In my day, the head of our production centre had a chaffeur-driven car.
The driver was a normal part of the transport department and he and the vehicle ran errands when it wasn't being used for official business. So I'd book it (him) for a run down to Temple Meads station to take our flightcases of (rented) radio mics back to the Red Star parcels office at the end of a studio day. Generally speaking, everyone in the building, including HNPC (the boss), would have been mortified if the facility had been used for, say, shopping trips.
We had a small pool of estate cars for general purposes and our specialist vehicles, and that was it. Pretty much everything else was either hired in as needed or a staff-owned vehicle, or public transport.
About three months before I resigned, at the end of the 1980s, they started introducing leased company cars for middle managers.
We couldn't understand why. The mileage rate was quite adequate - if you needed a car for work it covered the cost; if you didn't you could choose to own one and it was a handy subsidy for those rare occasions. I think it's fair to say that new cars were almost unknown in the car park, the exceptions being those of the news film crews (many of whom were freelancers anyway), whose vehicles had to be fairly fast and reliable (they did huge mileages).
That company car scheme was the start of the rot - the creation of a middle and upper-management elite. It created envy, and separated managers out from the rest of us. Previously people often moved reluctantly from operational jobs into management. I had several friends who were asked to apply for management jobs but refused, and, to be fair, the lower rungs weren't well paid. Afterwards, management became popular with those who preferred self aggrandisement to making programmes.
It's been like that ever since. I still have many friends and relatives in the BBC. They all say the same thing: its management is now centralized, very powerful, very well remunerated, and they no longer feel part of a big, collaborative effort like we used to. They also all feel they're only paid to do a job, not contribute to a bigger goal.
The other big change behind the scenes is at the bottom end: the BBC like other unprincipled operators in the industry, expects people to work, literally, for nothing.
"Internships" are a quite disgraceful concept. They are a legalized form of slave labour, they increase stratification and a them+us ethos, they allow wealthy people to 'buy' jobs by subsidizing their children, and above all else they give impressionable youngsters false hope. There are no jobs to move on to once an internship ends. The Meejuh Studies departments of schools, colleges and universities across the land have TEN TIMES the number of students enrolled, each and every year, than there are jobs in the UK broadcast industry in total (never mind vacancies).
I fought hard to get and keep my initial, low-grade technical job in the BBC: initial tests, several interviews in succession, long technical training courses with weekly tests (pass mark to keep your job 90%), on-the-job assessment and regular feedback sessions with my boss. It was made clear I was joining an elite team and I had to be up to standard. And boy, were my colleagues and production teams people to live up to! I wasn't paid much, but I WAS paid. Even then, the ratio of applicants to entry-level jobs in engineering was something like 100:1. If you wanted to train, the only alternatives were the BBC and a very small operation (Ravensborne) run by the ITA. This made sense, as the training resources reflected the small number of jobs in the industry.
Roll on 25+ years. I took one of my children to Bournemouth University a few years ago to look at a journalism course they were interested in. Bournemouth is one of the BBC's favourites, and has (had) a number of ex-BBC managers on its teaching staff.
There were about two hundred families there for the open day, and we packed out the largest lecture theatre to hear presentations on what the courses offered. There was noticeably a lot of bling in the room: tanned, expensively-dressed parents and children. After the talks, they ran a video featuring (I think) three of their graduates, grinning to the camera about how good their courses had been.
I was one of only two people who asked questions: what were the people in the video doing now and how many of their graduates went on to get jobs at the level for which they had been trained? Of the three, only one was still in the industry after two years, working as a production runner (had a degree qualification trained as a director/editor).
Surely they had other success stories? After all, they were graduating over a hundred people a year...
... silence fell, and, as we got up to leave, I could hear the non-answer being discussed by families around us.
Never mind the licence fee: why are British taxpayers paying for all these, pointless, media courses across the country?
Back on topic, the issues are obvious: BBC simply does too much these days. The money is spread too thinly; it has an expensive, unaccountable and top-heavy management structure; the old, productive corporate culture has largely gone*; it has lost sight of its public-service remit; its standards in many areas have plummeted.
The public-service 'deficit' is particularly obvious in its regional and local services, now largely clones of London. Moving big departments to Salford (Manchester) is pointless if at the same time the system denies autonomy to local programme makers. Radio Bristol, for example, used to have a proudly local team of presenters. They're long gone, and their replacements have come from all over the place. "Local" radio isn't honestly local any more, and it's the same for TV. The BBC no longer genuinely reflects the diversity of the country, it mainly imposes London attitudes and standards on everyone else.
The unaccountable management, responsible for this sort of thing, is by far the BBC's biggest problem: it doesn't employ, and doesn't understand even middle-class Britain, let alone those who make up the majority of the population. And it doesn't care.
I don't want to see the license fee go. For decades it gave us an independent voice in the nation - not beholden to commercial interests. But I struggle to see how the BBC could be restored to its former greatness.
E.
*In the late 1970s/early 1980s the BBC was extremely proud of being the most efficient broadcaster in Europe, in programme hours per staff member, per pound of income, and per studio facility. That was achieved by doing almost everything in-house, with its own engineering and technical Directorate, with a very lean management structure, and by staff who were proud to be as productive as possible.
