Former BBC producer Rod Liddle’s column in today’s Sunday Times is a cracking read

from end to end, echoing so much of what we have said and discussed here for so long. Particular highlights of his article, BBC in need, sub-headed “Poor old Auntie Beeb is unwell. She’s confused and no longer knows right from wrong, truth from fakery”, include:

Management surprise at management ignorance:

Much to the apparent surprise of Bennett and Abramsky, two experienced and highly respected corporation bureaucrats, a procession of contrite and nervous producers came forward to ’fess up. The public, it seemed, had been deceived with unnerving consistency, particularly over programmes with phone-in polls and competitions. And on the corporation’s most noble flagship enterprises, too. Comic Relief and Children in Need, for example.

“We just sat there absolutely stunned,” one executive board member told me, “shocked beyond belief. Nobody had any idea that this was going on on such a scale.”

Not even Bennett and Abramsky, when they asked for producers to come forward?

“Nobody. Nobody at all. And we had the very powerful sense that there was a lot more to come. And we thought this time no excuses, something really has to be done.”

The contradictions between quality, populism and the compulsory tellytax:

Either way, all those I spoke to believe the BBC needs a change of culture, that it needs to decide what it is there for and why we should continue to pay for its existence, compulsorily and on pain of imprisonment if we don’t fork out.

“Why are we doing these phone-in polls?” said the executive board member. “In what possible sense are they public service broadcasting?

How the BBC’s sheer dominance affects and controls every broadcaster:

According to Roger Graef, a leading independent producer, the scams and manipulations have been threatening to erupt for some time.

“It was lurking under the surface,” he says, “but there were more and more people coming to my company literally bursting into tears and saying, ‘I don’t want to do this to people any more’. But they wouldn’t go public because they were worried they’d never get another job.”

More on the contradictions of the tellytax:

A senior BBC journalist put it even more bluntly. “The BBC has to stop trying to get in the f****** gutter with all the other tawdry channels. When you start chasing ratings and using the foul marketing language of City spivs, it’s inevitable what will happen.” AH, but the trouble is, if the BBC doesn’t get into the gutter it may lose its raison d’être anyway. For the past 60 years or so the BBC has managed to straddle two poles – universality and public service – and thus justify the licence fee. But it is finding it increasingly difficult to do so.

The awful waste of an awful lot of cash on the awful Jonathan Woss:

“The BBC was burbling with happiness because it had got Jonathan Ross for ‘only’ £18m when he had asked for £24m,” the senior BBC journalist remarked with some derision. “He draws only about 3m viewers every week – for which he is paid almost eight times the entire yearly budget for a programme like The World Tonight. How can that possibly be justified?”

Privately quite a few BBC executives admit that the Ross contract was a misjudgment, politically, morally and practically. One told me it had cost the BBC “a couple of hundred million quid” when it came to charter renewal because the politicians were ill-disposed towards an organisation that could be so cavalier with licence-payers’ money.

Others argue that the BBC should not compete with commercial organisations because the BBC is simply inept at doing so, and they use the Ross contract as a case in point.

For the executive board member it’s a more straightforward calculation. “If there’s a commercial organisation that wants to pay Jonathan Ross £18m and thinks it can draw an audience that justifies the salary, then let them do it. It’s not for the BBC. Exactly the same applies to phone-in polls.”

The buck being passed to a quivering RDF scapegoat:

WHAT should be done? The BBC provided an easy sacrificial victim by “suspending” all commissions from RDF, the independent production company which supplied the original shots of Her Majesty. But the firm says that they e-mailed the BBC three times asking to see its edit before transmission. Someone in the BBC jumped to the conclusion that their trail showed the Queen storming out. At no time did they ask RDF whether this actually happened.

Self-serving institutionalised producers who just know they are serving the public whatever they do:

“You know, whenever I ask them about some new programme or channel they’re planning,” the executive board member told me, laughing, “they always tell me that it is core broadcasting. And I say to them, ‘Right, okay, well give me an example of something the BBC does which is peripheral broadcasting’. They can’t come up with an answer.”

Do read the rest – it’s a longer column than usual, and has a section of additional reporting by Dipesh Gadher, including these examples of recent BBC trouble:

The Treasury has complained about a recent Newsnight report in which scenes were manipulated to make it appear as if Gordon Brown’s press officer was deliberately picking on a reporter.

All seems to have gone quiet on this issue, covered at length here at Biased BBC. Has anyone seen or heard an answer yet to the question of just why was the order of the footage manipulated in the first place, if, as Newsnight maintains, it had no effect on the story?

This weekend the BBC revealed that it had misled viewers in a wildlife documentary called Incredible Animal Journeys broadcast in May. The programme claimed to show Steve Leonard, the presenter, tracking the migration of a pregnant caribou via a GPS receiver from a hotel room in the Yukon. In fact, the scenes were “reconstructed” several weeks later in the UK.

The broadcaster was only rumbled after an eagle-eyed viewer spotted a British electrical socket in the background.

I remember this program, and another one or two supposedly tracking migrating animals, and thought at the time that the tracking they were purporting to do seemed infeasible, both technologically and in style. Now we know – it was just the BBC faking it, again.