There is so much human suffering in the world that it seems rather bad form of Jenni Russell in yesterday’s Sunday Times to oblige us to confront yet more of it in her portrayal of the downtrodden, persecuted, mutinous BBC. If Ms Russell’s account is to be believed there is a “level of rage” within the Corporation unprecedented in a quarter of the century as staff are forced to cut their administration budgets, attend meetings brutally described as “packed” and eat fried sawdust and beetle-droppings in the unimaginative, unRamsayed, canteens. On top of this, many of them are being forced to move to Salford, where it might be thought their miniscule salaries would at least run to a tin of corned beef, but where in reality they will be laughed at by Northerners for their effeminate ways and thrown into the Manchester Ship Canal.
None of this would really matter – there are so many young people who want to “work in television” that the maltreatment of the current shift is of trifling practical consequence – save that life in the upper echelons of the Corporation is so very different. As usual the problem is not about absolute poverty but about the perception of inequality. Greed, and its permanent dancing-partner envy, is the old sore here.
For Mr Mark Thompson, the director-general of the BBC, and his lieutenants, the Corporation means base salaries half the way and beyond towards seven-figures, generous bonuses, gilt-edged pension-schemes and, despite everything, calorific expense accounts. Their privileged existence would make a tsarist blush. There is, of course, no question of them being made to move any further north than Highgate Ponds.
True these odious individuals are from time to time required to present themselves before the BBC Trust where they can be ruthlessly pummelled with feather cushions, but the consequences of this are not usually profound. When the Trust recently told the BBC’s head of radio strategy that he didn’t have a radio strategy, he seemed to be approximately as moved by this conclusion as he would have been to be informed that he had left the inside light on in his BMW. Conservative ministers meanwhile dare not challenge the oligarchy for fear of being accused of being the jagged instruments of Rupert Murdoch’s evil intentions.
The Guardian-classes would fight until the last of them is slain to defend the BBC – which is the best of many reasons for attacking it – but are pig-headedly oblivious to its faults. Board-room greed, they ululate, happens only in private corporations under the perverting influence of the profit-motive. Yet the experience of the BBC tells us that avarice, egotism and selfishness are natural parts of the human condition and just as readily expressed in the public as in the private sphere. For this insight we at least have something for which to thank the Corporation.
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