MT the DG on the BBC at the MGEITF
I was, if I’m being honest, a little disappointed by Mark Thompson’s MacTaggart lecture on Friday. Perhaps I’m too used to the finely-tuned delivery of Steve Jobs at Apple events (and, let’s face it, whatever you think of Apple and its products, Steve Jobs knows how to work a crowd).
It wasn’t just Mark Thompson’s delivery that bothered me, though. The content of his speech, which of course is what really matters, didn’t seem all there either. The Director General had a prime opportunity to reframe the entire Sky/BBC battle as one of meaningless irrelevance — this, to my mind, would have been a good thing. This particular protracted battle is only marginally less dull, and just as worthy of the playground, as Adobe’s war of words with Apple.
Instead, Mark Thompson merely drew it out further — though not really answering many of the concerns raised by Sky (and shared by some in the industry) and taking the opportunity to put the boot in about Sky’s low levels of investment in British television and cross-media ownership, not to mention throwing a few punches at the press.
This was a MacTaggart lecture delivered not just to a room full of industry types. It was carried live on the BBC News Channel and simulcast via the web in several places. The transcript is available online (both from the BBC and others), and there’s been extensive coverage both in the news media and the likes of Twitter and blogs. In this context, I think Mark Thompson missed a trick in a big way. Rather than play to an audience which is sometimes renowned (not entirely unfairly) for navel-gazing, he had an opportunity to speak to the wider public, and to the vast majority of BBC staff who weren’t in Edinburgh. Rather than playground squabbles, I would have liked to have seen a galvanising speech championing all of the good things the BBC is doing.
The lecture contained some interesting statements. He harked back to Dennis Potter’s MacTaggart lecture in 1993, describing public service broadcasting, inlcuding the line “One that would not put anyone on the wrong side of an encryption wall. One that would treat everyone as being of equal value.” — unfortunate given the various Freeview HD and iPlayer non-neutrality issues that have been rumbling on over the course of the last year or so. His emphasis on the “Service” in “Public Service Broadcasting” was good to see, though.
Canvas was described in the dullest possible terms. Now, to be clear, Canvas isn’t terribly exciting. It’s a step towards convergence, certainly, but it’s a baby step and one which appears incredibly short-sighted at this stage. And, as regular readers of my blog and Tweets will be painfully aware, its execution is somewhat incongruous with its proclamations of openness. Even so, Canvas’s stunted innovation is still a hell of a lot more interesting than Mark Thompson made it sound.
The speech did contain one quite canny move, throwing down the gauntlet to some rightsholders groups: the announcement was made that the BBC was looking for a way to allow UK TV Licence Fee-payers who happen to be abroad (the key example cited was servicemen and women deployed out of the country) to access domestic iPlayer content. This was met with near-immediate opposition by PACT. Perhaps PACT doesn’t care what the public, press and politicians think. One thing’s for sure — you need some balls to side with the industry body in a “our Brave Boys versus PACT” showdown.
Inevitably, there came the talk of cuts. Cuts to executive pay, and to the Licence Fee, complete with a cringeworthy reference to public support for the BBC in the form of “Twitter feeds”. Honestly, he might as well have started dancing to Rod Stewart at that point, that’s how painful it was. Even so, the point was — in a nutshell — that Jeremy Hunt’s going to give his views and you’d all do well to remember that the BBC has a hell of a lot more public support than a Tory Culture Secretary.
I think it’s clear that Mark Thompson works a lot better behind the camera than in front of it, and that — like many off-camera BBC staff — he’s not entirely comfortable in the public eye. That’s not really something you can hold against him. But at the same time, many have viewed this year’s MacTaggart as being critical, and possibly even a turning-point in his role as Director General.
I don’t think Thompson’s speech came anywhere close to capitalising upon the opportunity he was afforded — an opportunity not simply to mount a basic defence of the BBC, to attack critics, or to talk in broad terms about some of the stuff the corporation has produced recently, but instead to look to the future.
An opportunity to rouse not just the TV industry but the wider, watching, public — not just low-level “background noise” support for the basic principles of the BBC, but to get people on their feet and proclaiming: “I want the BBC to do that and that and that. Make them happen!”
