The same, but different

The Birt legacy - programmes: His era began with a 'massive attack' on the BBC and a radical manifesto. But, says John Dugdale, the revolution has not been televised
The future of the BBC: special report

The Guardian, Monday 17 January 2000

Seven years ago, on Monday, January 18, 1993 - halfway through John Birt's first month as director-general - BBC1's evening menu offered national and regional news (6-7pm), a soap (the soon-to-be-axed Eldorado), two sitcoms from 8-9 (including "a new comedy series set in Glasgow's boxing world"), news (9pm), Panorama (9.30pm), Film '93 (10.10pm) and Cagney and Lacey (10.40pm).

On BBC2, Janet Street-Porter's Def II yoof zone ran from 6.30-7.30pm, followed by an arts documentary, Horizon (8pm), a movie, Newsnight (10.30pm) and The Late Show (11.15pm). Apart from the news and current affairs output, which he had overhauled as deputy DG, Birt was not responsible for these schedules - in radio, where one DJ can replace another overnight, his impact was sometimes swifter, but in television, his era only really begins when programmes commissioned by the new controllers installed at the same time, Alan Yentob (BBC1) and Michael Jackson (BBC2), came on stream in 1994.

This, then, is still the Beeb before Birt - the product of what he called "the bloated, inefficient BBC that history bequeathed us" (MacTaggart Lecture, 1996), so debased that only the merciful cruelty of a "massive attack" could save it. But what strikes you, comparing the line-ups with those of January 17, 2000, is an impression of plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose.

So tonight's early-evening offerings on BBC1 are A Question of Sport, EastEnders and a spin-off from Watchdog, all three pre-1993 launches. Flanking the second news bulletin are ex-ITV perennial, This Is Your Life, and Soldiers To Be, revisiting any number of 1980s army-training documentaries. After Panorama comes It's Only TV But I Like It, Telly Addicts revamped with celebs.

The few discernible changes reduce risk to keep the two channels competitive. Panorama has moved from 9.30pm to 10pm, Horizon from 8pm to 9.30pm. The Late Show has gone. No BBC1 controller nowadays would risk a new sitcom about Glaswegian boxers. True, Gormen- ghast, starting tonight on BBC2, is strikingly adventurous; but back in January 1993 the same channel was premiering Clarissa.

This is the opposite of what one might expect, because two months before Birt acceded to power the manifesto of the incoming regime, Extending Choice, committed the corporation to a strategy of anti-populist risk-taking. To justify the continuation of licence-fee funding and the renewal of its charter, the BBC would progressively move away from programming that could be replicated by a commercial broadcaster. "Distinctive" output became compulsory. "Imitative, derivative or formulaic" programmes were outlawed.

If the strategy set out in Extending Choice had been implemented for seven years, the BBC would have axed Neighbours, Hollywood movies, and US dramas or comedies. Most dramas involving detectives and medics, and/or starring former soap stars, would have gone too.

Jim Davidson and Hale & Pace could not be poached from ITV. Live football would have vanished, as would the Lottery Show. Successful factual series (eg Airport, Changing Rooms) would have to be abandoned as soon as the opposition came up with a copy (eg Airline, Better Homes). Kids' shows would eschew cartoons. No hits would be played on Radios 1 and 2.

Clearly, none of this has happened: in television, controllers recognised the prescriptions of Extending Choice, Birtism's Old Testament, as suicidal, with their minds concentrated by a ratings slump in 1993. Atavistic populist practices continued, and were eventually ratified by People and Programmes, the more pragmatic New Testament, in 1995. When Yentob's head of popular drama, Nick Elliott, was asked by the Guardian how he squared his plethora of detective series with Extending Choice, he replied that he'd never read it.

The one marked change of the Birt era has been the ascendancy of trusty reality over chronically unreliable fiction and fun, with BBC1 slots that would have gone to drama or entertainment going to factual output, and BBC2 cutting its commitment to drama serials and single films. And with this shift came a recognition that a diluted version of Reithian and Birtist ideology could be reconciled with ratings rivalry - could even inform hit shows such as Animal Hospital, Antiques Roadshow and Ground Force.

Factual series have cheekily borrowed tricks from the genres they supplanted, most obviously in the transformation of the observational documentary into the docu-soap and the emergence of the lifestyle gameshow. Programmes with a wide range of subject-matter - cookery, gardening, DIY, antiques, pets - can be loosely defined as educational, and enlivened by vivid presenters and/or the injection of challenge or competitive features.

On Monday, January 18, 1993, a transitional Radio 1 had Simon Mayo hosting the breakfast show, Simon Bates at 9am, Jakki Brambles the lone female DJ at 12.30, Steve Wright at 3pm, Mark Goodier at 6pm, Mark Radcliffe at 9pm and Nicky Campbell at 10pm. Radio 2 fielded exactly the same morning line-up as now, but its afternoon slots were filled by Gloria Hunniford, Ed Stewart and John Dunn. Radios 3 and 4 had much the same mix as today, although on 4, controller James Boyle has reshuffled running orders. Radio 5 had not yet been relaunched as 5 Live.

BBC radio in the Birt era has seen the same shift as television from batty purism to realism, with Radio 1 under Matthew Bannister - the man credited with writing Extending Choice - inevitably the most volatile station. Taking over in summer 1993, and bidding sayonara to Smashy and Nicey types such as Bates and Dave Lee Travis, Bannister set about implementing the manifesto, introducing intelligent, quirky DJs - Radcliffe, Danny Baker, Emma Freud - and running speech strands, including comedy, in mid-evening. Certainly "distinctive", but the results were catastrophic: in his first seven months, the station lost four and a half million listeners.

Over at Radio 2, controller Frances Line was repositioning her network as an oldies' station. Thus the corporation's music channels abandoned on principle the 25-45s, with Radio 1 concentrating on the young, Radio 2 on the over-45s.

When the inevitable pragmatic backlash occurred, Radio 1 remained a youth station, but it slashed speech output and reverted - first with Chris Evans, and currently with Zoë Ball and Chris Moyles - to the highly un-Birtist notion of the personality DJ.

Kudos and ratings stability have been regained, but - in contrast to television, where Birtism was never rigorously applied to non-news programming - the Bannister years saw a step-fall in audience figures, not gradual slippage: the station will never come close again to the 19.23m listeners he inherited.

Showing all the strategic consistency of the Grand Old Duke of York, Radio 2 meanwhile wooed back the 25-45s under new controller Jim Moir, adding performers jettisoned by Radio 1 (eg the Corrs, Simply Red) to the playlist and even giving breaks to DJs under 50. With similar belated realism, the original plan for a "rolling news" 5 Live was abandoned in favour of a hybrid network inheriting the old Radio 5's hefty following of sports fans.

In shaking up first BBC News and Current Affairs, then the structures of the entire organisation, there can be no doubting Sir John's impact as a radical reformer. But in terms of what's actually on screen or coming out of the radio, clear-cut differences are often hard to detect - arguably, the networks he bequeaths are much as they would have been under any sensible modernising post-Reithian with no messianic pretensions. To have kept broadly the same programme mix on these networks as in 1993, without most of them suffering precipitate loss of audience share (compared to a 30% share in July 1993, BBC1 is now - week ending December 19 - at 28.8%) , is no small achievement - remembering that the last seven years have seen huge talent and rights inflation, comparatively paltry licence fee increases, remorseless pay-TV and ILR growth, the launch of Channel 5, Talk and Virgin, and an ITV given greater punch by an aggressive Network Centre.

But Birt promised much more than mere piffling continuity. In his MacTaggart Lecture (dubbed by some BBC staff "the Revelation of St John"), the "massive attack" on the bloated pre-Birtist BBC did not just keep budgets static and quality unaffected: "We have freed hundreds of millions of pounds to spend on programming. The BBC produced wonderful programmes. Now we can produce more. We have enhanced our creativity. We are a BBC on song, at the top of our form."

Judged by comparison with the past, the BBC's programming record under John Birt is very respectable; judged by his own rhetoric, however, it has miserably failed to do any better than produce more of the same.

The Birt Years (1993-99)

* Our Friends in the North

* Pride and Prejudice

* Ballykissangel

* The Crow Road

* The Cops

* Mrs Brown

* Men Behaving Badly

* The Day Today

* Shooting Stars

* Driving School

* The Naked Chef