returns to the BBC as a potential saviour. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

At the end of April two chairs in Westminster will await the arrival of Tony Hall, incoming director general of the BBC, and Chris Patten, chairman of the corporation's trust. The two lords, Baron Hall of Birkenhead and Baron Patten of Barnes, have been invited to perform their first public double act to a parliamentary select committee.

Hall leaves the Royal Opera House this week to return to the BBC, where he once ran the news operation, as a potential saviour. He has been appointed at a low point in the corporation's history, in the middle of an industrial dispute, following the brief tenure of George Entwistle and all the horror of Jimmy Savile's crimes.

The big question is whether Hall should play it safe or boost morale by taking risks. Certainly he has to tackle the collapse in trust recorded by the BBC's own tracking of public opinion.

He will also have to deal with the crisis of leadership exposed by the Pollard review. Senior BBC editors believe a dangerous gulf has opened up between well-paid managers and those who do the more visible work.

The dilemma is whether to try for reconciliation or brush away damaged personnel. A wave of internal cynicism has already greeted news that fresh posts have been found for the five executives who made serious mistakes after the Savile revelations, including Peter Rippon, the ex-Newsnight editor, and former news chief Helen Boaden, now director of BBC Radio. Meanwhile 1,350 staff jobs are to be axed, causing the bitterness behind last week's Bectu and NUJ strike, the second this year.

Budget cuts after a six-year licence fee freeze and a requirement to fund the World Service and S4C will raise the issue of whether the BBC should retreat from some current activities.

Two leading roles in news and television have yet to be decided upon. Former editor of the Times James Harding is a popular choice for a senior news job (if an outsider is in the running), while others would like to see the BBC shaken up by plain-speaking Nick Pollard, who ran the post-Savile investigation. Fran Unsworth, acting director of news, is an internal candidate, as is Peter Horrocks, who runs the World Service. Peter Salmon, a former controller of BBC1 who led the move to Salford, is a top contender for the TV job.

Pressing issues are arts coverage, recently criticised by the National Theatre's Nicholas Hytner, and the campaign for the renewal of the BBC's royal charter. The former Labour culture secretary James Purnell has been recruited to help deal with this.

As one senior executive said last week: "The BBC is full of talented people who need to be motivated." Over to you, Tony.

The experts

Paul Jackson Former BBC and ITV entertainment and comedy head

Mark Damazer Former head of BBC news, former controller of Radio 4

Nick Elliott Former head of drama at ITV and BBC

Sian Kevill Former editor of Newsnight

David Thompson Former head, BBC Film

Peter Kosminsky Writer and director


Kevill: "The idea that you don't want to have to deal with difficult, eccentric characters within the organisation is wrong because they are often the most talented. These people should cause management problems or they are not doing their job."

Damazer: "Hall [pictured] is completely right to revert to the English language and call them Television and Radio, rather than Vision and Audio. A danger that comes from Nick Pollard's report, where everyone talked about the need for good editors and letting them get on with it, is that you need extremely strong editorial management from people who are sufficiently proactive to intervene with programme sovereignty and stop it being used as an excuse and a mantra.

"He will need to get out there and sell his ideas very hard to staff, but only once he has appointed his team and is clear what the message is. He needs to tell people what he expects and to give examples.

"Greg Dyke inherited the BBC at a time of buoyancy after the settlement of Chris Smith, so he was lucky, but his achievement was to see that John Birt had overdone some of the engineering talk. Dyke was marvellous at a new emphasis on creativity."

Kosminsky: "I hope he will clear out the stable and get rid of some of the bureaucracy. The BBC is first and foremost a programme-making organisation, so I'm afraid I would be quite brutal if I were him.

"Anyone who trained there, as I did, would hope the BBC finds its way out of the mess it's in. Hall has a strong legitimacy as a programme maker and is also a news man. On my first day in the organisation I was asked if I wanted to see a broadcast and I asked to watch The World at One go out on Radio 4. The senior editor that day was Tony Hall."

Sports and national event coverage

Damazer: "The Olympics was a technical triumph and that is more difficult now because in the days when the BBC had a lot of sports rights they were effectively in a state of perpetual training for covering the big national events. Wimbledon now is the biggest sports rights they have.

"What happened with the river pageant for the diamond jubilee was the result of the BBC's understandable anxiety that it should not come across as an institution more often than it has to. It should not be seen as the state broadcaster or as the establishment, because it is not the establishment. So as a result they thought, I know, we are going to throw a big BBC party. Unfortunately, there was not enough authority or gravitas in the middle of all that."

News and current affairs

Damazer: "Hall has to sustain, and restore if need be, the credibility of investigations at the BBC. That is not to say there won't be further bumps and scrapes, because that is in the nature of this sort of work, but he has got to do something about the quality control side of it.

"There has to be enforced co-operation between programmes. There is a very delicate mechanism there, with key differences between Today, Panorama and Newsnight, but there has to be some sense of co-operation when it is smart to do so. There is a whole world of other organisations outside, so they need to have a better sense of the BBC's overall interests.

"What needs to happen is that the group of people who sit at the top, including the DG and senior people in news and current affairs, are sufficiently credible that they are prepared to intervene with programme editors. This is one of the things where I don't think the balance has been quite right.

"I would defend the practice of interviewing of special correspondents on news programmes. Before the 1990s everyone used pictures and correspondents were ruled by that. Until then every item started with the anchor speaking then a video package of one minute and 42 seconds. One of John Birt's great transformations as DG, it turns out, as well as taking the web seriously, was to underline the basis of specialist journalism.

A group of people were appointed – there are still no more than about 10 of them – who, from Stephanie Flanders, Nick Robinson, Jeremy Bowen, Will Gompertz and Robert Peston, are at the centre of the public's sense of trust in the BBC. So I would say it is a question of making sure the right people are being interviewed by the right people. Sometimes, it is true, you do get the wrong people interviewing the wrong people. But it is an improvement that started with the brilliant political editor Andrew Marr and it rid us of the tyranny of the package."

Kevill: "This is a fantastic moment for the BBC to turn a page. If I was in Tony Hall's position, and looking at news and current affairs, I would be looking at quite a demoralised group of people, but I would say there is already quite a lot of co-operation between the news programmes due to budgets.

"The appointment to the news job will be crucial. They need to help news find its confidence again and find its appetite for doing difficult investigations. There is an attraction to the idea of bringing someone in from the outside, but the BBC is a very particular place and the level of transparency demanded, understandably, can be difficult to deal with.

"Someone also needs to revisit the Delivering Quality First calculations in news and current affairs, because a part of what has caused problems is the fact that people are trying to create the same level of journalism on fewer and fewer resources."


John Naughton, professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University and Observer technology columnist

"The BBC ought first to look back to its roots. Lord Reith may have been a crusty old patriarchal bird, but his vision was startlingly egalitarian. He believed the corporation's mission was to bring the best to everyone . And he wanted the things it created to be free from commercial and political manipulation. Hall and Purnell could do a lot worse than return to those two aspirations.

"As more of the world goes online, we're heading towards domination by huge, primarily foreign-owned, corporations which are creating walled gardens, in which internet users will be corralled. The BBC is the only institution with the resources and the capability to challenge the drift towards commercially controlled walled gardens."


Kate Kinninmont, former producer and chief executive of Women in Film and Television

"We've never had a female DG, so we have to hope for an enlightened man. Women in Film and Television recently asked its members if they had experienced sexual harassment or discrimination in the last five years. Of the 327 who responded, 86% felt there was still a problem, 50% claimed to have suffered discrimination and 23% complained of harassment

"In fairness, it's hard to make top-down transformations. After Miriam O'Reilly [pictured] won her fight to protest against discrimination in her sacking from Countryfile, the BBC apologised and sent an entire layer of managers on "awareness courses". DG Mark Thompson encouraged Miriam to return to the BBC, but she lasted only a few months before leaving again. It was disturbing to see, during last week's strike, that bullying was again cited as a major problem.

"Change is happening. When research indicated that only 20% of "experts" interviewed on TV and radio were women, Broadcast magazine began an Expert Women campaign. The BBC Academy announced 30 places on a brand new one-day training course for 'expert women'. 2,000 people applied. The course has proved to be highly successful; it's been repeated and more will follow. As a result, the BBC set up a database of expert women as well as a YouTube channel showcasing these women to the industry. A simple awareness of the problem has led to positive action.

"Still, entire areas of production are almost female-free – camera, sound and other technical grades, for example. More surprisingly, only 8% of drama directors are women.

"Tony Hall should look at why older women still disappear from our screens and production offices and instruct his HR department to focus not just on staff posts but on hiring practices in the increasingly freelance workforce.

"The BBC is probably still the world's pre-eminent broadcaster, but it remains sexist, ageist and monocultural. If Tony Hall can speed up the process of change, who knows? Perhaps when the next DG takes office, she will thank him."


Jackson: "Entertainment desperately needs fixing. Apart from Strictly Come Dancing what else does the BBC have? The Voice is a bought-in format. I know that Miranda and Mrs Brown's Boys are big hits, and I am delighted for them, but they are comedies.

"The BBC needs entertainment. We have just seen BBC Television Centre, the most iconic centre of entertainment, close. It needs to be restored in 2015. I was lucky enough to work at the BBC under the legendary Bill Cotton in the 1970s when the BBC was the only studio for entertainment comparable to Hollywood.

"BBC Television needs to re-establish its authority in entertainment. Bill Cotton used to say people pay the licence fee not because of news, but because they want to be entertained, with soaps, stars and shows such as The Two Ronnies, John Cleese's Fawlty Towers and French & Saunders."

Thompson: "Hall might wonder why the BBC is making films, but it is really valuable as a way of taking the corporation's name out there globally. And its support to the British film industry has never been more crucial.

"I know from times when I was at the BBC that when money is short people think it is not essential, yet it brings in all sorts of talent that would never work for the BBC otherwise, and what is often forgotten is that it can be shown again, so there is an economic sense to it too. And Hall should not forget that really good television drama can bring a nation together. A brilliant piece such as Call the Midwife delivers real clout when it brings all the generations around the television set. It is incredible that is getting an audience of 10 million in this day and age. And there is nothing like drama for doing that."

Elliott: "My main thought, and something the rest of the country often wonders, is why is the BBC is so obsessed with ratings?

"In far more instances their role ought to be to strike out and do more radical things than ITV and Channel 4. I enjoyed the play about PG Wodehouse last week, but why is there not more on offer like that? That needs looking at."

Kosminsky: "We need to see drama that is prepared to challenge vested interests and do some boat-rocking. The desperate risk aversion of the BBC is an endemic atmosphere. It is all very well to make a good thriller about crime, but you need to make dramas that are prepared to make things hot for people in power in general in society. To justify the licence fee, you have to be doing stuff that no one else is doing."


Damazer: "A success like the Olympic coverage is crucial when it comes to persuading the viewer there is value for money in the licence fee. If there is a big event you should be reasonably sure the BBC will be there, broadcasting without adverts. You can't overestimate the impact of that. Hall will also absolutely and resolutely want, I think, to set the highest of standards as he faces charter renewal. The priority will be to sustain BBC standards then he can worry about accessibility. He needs to attend to the central core values of the news machine and to be certain that the BBC either stands for excellence or it stands for nothing. There is not much in betwee n."

Kevill: "For the approach to charter renewal you need someone who can manage the political process; see who in Westminster needs rubbing up, and how to get the civil service onside. Renewal is a fundamentally political issue and really does need to be handled with a deep level of understanding of politics and the civil service and the prevailing political zeitgeist."