Spending Public Money
I'm sure this piece in The Times about the BBC must be exaggerated, if even a little, but the story certainly shows the broadcasting organisation in a very bad light and serves to reinforce the article by Rod Liddle (below) which I published last week.
Until recently I was blissfully unaware of Danny Cohen and his role at the BBC, yet twice within a week I am being told the man is responsible for pouring large amounts of public money down the drain.
Now that's the importance of a free press in the UK compared to Russia, say, where such critical reporting of state TV would no doubt get you sacked or sent to the nearest salt mines for a spell.
Until recently I was blissfully unaware of Danny Cohen and his role at the BBC, yet twice within a week I am being told the man is responsible for pouring large amounts of public money down the drain.
Now that's the importance of a free press in the UK compared to Russia, say, where such critical reporting of state TV would no doubt get you sacked or sent to the nearest salt mines for a spell.
It’s beyond parody: the BBC carpet revitalising committee
Alex Spence - The Times
It is a prime example of life imitating art. As the first episode was broadcast last night of a BBC “mockumentary” deriding bureaucracy, management-speak and an obsession with blue-sky thinking, the corporation was busy defending claims of absurdity in real life.
TV executives at the BBC have started tearing up carpets and replacing decor that is less than two years old on two floors of its £1 billion London headquarters because “they did not feel like creative spaces”, it has emerged.
The sixth and seventh floors are being revamped to introduce new “TV branding, images and props” to give them a more “vibrant” feel. Danny Cohen, the BBC’s powerful head of TV, assembled a committee of employees to bounce around ideas for giving their floors a “unique sense of identity” after complaints that they lacked character.
The committee recommended giving the sixth floor a “Welcome to Television” theme, while the seventh will be modelled on an “outside streetscape”, staff have been told.
Claire Dresser, a senior adviser in the TV division, told the BBC’s in-house magazine: “We want to make our space feel inspiring and creative, a home for BBC Television that reflects our ambitions as the very best broadcaster and producer in the world.”
It comes at a time when swingeing cuts are threatened. BBC Three will be taken off the air to save money. BBC Four and children’s programming could be axed if licence fee funding is reduced, executives have warned.
One staff member complained to the BBC: “I think many of us would rather have a modest pay rise than be dazzled by a new garish carpet.”
The spat could be a subplot of BBC Two’s new comedy show, W1A, which began last night. Made by the writers of the satirical London Olympics series Twenty Twelve, the series again stars Hugh Bonneville as a hapless consultant caught up in political correctness and bureaucracy.
Bill Rogers, a former BBC manager who writes a blog about the corporation, said the changes were nonsense and illustrative of the culture that W1A aims to send up. “I try not to be too rude here, but I suggest people will know that the sixth and seventh floors belong to television because they get busy late, finish early and close at weekends.”
The carpet that is being torn out would be reused elsewhere in Broadcasting House, the BBC said.
The spending leaves the BBC’s leadership open to claims that they have not learnt from the excesses of their predecessors. Mark Byford, the former deputy director-general, claimed nearly £5,000 on flights to attend the football World Cup final in South Africa. He later left the BBC with about £1 million in redundancy pay.
The controversial redecoration also illustrates the challenges that the writers of W1A may find in satirising Britain’s public service broadcaster.
During filming, Mr Bonneville was denied re-entry to Broadcasting House by a security guard because “he did not have the right sort of security pass”. In a recent appearance on Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson told him: “You’re not allowed in [Broadcasting House] even if you’re BBC staff unless you’ve been on a half-hour health and safety course on how to operate the building.”
Mr Bonneville said he had attended the course and was given an eight-page document explaining the fire alarms look like. Mr Clarkson said he had not done the course. “I still have to be escorted around New Broadcasting House in case I’m confused by a light fitting.”
Mr Clarkson added: “How do you make a fiction about BBC management funnier than what actually happens?”
In the new series, Mr Bonneville’s character is appointed the BBC’s Head of Values with responsibility for “thinking big thoughts and clarifying the role of the BBC in the digital age”.
That is a nod to recent public comments by the corporation’s executives about plans to reform the BBC in the run-up to renewal of its royal charter in 2016. Lord Hall of Birkenhead, the Director-General, has said he will reform the BBC to compete with technology giants such as Google, Netflix and Facebook. He faces a difficult task with hundreds of managers and dozens of boards and committees still in place despite attempts to streamline.
It comes after a tough two years for the BBC, beginning with the Jimmy Savile sex abuse scandal. Public trust was then dented by revelations that highly paid executives had left with generous pay-offs and the abandoning of an IT project at a loss to licence-payers of almost £100 million.
Alex Spence - The Times
It is a prime example of life imitating art. As the first episode was broadcast last night of a BBC “mockumentary” deriding bureaucracy, management-speak and an obsession with blue-sky thinking, the corporation was busy defending claims of absurdity in real life.
TV executives at the BBC have started tearing up carpets and replacing decor that is less than two years old on two floors of its £1 billion London headquarters because “they did not feel like creative spaces”, it has emerged.
The sixth and seventh floors are being revamped to introduce new “TV branding, images and props” to give them a more “vibrant” feel. Danny Cohen, the BBC’s powerful head of TV, assembled a committee of employees to bounce around ideas for giving their floors a “unique sense of identity” after complaints that they lacked character.
The committee recommended giving the sixth floor a “Welcome to Television” theme, while the seventh will be modelled on an “outside streetscape”, staff have been told.
Claire Dresser, a senior adviser in the TV division, told the BBC’s in-house magazine: “We want to make our space feel inspiring and creative, a home for BBC Television that reflects our ambitions as the very best broadcaster and producer in the world.”
It comes at a time when swingeing cuts are threatened. BBC Three will be taken off the air to save money. BBC Four and children’s programming could be axed if licence fee funding is reduced, executives have warned.
One staff member complained to the BBC: “I think many of us would rather have a modest pay rise than be dazzled by a new garish carpet.”
The spat could be a subplot of BBC Two’s new comedy show, W1A, which began last night. Made by the writers of the satirical London Olympics series Twenty Twelve, the series again stars Hugh Bonneville as a hapless consultant caught up in political correctness and bureaucracy.
Bill Rogers, a former BBC manager who writes a blog about the corporation, said the changes were nonsense and illustrative of the culture that W1A aims to send up. “I try not to be too rude here, but I suggest people will know that the sixth and seventh floors belong to television because they get busy late, finish early and close at weekends.”
The carpet that is being torn out would be reused elsewhere in Broadcasting House, the BBC said.
The spending leaves the BBC’s leadership open to claims that they have not learnt from the excesses of their predecessors. Mark Byford, the former deputy director-general, claimed nearly £5,000 on flights to attend the football World Cup final in South Africa. He later left the BBC with about £1 million in redundancy pay.
The controversial redecoration also illustrates the challenges that the writers of W1A may find in satirising Britain’s public service broadcaster.
During filming, Mr Bonneville was denied re-entry to Broadcasting House by a security guard because “he did not have the right sort of security pass”. In a recent appearance on Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson told him: “You’re not allowed in [Broadcasting House] even if you’re BBC staff unless you’ve been on a half-hour health and safety course on how to operate the building.”
Mr Bonneville said he had attended the course and was given an eight-page document explaining the fire alarms look like. Mr Clarkson said he had not done the course. “I still have to be escorted around New Broadcasting House in case I’m confused by a light fitting.”
Mr Clarkson added: “How do you make a fiction about BBC management funnier than what actually happens?”
In the new series, Mr Bonneville’s character is appointed the BBC’s Head of Values with responsibility for “thinking big thoughts and clarifying the role of the BBC in the digital age”.
That is a nod to recent public comments by the corporation’s executives about plans to reform the BBC in the run-up to renewal of its royal charter in 2016. Lord Hall of Birkenhead, the Director-General, has said he will reform the BBC to compete with technology giants such as Google, Netflix and Facebook. He faces a difficult task with hundreds of managers and dozens of boards and committees still in place despite attempts to streamline.
It comes after a tough two years for the BBC, beginning with the Jimmy Savile sex abuse scandal. Public trust was then dented by revelations that highly paid executives had left with generous pay-offs and the abandoning of an IT project at a loss to licence-payers of almost £100 million.
Money for Old Rope (15 March 2014)
Rod Liddle give Auntie Beeb both barrels in his regular column for The Sunday Times and it's hard to disagree when you think for a moment about the film star salaries and payoffs handed to senior figures at the BBC.
Money for old rope is the phrase that springs to mind.
Dear BBC, you guys are great. Please take more of my cash
Money for old rope is the phrase that springs to mind.
Dear BBC, you guys are great. Please take more of my cash
Someone, probably himself, should give Danny Cohen a television show. It is a national disgrace that someone so effortlessly hilarious is denied wider public exposure. Danny is the BBC’s director of television, so already you have a cornucopia of delights to thank him for.
He is also somewhat self-regarding and not in the habit of underestimating the immensity, the incandescent brilliance, of his own talent. Just recently he defended his salary of £320,000 — which you pay, of course, whether you like it or not — by suggesting that he could earn double that amount in the private sector.
He did not specify where in the private sector someone would be prepared to fork out £640,000 for a chap whose career highlights include commissioning such astonishing, effervescent programmes as The World’s Strictest Parents, Blood, Sweat and Takeaways and Russell Howard’s Good News — and all for a channel so utterly dire, so comprehensively unwatched, that it is about to be taken off our televisions. But never mind, I’m sure he is right and the commercial broadcasters are queuing up for a piece of the Danny action.
And alerted to Danny’s self-sacrifice and hardship, the licence-fee payer is surely tempted to say: “Go, go! You have given of yourself for the public good. Enough — we are only holding you back. Go now and fill your boots, wherever you can!” Luckily for all of us, Danny is not about to try his luck in the private sector, despite the lure of wealth beyond imagining. He is going to stay, being paid by us instead, confident in the knowledge that — lucky, lucky people that we are — we are not paying him nearly enough. A mere pittance, a crust.
Danny last week took to Twitter to take questions from some of these grateful licence-fee payers — and yet very few people took this generous attempt at genuflecting before hoi polloi terribly seriously. Among the tweets posted to Danny were: “Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or 1 horse-sized duck?” This sort of flippancy must have discombobulated Danny.
Cohen is, in a sense, what’s wrong with the BBC. A public school, liberal, white middle-class male with an unending sense of entitlement to your money and a deluded impression of his own abilities — not quite a unique creature within the corporation.
We should all be grateful, as licence-fee payers, that the fiefdom in which Cohen made his name, such as it is, will become an online-only proposition. The BBC director- general Tony Hall has rightly taken the view that with a budget to be slashed, BBC3 is one indulgence too many. There are many indulgences within the BBC and most of them concern the amounts paid to staggeringly useless executives who seem to feel that if they weren’t toiling away for the public benefit they’d be swaddled in mink by the private sector: yeah, as they say, right.
The astonishing thing is that even the Jimmy Savile business — the incompetence, the evasions, the sheer lack of intelligence, the back-watching, the sudden defenestration of a director-general and the utter scorn poured upon the over-remunerated upper echelons of the corporation — has not disabused them of this notion. I don’t think anything ever will. I suppose that if you are a BBC manager, psychologically it is necessary to kid yourself in this manner, otherwise you could hardly go on.
The vast majority of the rest of the BBC, meanwhile — the people who make the programmes you watch or listen to — are genuinely underpaid. Still, good for Hall in jettisoning BBC3, a channel, simply put, that did not meet the public service remit; for every programme of interest and innovation there were about 20 of lumpen mediocrity — and little in the way of original arts coverage or new music.
Now get rid of BBC4 or BBC2, one or the other. Numerically it would make sense to bin BBC4. They are meant to do the same things, these two channels — so why have them both?
He is also somewhat self-regarding and not in the habit of underestimating the immensity, the incandescent brilliance, of his own talent. Just recently he defended his salary of £320,000 — which you pay, of course, whether you like it or not — by suggesting that he could earn double that amount in the private sector.
He did not specify where in the private sector someone would be prepared to fork out £640,000 for a chap whose career highlights include commissioning such astonishing, effervescent programmes as The World’s Strictest Parents, Blood, Sweat and Takeaways and Russell Howard’s Good News — and all for a channel so utterly dire, so comprehensively unwatched, that it is about to be taken off our televisions. But never mind, I’m sure he is right and the commercial broadcasters are queuing up for a piece of the Danny action.
And alerted to Danny’s self-sacrifice and hardship, the licence-fee payer is surely tempted to say: “Go, go! You have given of yourself for the public good. Enough — we are only holding you back. Go now and fill your boots, wherever you can!” Luckily for all of us, Danny is not about to try his luck in the private sector, despite the lure of wealth beyond imagining. He is going to stay, being paid by us instead, confident in the knowledge that — lucky, lucky people that we are — we are not paying him nearly enough. A mere pittance, a crust.
Danny last week took to Twitter to take questions from some of these grateful licence-fee payers — and yet very few people took this generous attempt at genuflecting before hoi polloi terribly seriously. Among the tweets posted to Danny were: “Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or 1 horse-sized duck?” This sort of flippancy must have discombobulated Danny.
Cohen is, in a sense, what’s wrong with the BBC. A public school, liberal, white middle-class male with an unending sense of entitlement to your money and a deluded impression of his own abilities — not quite a unique creature within the corporation.
We should all be grateful, as licence-fee payers, that the fiefdom in which Cohen made his name, such as it is, will become an online-only proposition. The BBC director- general Tony Hall has rightly taken the view that with a budget to be slashed, BBC3 is one indulgence too many. There are many indulgences within the BBC and most of them concern the amounts paid to staggeringly useless executives who seem to feel that if they weren’t toiling away for the public benefit they’d be swaddled in mink by the private sector: yeah, as they say, right.
The astonishing thing is that even the Jimmy Savile business — the incompetence, the evasions, the sheer lack of intelligence, the back-watching, the sudden defenestration of a director-general and the utter scorn poured upon the over-remunerated upper echelons of the corporation — has not disabused them of this notion. I don’t think anything ever will. I suppose that if you are a BBC manager, psychologically it is necessary to kid yourself in this manner, otherwise you could hardly go on.
The vast majority of the rest of the BBC, meanwhile — the people who make the programmes you watch or listen to — are genuinely underpaid. Still, good for Hall in jettisoning BBC3, a channel, simply put, that did not meet the public service remit; for every programme of interest and innovation there were about 20 of lumpen mediocrity — and little in the way of original arts coverage or new music.
Now get rid of BBC4 or BBC2, one or the other. Numerically it would make sense to bin BBC4. They are meant to do the same things, these two channels — so why have them both?
