He dared speak the truth about the BBC

2 September 2006

So, while criticism could always be shrugged off, there were a couple of pundits who were able to raise the temperature within Broadcasting House (and later White City). These were Michael Vestey of The Spectator and Gillian Reynolds of the Daily Telegraph. In both cases, I suspect, the BBC executives got hot under the collar because they thought the acute observations of these two journalists were, more often than not, dead right. Gillian Reynolds clearly knows her subject and loves the medium and, what’s more, writes very well indeed; she is passionate about radio and its refusal to pander to the lowest common denominator.

Michael Vestey had all that, too, but something more besides — he had worked for the corporation for more than a quarter of a century and had come, in an almost affectionate way, to utterly and completely loathe it. I don’t mean that he loathed everything the BBC produced, or everybody who worked for the institution; he had untrammelled respect for the reporter out in the field, the producer crafting a programme and so on. No, he loathed what he saw as its corporate stupidity, its inverted pyramid of talentless middle managers and ever expanding legion of deathly accountants, its flaccid, thoughtless, self-flagellating, institutionalised left-liberalism, its craven attitude towards political authority and concomitant arrogance towards the people who paid the licence fee, i.e. the listeners. And he wrote about this in The Spectator every week for the ten years after he left the BBC, aggrieved and weary, until his untimely death at 61 last weekend. In return, you have to say, the BBC loathed him too.

I did not know him very well while I was at the BBC, but I knew of him. He was spoken of in darkened cadences. Yes, it was agreed, he was a fine and possibly brilliant reporter; he had served the corporation well since 1970, reporting from South Africa and Chile (during the Falklands war). He could do that increasingly rare thing — craft a beautiful radio feature, full of sounds and voices, an incalculably time-consuming and un-cost-effective form of journalism. And again — an increasingly rare occurrence — he was wholly literate, well read, articulate, informed. His scripts not only made sense and told people stuff they didn’t already know, but they also had rhythm and were easy on the ear. However he was also something known as ‘old school’. He spoke that awful thing, RP. He was definitely white. He was, towards the end, getting on a bit, you know? He was rarely bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. He didn’t like filing from somewhere until he knew what the story was, until he understood himself what it was that he was telling the audience. He could be curmudgeonly when presented with the unreasonable demands of a producer or editor. He was, people suggested, terribly louche. And worst of all he was quite unconscionably, irredeemably, implacably right-wing.