John Birt, Baron Birt (born 10 December 1944) is a former Director-General of the BBC who was in the post from 1992 to 2000.
After a successful career in commercial television, first at Granada and then at LWT, Birt was brought in as deputy director-general of the BBC in 1987 for his current affairs expertise. The forced departure of Director-General Alasdair Milne following pressure from the Thatcher government[1] required someone at the top, preferably from outside the corporation, with editorial and production experience: Milne had been summarily replaced by Michael Checkland, an accountant.
Birt was credited with re-structuring the BBC in accordance with Conservative Party privatisation policies, but in the face of much internal opposition. His supporters insist he saved the corporation from possible government sell-off, and properly equipped it to face the digital age. Birt later became an adviser to the Blair government.
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John Birt was born in Liverpool to a Catholic father, a manager at the Firestone tire company, and a Protestant mother. He was raised as a Roman Catholic. Birt was educated at the direct-grant grammar school St Mary's College, Liverpool and St Catherine's College, Oxford, where he got a third-class degree in engineering.
From 1966 to 1971 Birt was at Granada Television. He devised the magazine programme Nice Time and, as a researcher at World in Action, staged in July 1967 a melodramatic post-trial encounter between Mick Jagger and senior figures in the British establishment. Jagger, just released following drugs charges, descended from a helicopter to discuss on the lawn matters of the day with, among others, the editor of The Times William Rees-Mogg, and the Bishop of Woolwich John A. T. Robinson.
Birt in 1969 became joint editor of World in Action with Gus McDonald, a former Trotskyist, later himself to become a government minister and a member of the House of Lords. Birt later moved to LWT, where he was founding editor of the current affairs programme Weekend World. He became head of current affairs at LWT and, later, controller of features and current affairs. In the mid-1970s he took a break from LWT to produce David Frost's interviews with disgraced former US President Richard Nixon. Birt returned to LWT as director of programmes in 1982. During this period he revived the career of his old friend, the Liverpool singer Cilla Black, who in due course became the highest paid female performer on UK television.
Birt formed a close working relationship with his boss at LWT, Michael Grade, which would later go sour when both worked at the BBC.[2]
While deputy director-general under Michael Checkland, a former accountant, Birt also served as the BBC's director of news and current affairs. Then and subsequently, in the wake of the Thatcher government's bitter spats with Milne, he became the most hands-on editor-in-chief in the corporation's history.
With the then Weekend World presenter Peter Jay, Birt had in 1974 contributed to The Times a series of three much-discussed articles on the topic of television journalism. Most television news and current affairs contained, they argued, a "bias against understanding": mere pictures had taken precedence over analysis. They advocated instead what became known as "a mission to explain." The model was Weekend World.
In accordance with this thesis and, no doubt, with Milne's earlier agonies in mind, makers of news and documentary programmes were required to outline their finished product in writing before setting out with the cameras. The news correspondent Kate Adie considered such methods were at odds with the "obligation to report".[3] Fred Emery a former presenter of Panorama, a direct rival to Weekend World and thus a prime test-bed for the new supervised approach, said it gave rise to "a certain blandness".
Shortly after arriving at the BBC, in July 1987, Birt held a conference at Lime Grove Studios with the BBC’s current affairs journalists in which he was questioned vigorously by Charles Wheeler, one of the BBC’s longest-serving reporters, about what he meant by the BBC’s lack of analysis in its news reporting. Panorama producer David Wickham, also at the conference, later described Birt in an interview as “phenomenally arrogant”.[4]
Birt's promotion to Director-General in 1992 caused immediate controversy. On top of all the internal opposition, it was then revealed that, though Director-General, Birt was being employed on a freelance consultancy basis in order to write-off numerous personal expenses against tax, including "secretarial services" from his wife. While perfectly acceptable in the private sector, such practices were considered unacceptable in a Director-General of the BBC. Under political and public pressure, Birt became a BBC employee. He had to sell his shares in LWT, part of his final salary settlement with the company. When in 1994 LWT was bought by Granada, Birt lost out on a windfall of what would have been several million pounds.
Consistent with Conservative Party policy, Birt introduced a "virtual internal market" at the BBC. Individual departments were required to charge each other for services, and even to compete against each other for contracts. Under what was called the "Producer Choice" initiative, programme producers were required to use outside suppliers if they were cheaper. Faced with high rental fees from the BBC's record library, producers for a time found it cheaper to buy records from local record shops. In-house facilities were closed or stood idle as a result, it was alleged, of "creative accounting" methods. Apparently unprofitable departments, including the Radiophonic Workshop, were suddenly axed after decades of service. Birt's use of impenetrable jargon became known as "Birtspeak", a phenomenon still regularly mocked in the satirical magazine Private Eye, complete with miniature Dalek caricature of the man himself.
The allusion to Birt and Daleks has stuck. Originating from a speech Dennis Potter gave at the Edinburgh Television Festival less than a year before his death, Britain's foremost television playwright, labeled Birt a "croak-voiced Dalek".[5] Potter's comments were not universally admired though. Televiison critic Mark Lawson, then of The Independent, wrote of Potter's "tendency towards unfocused vitriol and noisy self-examination made his contribution easily swattable by the BBC's damage controllers and ignorable by the wider audience."[6]
In the 1993 Christmas tape produced by the BBC's post production department, Birt was portrayed as the Daleks' creator, Davros.[7] Former BBC director and producer David Maloney claimed on the DVD commentary for Genesis of the Daleks that John Birt "succeeded where Davros failed and ruined the BBC".
Former BBC Director-General Alasdair Milne described Birt as “the most graceless man I have ever known” and a “ghastly man” who did little good for the BBC except establishing the BBC’s Internet service. He also criticised him for paying consultants a lot of money to restructure the corporation.[8] Bill Cotton described Birt’s tenure as a “nightmare” for the BBC.[9] Radio broadcaster John Dunn said of Birt: “I certainly don't like what Birt has done to the surroundings in which I work. The atmosphere is terrible, morale is bad."[10] David Attenborough commented: “When Birt gets up and says the whole of the BBC was a creative mess and it was wasteful, I never saw any evidence of that. I absolutely know it wasn’t so in my time. Producers now spend all their time worrying about money, and the thing has suffered for it.”[11] Barry Norman wrote in his memoirs: “I left the BBC in the summer of 1998. I wasn’t unhappy there at the time but I was certainly less happy than I had been. Everyone was. Something had happened to the BBC - John Birt had happened. He had been brought in a few years earlier as Director-General, charged with making the organization more efficient and cost-effective and in that I’m sure he succeeded. But his greatest achievement - and it took some doing - was to assume control of the broadcasting organization for which everyone in the country, and many people outside it, wanted to work and within six months make the entire workforce fearful and unsettled. The confident security which in my time there had made the BBC innovative and admired throughout the world seemed to vanish overnight. There were redundancies and downsizing; staff members who retired or left for other jobs were replaced by people on contract, often short-term contract, and it’s difficult to build a career, or a life, like that.” Norman also commented that Birt’s policies led to the BBC playing safe with programme ideas and filling the schedules with “a plethora of cookery programmes, gardening programmes, quiz shows and game shows. There is very little on the BBC right now that you can’t find replicated on the commercial channels because the bottom line is cost and ratings”.[12] Even Marmaduke Hussey, who appointed Birt to his BBC role, later claimed to have regrets: "If I'd been reappointed as chairman I would have got rid of him. I had chosen a man who did not have the two prime skills of managing and getting on with staff. He totally failed to take the BBC with him.” He said Birt was "dogmatic and difficult" and that although he had some fine qualities, "admitting others may be right was not one of them".[13]
Birt's changes were partially dismantled by his successors Greg Dyke, himself sacked following pressure from the Blair government, and Mark Thompson. However, veteran producer Tony Garnett claimed in 2009 that Birt's legacy of “totalitarian micro management” has existed at the BBC ever since. He said of Birt: “After John Birt achieved power, centralisation was accelerated. Birt had consultants all over the BBC like a rash. As an institution it fitted in perfectly with the ideology of the day. It is no accident that Birt's two jobs since have been at number 10 and at McKinsey's”. He conceded: “He was resolute and brave in his attempts to bring some proper financial discipline. He was percipient about New Media and the imminent upheavals the Internet would bring and made sure that the BBC had a head start”, but he also had “a leadership bypass, an inability to charm and persuade” and his faith in out of date management theories about structure led to “just more irrelevant bureaucratic supervision from senior management ... This sort of control is the enemy of creativity."[14]
Birt's defenders include the prominent journalists John Lloyd and Polly Toynbee.[15] It has been argued that without his reforms and his ability to accommodate the Thatcher government,[16] the renewal of the BBC's operating charter in the 1990s was in jeopardy. Birt was responsible for modernisation of much BBC output, including the removal from BBC Radio 1 of veteran disc jockeys such as Dave Lee Travis and Simon Bates. Radio 1 re-branded itself as more youth-oriented, but the station's audience total declined nonetheless.
Birt invested heavily in digital broadcasting and sought government approval to direct licence fee money into the new internet service bbc.co.uk. Such ventures were at the time criticised by some as being to the detriment of the BBC's core programming. John Tusa, a former boss of the BBC World Service said, "You have to love an organisation in order to reform it."
In 1998 BBC programme makers were ordered to refrain from any mention of the private life of the cabinet minister Peter Mandelson. In a live interview on BBC television's Newsnight the journalist and former Conservative MP Matthew Parris had identified Mandelson as a fellow homosexual. Mandelson, a former editor of Weekend World, and Birt had been colleagues at LWT. There was press speculation that Birt himself had initiated the directive.
Birt was awarded a knighthood, and in 1999 a life peerage.[17] He took his seat in the House of Lords in March 2000 as a crossbencher.
In 2001 Tony Blair appointed Birt as his personal advisor, for what was termed "Blue Skies thinking";[18][19] it is thought his long-standing friendship with Peter Mandelson had a role in his appointment.[20] His role in government was controversial, since as a special advisor, rather than a civil servant, he is not formally obliged to face questions from House of Commons Select committees. In October 2002 an uproar was created when it emerged that the government had specifically asked him not to appear in front of the transport select committee, at a time when he was in charge of long-term transport strategy. Earlier that year, a paper of Birt's had proposed a second network of motorways operated as tolls to counter the problems of traffic congestion.[21] In parallel, he subsequently become a part-time consultant with McKinsey & Company, which some see as a conflict of interest with his government involvement. In December 2005 he quit his role as advisor to Tony Blair to join private equity firm Terra Firma Capital Partners, "for personal reasons". In addition to his unpaid work with the UK government Birt also had a paid role at McKinsey & Co in their Media and Entertainment Practice. Birt's relationship with government and McKisney caused some controversy as McKinsey were increasingly working with UK government departments in a range of public service and defence areas.[22]
Since February 2004, Birt has been on the board of PayPal Europe.
The Financial Times reported at the beginning of July 2005 that Birt's office ceiling at No 10 Downing Street had fallen in. However, Birt was not injured.[23]
Returning to his earlier career on 26 August 2005, Birt delivered his second MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival. Partly a review of his professional life as a broadcaster, he also criticised the "tabloidisation" of intellectual concerns. More importantly, he argued that Channel Four should receive financial help, in order to preserve "public service broadcasting", which was taken as advocacy of the BBC sharing its licence fee with Channel Four. He also mentioned that his long standing feud with Michael Grade had been resolved, but the speech as a whole was not admired by many figures in the industry.[24]
In 2006, Lord Birt joined the consulting firm Capgemini. He will advise the firm, with a focus on its consulting services in the public sector and telecom, media and entertainment.[25]
He is currently working with renewable power company Infinis.
John Birt's first wife was the American-born Jane Lake. They met in 1963, whilst she was an art student at Oxford. The couple married in Washington, D.C. in 1965, and have two children, Eliza and Yahya (formerly Jonathan) Birt.
In April 2005, Birt admitted a twelve-month affair with Eithne Wallis, a divorced mother of three and a former head of the National Probation Service.[26] Birt admitted adultery in his court papers.
Birt and Wallis' marriage took place on 16 December 2006 at Islington Register Office. It was attended by neither set of children. A reception was held after the ceremony at the fashionable London St John restaurant in Smithfield,[27] attended by, among others, the politician Peter Mandelson and Trevor Philips, chairman of the Commission for Equalities and Human Rights, both former colleagues at LWT.
In the 2007 play Frost/Nixon on Broadway, Birt was played by actor Rene Auberjonois. In the 2008 film adaptation Frost/Nixon, he was played by Matthew Macfadyen.
| Media offices | ||
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| Preceded by Michael Checkland 1987–1992 |
Director-General of the BBC 1992–2000 |
Succeeded by Greg Dyke 2000–2004 |