 Welcome to the British Library, currently home to the Breaking the News exhibition, which scrutinises five centuries of UK news from all kinds of angles right up to the present day. Thank you for joining us tonight. This is the BBC on Artee's 100th birthday. The BBC is of course now a global institution, but it acts almost as a repository or a reflection of 100 years of British history. But what does its future hold? Let's find out. Please submit your questions throughout in the box below right here on the platform. And we do have a quite extraordinary wealth of expertise on the panel here. So don't be shy. Get your questions in early so we've got time to get round to all of them. You can also give feedback here on the platform. And very importantly, you can buy our speakers books. Highly recommended. Our dazzling panel will be led by your host, Jean Seaton. Jean is Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster. She's Director of the Orwell Foundation. And she's the author of Pinkrose and Traders, the BBC and the Nation, 1974 to 1987. Over to you, Jean. Hello and welcome. And what we've got, I just want to introduce you to the panel, all of whom have, as it were, lived experience in and of the BBC over many years. So we hope to have a really lively discussion. And don't be shy about putting your questions in. And don't be shy about going to the exhibition, which is tremendously interesting and has extraordinary juxtapositions, actually. So the panel tonight has got Janelle Audred, who worked for 13 years for ITN, ITV, the BBC. She's the Deputy Chair of Women in Journalism. And she's written a very interesting book, which was Communication for Change, Creating Justice in a World of Bias. And I think she's got a really unique capacity to understand the way in which communications and what we call the media come from somewhere and go from somewhere. So we're very pleased to have Janelle here with all of her experience. Then we've got Mark Damoser, who's currently Chair of the Booker Prize Foundation. So, you know, all you think he bookie people. Mark is the man who's in charge of the books at the top of your Christmas present list next year. Not shy, the Booker Prize Foundation, a little bit of controversy here and there, up and down, very useful. But Mark worked for the BBC for 25 years. He worked all over the shop in broadcasting, in news night, in news. And he was the controller of Radio 4, our dear, dear Radio 4, for a number of years. And then he became in that brief moment when we had BBC trustees between 2015 and 2017, one of the people responsible for the future of the BBC. But Mark, and then he went on to St Peter's College, Oxford. But Mark has thought about broadcasting and has been involved in almost every aspect of it. So we're really grateful for him to come tonight. Then we've got David Hendy, who I have known for a very, very long time and was a colleague. David's got an extraordinary, he also worked for the BBC. He's, I think, got a very particular ear for that which is heard. He wrote, and that's a wonderful book on sound and listening, which is called Noise, but also a wonderful book on the BBC Radio 4. And most recently, what we call the BBC of People's History, which manages to deal with 100 years going forward really. And so we're really, we're going to use David's extraordinary knowledge as our kind of foundation stone. And then we've got Pat Young, who is the founder of Cardiff Productions. But he too has worked in and out and over and round and through everything that matters in broadcasting. He's a non-executive director of ITV Studios. He was previously chief creative officer of the BBC, responsible for the most vast number of people and the most vast amount of programs. And he's currently the chair of Cardiff University. And Pat kind of understands, I think, the whole range of what it is that public service broadcasting is. So we've got some great insights, I hope, for you to challenge this evening. And I wanted to really start with David. You know, I wanted to ask David in a way to tell us how it is that this weird little organisation, which, you know, Asa Briggs said, you know, the Presbyterians would have strangled at birth if they'd got it, if they'd have understood. And they go, they go on trying to strangle it, frankly. I mean, how, with your extraordinary view, and how did this, this thing called the BBC develop its values, but come a thing? Has it got a soul? I think different people would give a different answer to that. But for me, the BBC emerges not as a piece of technology, but as an idea, or rather, it's a social purpose to which the technology of the time is put. So, I mean, my starting point is really in the immediate aftermath of the war. You've got plenty of people who are despairing. World War One. The Great War. The BBC starts in 1922, only four years after the end of the Great War. And there are plenty of people who are despairing of civilisation, its ability to stop sliding constantly into barbarism. And there are other people who believe that the time is right to create a new and better world, if you like, who are looking for a way of healing humanity, of increasing mutual understanding, of helping humanity to achieve its better self. And I think that's the reason why I start the history with looking at the three figures there in 1922 who, in one sense, embody this idea, these values. You've got John Wreath, deeply religious upbringing, believed he could serve God by serving the public, doing some good in the world, but he's not quite sure how or how it could be done. There's Cecil Lewis, who's only 24 when he becomes a kind of senior figure at the BBC. He was a teenage pilot in the war, exhilarated by the experience, but also despairing at the destruction that he witnessed. And after the war, he's wondering, could good art or poetry or music heal humanity in some way? But he's not quite sure how. And then you've got Arthur Burrows, who's actually the only one of the three who really knows about radio or wireless as it was called at the time. And he'd been monitoring enemy wireless propaganda during the Great War. And he'd been appalled at the idea of how easily disinformation could spread like a poison gas, he said. And he thought, well, if that's the case, then surely the same technology could be used to spread what he called a doctrine of common sense. And here was technology, radio that had the potential to reach into every home, as he put it, from a palace to the humblest cottage. So their ideas kind of come together and they channel the spirit, which is still enduring, actually becomes more important after the war, of Matthew Arnold, that great Victorian writer who in culture and anarchy talks about how do we stabilize society? How do we hold it together? It's going to be through culture or sweetness and light, as he called it. But the key for him was sweetness and light must prevail. It mustn't be just for the few, it wasn't going to work unless it was for everyone. So in 1922, you've got radio is the technology to hand that makes this idea a reality to provide, to kind of paraphrase Reif and Burrows and Lewis, to provide the best that has been thought and said and done to as many homes as possible. And the second half of that sentence is just as important to the idea as the first half. And that first half, the best is not just about the kind of the elite stuff, it's also about, well, the best in entertainment and so on, because the complete life as it were, the full life is not just one of virtue, it's one of pleasure and relaxation. Now, what counted as the best, clearly, is something that had to be then argued over both outside the BBC and inside the BBC over the next 100 years. And of course, there's no sort of definitive answer. And there's also the question of technique. If the BBC had to be maybe a touch ahead of public opinion, in the hope that it would nudge public opinion, public taste along with it, improve it steadily, a little bit of uplift. How could it, how far ahead could it be without losing the public from that chase, if you like? So that's a kind of constant niggle, something that has to be worked out ad hoc in practice, bit by bit and in terms of programs. But behind that kind of constant argument, how do we do it? What is the best? And how do we deliver the best to as many people as possible? There is that enduring value that I think was articulated by William Haley, the wartime director general, he said it's not about radio or television, it's about true citizenship and the leading of the full life. And that commitment to universal access, that attempt, not always successful, to offer the fullest range of ideas, culture, entertainment and so on, to everyone equally. That's I think the core DNA that kind of everyone throughout that hundred years is trying to work through. Thank you very much. Can I just ask one, just one sort of follow up on that. How difficult is it to find out what's the best and how do you balance what people want? I mean, I think with what they may want. I mean, the BBC has sort of through its history found different ways of doing that. I mean, Cecil Lewis said, if there are, in Savoy Hill, if there are about 12 of us gathered around the table, we all ask what we kind of think is the best, what we think the public want. And then we err on slightly on the upper side of what we judge the public to want. There is a slightly more scientific way of doing it, which is to kind of think, gather data from the public. And even before the end of 1922, the BBC is getting something like 2000 letters a week. So it's basically it's about sort of sniffing the air and sensing. Lionel Fieldon, who's one of the other early figures in the BBC in the Savoy Hill days, says that it's the producer's role to go to every party, to speak to every politician, to kind of to travel the underground, to speak to the public, to just talk, talk, talk, talk, to gather, in a sense. The idea is you have antennae. And I think that one of the ways in which the BBC sometimes struggle is when they take some shortcuts. And in a sense, audience research is a shortcut, which is very useful, but it maybe only tells you certain things. And perhaps in journalism, reading the kind of the British press for a sense of what is common sense or common opinion or whatever is also a shortcut that can lead to some problems, I think. So, you know, the techniques for sort of sensing where public tastes are are always imperfect in some way. And if you kind of, if you immerse yourself in the kind of the records of the BBC, and one of the treasures of these records, the archives is the records of the weekly program review board, where senior figures chew over the output of the last week. And they pull together audience research, and they pull together critical feedback. And the program correspondence, the letters and phone calls that have arrived. But they also pull on their own professional instincts. And I suppose this is something that even Reef, as early as 1924, he talks about this idea that, you know, if the right people are chosen, who are the right people, but if the right people are chosen, they should develop an instinct, a sense. Grace Wyndham Goldie talks about this later on in BBC history, having the kind of sense for where to pitch the program. And of course, you don't always get it right. And the BBC is not straightforwardly responding to public tastes, right? It's, you know, it follows and it leads. It does both. So it can't just identify public taste and then reflect that back. That's it's doing something more and more complex than that. That's fantastic. Thank you very much. I just, we're bounding through 100 years of, as it were, what it is to be British in a way. And I'd like to turn to Janelle next, or you can come back to some of the middle bits later, perhaps. Janelle, what, you know, David's last words where we're really good prompt for, I think, some of the things you'd like to say. How does the BBC have to get beside audiences? How does it, where is it? Where does it need to go now? How does it need to do it? I mean, if I think about some of the things that I talk about in my book, specifically around news and impartiality, and I think that's something that the BBC gets a lot of stick for at the moment is them not being impartial. But probably if some people are saying you're too far left and some people are saying you're too far right, you're probably around the middle, and you're probably doing something quite right. But I think it's really interesting when we think about impartiality in terms of especially news and journalism, because wherever there's people, there's bias. And some people might just miss that some kind of wokery chat. But I can definitely say that wherever there are humans, there is bias. And that is just a very natural, normal human way of being. And so when we think about and go through the history of the news, where there was, first of all, just the BBC, there was nothing to compare it to. So who was to say whether the BBC news was impartial or not, because there was no other alternative version, or as Donald Trump calls them, alternative facts out there. But as we go forward into the now and where audiences are now, the great veil and magic of TV has really been lifted. We know how it's done. We know how it's made. We even know the people behind the news who make it. There would have been a time when you wouldn't have known anything like that really, or anything about someone's political views or who they'd worked for previously before they came to the BBC. So when your mind was a view that the BBC is the truth, because there's no other truth really counteracting this truth. So when we think about what rolling news has done, and then let's add on to that social media. So when I first worked at the BBC, my very first job out of uni during broadcast journalism, so I was very fortunate, that my very first job was putting the news middle and today on the internet. And at that time, there were no algorithms, there was no engagement, no one was counting. It was just about convincing journalists one to put their story on the internet before the six o'clock bulletin, which was very, very hard. And that was my job. And now we move forward to a time where you can't stop journalists from talking about their story before their stories even finished being cut and edited. So what that does to the audience is it gives them a multitude of viewpoints, because it's not just the BBC now telling that story, then you've got ITV, you've got Sky News, you've got Huffington Post, you have Vice, you have Gal Den magazine, you have all these other people telling this very, very same story from a different perspective. So that lifts the veil in terms of people thinking there is an objective impartial truth around something that this one broadcast is telling us. So I think if we look into the future, what does this mean for the future of news? Because we all know if there's a big disaster, people will still turn to the BBC for that what they believe to be our truth that they can lean on that they can trust. But then at other times they will say, oh, you can't trust the BBC or you can't trust the news, you can't trust the media in that very general stereotyped term. So I think when we think about the future, we have to think about audiences as far more sophisticated than we've ever thought about them before. They're not just taking on face value what's been said to them, they're going somewhere else to look and check, and it's saying something different. So now they're weighing that up with what they believe to be true. So sometimes when the BBC gets bashing for being biased, sometimes it might be true, sometimes it might not be true. But in a world where perception for a lot of people has become reality, I think the BBC needs to take a bit more, in my opinion, of a thoughtful view. It's not good enough to say, but we're impartial, because the people, they won't see that because we've seen where your director general, for instance, where he worked before, we know who we might vote for. And that sometimes people find it hard to separate a person's professional views from their personal views. And so I think there has to be that understanding that this is what is now going on in audiences minds and taking that into consideration. That's brilliant. Can I just ask just again, just one more question. There is an issue about actually how the news is made, which is rather different. And the BBC has one of the last big reporting operations left standing in the world they've just worked at. So does that make a difference? I mean, it isn't just that it says it's impartial, that it's, but it does have people on front lines in a way that many organisations can't fall to anymore. And I think that's true. Yeah. But again, it comes down to what audiences perceptions are, because we know that because we are from there. So we see all of that. And then, I think, again, sometimes what happens with organisations like the BBC, there's an assumed knowledge that people know that we're everywhere. But the reality is audiences don't see it like that because for them, Sky News are reporting on all the same stories as the BBC. So how do they not know that Sky are not also there, but just choosing to see it or say it in a different kind of a way? And so I think whilst a lot of the magic has been revealed, or the magic currents have kind of disappeared, in some sense, there's still the really back mechanics that people don't know about. And it would be hard to explain in a way as well with the funding model. And I think when you really start getting into some of that, then people start really asking questions as well, why are you funding all this and why are you paying for all that? And why are you doing this? So there's always that balance between how much information do people want, how much they need, it comes down to public interest. What we're interested in is not always what's in our interest to know. And so I think it comes down to all of these kind of subjects. But I think one thing that I think the BBC could do to become a bit more reflective, I think is to one really think about who are their senior leadership, because now that is far more front facing and known. People want to see a bit more difference in their leadership to understand that there is impartiality, there is true diversity of thought and enough difference of diversity of thought. Because yes, if you get 12 white men in a room, of course there's diversity of thought, but there's not enough difference. And so I think for people to understand the BBC is impartial, they want to see that difference and see it kind of out there, not front and centre, but to understand what it is there. Thank you very, very much. Which takes us seamlessly to Mark, who's been in the middle of many a row. It has, you know, the BBC is in one sense always under attack. In another sense, is that true? And in another sense that attack does very structurally actually. And Mark, I can tell you Mark's been in the middle of many a row. And they're pretty nasty. There's nothing quite like a BBC conflagration mark, is there? Phone call on a Friday night at seven o'clock that says there's a problem with panorama. There goes your weekend, if not your life. Well, why is the BBC under attack? I mean, if I could compress this into three words, because it matters or because it still matters. So if you just look at audience metrics, I think you could say that the power of the BBC has diminished, is diminishing, it will diminish further. That's a function of technology and to some extent consumer choice and plurality. And that's all fine. But the numbers are still incredibly large. And instead of concentrating on the decline, one might want to think of where the BBC is declined from where the figures were so astronomical, they couldn't possibly be sustained in a world of technological and consumer choice. But the BBC still has a huge footprint. So 90% of people in the UK use it, including 80% of people under the age of 35 who allegedly, if you take the worst reading of it, don't like the BBC. But that turns out not to be quite true, even though it's very challenging to sustain the degree of commitment from younger audiences. So it's a huge beast. And everybody knows that and not only politicians, but audiences feel it and know it and because they own it. It also has colossal brand power, if I can use, as it were, the modern idiom, it's been around for a very, very long time. It has a huge history and a huge mythology. And so it has status and heft, which gives it still more weight, so it's circular. Audiences recognise that the BBC is a different sort of beast to what they might pick up on Twitter or YouTube or Instagram or TikTok or whatever else. It is not the case. And by the way, this is true for some other aspects of mainstream media as well. It's not merely the BBC, but the BBC is the biggest player. It is not true that the explosion in social media has devalued the currency of those broadcasters or newspapers who are trying to do something different and who do believe that fact-checking and fairness and impartiality really matter. And audiences therefore expect more from the BBC and they treat the BBC much more seriously. And if you look at the research that's been done for generations of Sun readers or male readers or guardian readers for that matter, and ask them what they expect of the BBC, Sun readers know perfectly well that the Sun and the BBC are very, very different media outfits and they come to the BBC and receive the news from the BBC and programmes from the BBC in a different frame of mind to the way they pick up the Sun, which has its own virtues, but it's a different kind of beast. Why else? Because you can pressure the BBC. You can pressure the BBC for two reasons. One philosophical and one practical. The philosophical reason is that we all own it and gives it an ideological flavour, a good ideological flavour, which makes it very different to something which you can choose to buy and you don't feel that you have an equity stake in. The BBC is a massive beast and it's also one that is differently constructed and has a different conception of its ownership. It's all of us who own it together. So that's one. And the second reason, of course, is much better known and it's more functional, which is that there are mechanisms, both the regulation and licence fee funding, which make it a very obvious target for pressure. There are very strong antibodies. The BBC's own sense of its independence, the quality of its journalism, the connection with its origins, its relevance, its truthfulness, all of that provide the BBC with an array of weapons with which to fight back. But it's an irresistible target for politicians because of these unique contextual reasons behind it. And then you have competition around the rest of the media sector. So the BBC is a huge market intervention, no point apologising for it or denying it. I mean, £3.7 billion of public money is a lot of money per year. What would it be like without? Well, unlike America, the BBC existed when a lot of people were making investment decisions. So for newspaper owners to say, now the BBC has destroyed our profit margins, ignores the fact that when they made the decisions about whether to do this, that or the other, whether it's online or work out a radio strategy or put more into foreign reporting or less into foreign reporting, they can't turn and say, it's the BBC's fault. The BBC was there when they made these decisions. It's particularly possible that they would have made more money and would make more money if the BBC didn't exist. But the BBC does exist. And unless you believe in profit maximisation in the private sector only, and we live in a mixed economy, then they have to live with it, but they don't like it because they can all see more or less that their bottom lines would be the greater without the BBC. Some are able to manoeuvre and still make a lot of money and some approve of the BBC, even though it does affect their profit margins. But it means that the BBC is always likely to be the victim of those who not merely have an ideological prejudice, but also have a commercial interest in attacking the BBC. So finally, I mean, what's unique now? Well, not everything. There have been rows all the way back from the beginning. And some of them are better known than others. But I've just been reading recently a reminder of the story around Harold Wilson, David Dimbleby and yesterday's men. And I can tell you that was huge. And go back to Sue's and go back to the general strike and the attempt of the government in 1926 to try and influence the outcome. Look at the row about JB Priestly during the war, it's from time immemorial. So people should not get the impression that it's unique. And there's something absolutely iniquitous about what's going on at the moment. I don't think so. But there is a different shape to it. One is the opposition and the degree of technological choice and Netflix is now a new weapon with which to beat the BBC in my view, completely absurd comparison between what the organisations do. But nevertheless, it gives the friction a degree of different vocabulary and a different emphasis. And the other, I think this is slightly new. I don't want to go too far with this, but there is an aspect of this, which is around the cultural wars, which changes a little the inflection of this debate. It's no longer really straightforwardly political or economic or industrial or even straightforwardly underserved regions and devolution. There is something about the fractiousness of the debate about identity and culture, where the BBC is much the biggest player is bound to feel the pressure. And the Conservative Party is tempted and very often can't resist the temptation to use this debate for tactical political advantage, which gives it a degree of extra both resonance and sometimes unpleasantness. Well, just to say that it will never stop. And the point at which it does stop is the point at which the BBC ceases to matter. And it matters. Thank you very, very much. Swan, a really good chairman once said that a nation on the rack puts the BBC on the rack over Northern Ireland. And I think we're seeing that. Pat, we've talked about news and those sort of high-fluting things. But of course, in a way, all of those values have to live in programmes that people just enjoy. And those programmes have to be both the same, but also, in a sense, have some other values, I think, if they're in a weird thing called public service broadcasting. What does the BBC mean for this weird thing we have called public service broadcasting? And what is it? What is it? Well, if you take a step back, we have a PSB framework ecosystem, which is, I think, the envy of the world. And it's built on some very simple principles. We know that facts matter. We know that accountability matters. We know that identity matters. And it's how those values are transmitted, the core of our PSB ecosystem. Now, our PSB ecosystem is quite complex. It isn't just the BBC. This is the public, the NBBC. It's Channel 4. It's S4C. It's also the commercial broadcasters, ITV, Channel 5, Scottish Ulster, Sky News, and even GB News are tied into aspects of our PSB impartiality and other systems. The system is there to try and ensure fairness and impartiality, but it's uniquely British. I've lived in America for five years. You can never have anything like we have here. I mean, it covers commitments to children's content to art, religion, drama, and entertainment. There are provisions around the minimum number of originated new hours that a channel can show, guaranteed access to sports events. We have a lot of work in our PSB ecosystem about making programs outside of the M25 corridor and equally pressure on reflecting the UK back to itself, as well as reflecting the UK internationally, both through things like the World Service, but also through program sales, which export British culture through shows all around the world. So we have a quite complex, quite unique ecosystem, and that's where things like this Channel 4 privatisation matter because they accept the ecosystem in unpredictable ways. And then when you look at the role of the BBC in this, I remember when I was hovering over, joining the BBC or taking over, staying with Job at Channel 4, Peter Salmon came to me and he said, look, I understand why you had been turned by the Channel 4 thing. He said, what you have to understand is we're in a universe and the BBC is the sum. Everything in this PSB universe rotates around the BBC. And it's true, the BBC sits at the centre of that PSB ecosystem. It sits at the centre in terms of standards, well in terms of competition for standards, competition for staff in terms of training, in terms of new ways of doing things. And it isn't just in terms of news and current affairs. It's also in terms of drama and comedy and entertainment. It's also, I mean, to take the Netflix comparison that the Secretary of State said we loved. One, you don't see Netflix in Ukraine. We also don't see them in Bob Noreges, you know, Shlandudno or Kikaldi. You know, the BBC provides a global to local TV radio online ecosystem of its own, which is unique and highly valued. And Mark has talked about, you know, how much people use it. People use it far more than they realise they use it. There was a really interesting study where they took the BBC off a group of people, a group of sort of BBC deniers. People said they never used it. They took it off them, stopped them from using it, and then they realised how much they used it and missed it. And to go all the way back to the point David made at the beginning. Now in this age of social media and misinformation and disinformation, the BBC sits at the centre of a whole network of trusted providers that matter, you know, facts matter. And Mark and I have sat through BBC meetings where we have beaten ourselves up over what other people might say might be the smallest transgressions. But the BBC still holds itself to a really, really high level and bar of accountability around impartiality and around getting it right. And, you know, I've worked to ITV and Channel 4 and in the States, nothing, there is nothing I've experienced like that, internal rigour, internal discipline, internal desire to do well, driven by this idea that everyone pays for us, everyone expects to be, you know, to be properly seen, reflected, heard, understood through the BBC. Sure, we made mistakes. I made mistakes. Mark made mistakes. You're always going to make mistakes. But it's the only organisation in the world I've worked on where you make a mistake and the public have a right to expect you to sort of deal with it. You know, you would look for letters to come in about your programme. And if letters came in, you were expected to answer them. And you don't get that kind of accountability in any other sort of broadcasting system that I've ever worked to. And I've worked to all of the ones in the UK, apart from Sky and GV News. Thank you, Pat. Can I, I mean, can I just ask you, you know, when you're making, how does it make a difference when you're setting out to make a programme? I don't know, you know, for some, when you're setting out to make a series of programmes for any demographic you want to choose, but that's going to be comedy. I'm thinking, actually, I'm thinking of the Steve McQueen films, which were quite audacious to protect. What goes through a sort of BBC head? It's, everybody wants it to be successful, but they also want what? Well, I think if you take the Steve McQueen films, which are, in part, within the BBC, a response to failures around racial diversity, then within the BBC, and I know how much they would have beaten themselves up over doing it, and when they decided to do it, they will want an Oscar director to direct these films. They're going to put these films, I mean, those Steve McQueen films, if I'm being honest, they were sort of, in tone, they were BBC Two films, but the BBC made a statement to put these films on BBC One, right, they got the sort of ratings that in a commercial broadcaster you'd be taken out and shot for because they weren't massive rating success, but the BBC put them on BBC One to make a statement, which is these films matter. This is our biggest channel, this is where we put our biggest shows, and even if this doesn't get a massive live audience, this is the showcase for these films, and that is a massive statement which the BBC will always make. There is an inherent desire to do the right thing, they may not always get it right, but there is an inherent desire to do the right thing, to right the wrong, and then to try and go beyond maybe what's been done before. Thank you ever so much. I'd just like you all perhaps just to reflect on, you know, we've got, it's been a wonderful story of the BBC having to build sort of such testaments. Why, why, why, why does it feel so cowed sometimes? Or am I wrong? That's, I mean, that's, sometimes it feels... I have a brief go if I might, I mean I'm, if anybody's told me so this before, but you know the BBC oscillates between projecting itself and being perceived as empirically arrogant and having a nervous breakdown, and sometimes, you know, there's no synchromesh between these two positions, and of course you feel the weight and the responsibility, and in many ways it's a good thing too, but of course if you feel it in the wrong way it becomes inhibiting, and then there's a crisis of perception. I remember after Hutton, it was 2004, I mean it's extremely dreadful, the loss of a director general popular, and the loss of a, you know, an extremely good chair in Gavin Davis in terms of complete understanding of what the BBC was about, and the place was having a nervous breakdown, and then you made an editorial decision, and people could only see the editorial decision refracted back through the lens of the latest crisis. You've bottled it, they would say, because of Hutton and because of the criticism, and you try to persuade yourself that you were doing it for the right reasons, and that you were doing it evidence-led, but always with the BBC there's a danger that it's so big and so much in the news and so commented on that people perceive it as being the victim of self-censorship and not being able sufficiently to resist pressure. I mean I fight back against it, I mean I know that individual decisions are made which sometimes look as if they're not courageous, sometimes may not even be courageous, but I don't think that the BBC, in the way that it makes its programs and decisions, is perpetually doing it because it feels beaten up and has to count to whatever the government of the day is, or whatever the mean average newspaper criticism will be. I think it's better than that, it was and I think it still is. Thank you. Can I just come in there? Yes, just thought, I mean when you do look at the whole history of the BBC, one of the things that strikes you when you're immersed in its written archives is the constant worrying. I mean a lot of people say there's far too much talking in the BBC, but the talking in a sense is where the quality resides. It's part of what you mentioned, that rigor, that constant worrying, are we getting it right? I mean the only thing I'd say is that I think in terms of impartiality, which I think is such a tricky thing to kind of, you know, to keep hold of, I think the one area that perhaps the BBC needs to worry about a little bit more is what Peter O'Born has written about. I mean he's written about what he calls a moral emergency, in other words that we do appear to be in a situation where, you know, traditionally, you know, the BBC has been impartial between different points of view, but how do you do that when it's clear that some of those views are not necessarily being articulated in good faith? In other words, sometimes it's lies and it's deliberately lying. How do you deal with that, I think, is something which the BBC is still not necessarily got the complete answer to? Perhaps there isn't an answer to it, but it feels as if the BBC has to catch up with a changing political atmosphere in that sense. Janelle, Janelle. Oh yeah, I think, like David just said, you know, I think a lot of audiences are very, or audiences or younger people are increasingly values driven, so they do see everything through the lens of their values, whether their values are the correct ones or the right ones to have, but they see things through their values and when they don't see their values reflected back to them, they see that as a bias or something that's wrong and are quite indignant. I think we just have an increasingly vocal audience, like someone said earlier, you know, people would write to you before, letters take time, they take effort, there's the strongest, the most caring people get in touch, now anyone can get in touch. So of course, I think as that happens, people do feel more nervous because it's almost an avalanche of feedback coming at you all the time, constantly about everything. Also, I think as the BBC, I mean, I think part of the solution to this for the BBC is to become more diverse and to better reflect the audiences that it serves. And I don't just mean that in party political centres, because one of the funny things about all of these bleeds, bleating on the rat, anti-Tauri bias is the number of prominent Tauris who worked for the BBC and still worked for the BBC. But I do think that if they had a greater range of racial, social, sexuality, diversity within the BBC, especially at the upper levels, the complexity of those debates would feed into the rigor that goes into some of the conversations would wheat some of these things out at an earlier stage. And people would feel more confident about them. I do feel sometimes when they misstep, it's because culturally, they're not quite sure on the ground that they're on in a pretty unforgiving, you know, I hate the phrase cancel culture, but the pile on on social media comes pretty quickly and it can be quite unnerving. So I do think that better reflect in the audience that they serve will help them will give them more confidence, but it's as a transition, you have to go through to get there and their partways for it. I'd say on that a bit of history here that Channel 4 got the territory of racial diversity in the UK early and very well, both in terms of programming, so they were substance and in terms of marketing and the two were connected. Can I just ask something? We treated most of the crises as if they were kind of, you know, people languishing, I mean, you know, Savill, the Lady Diana interview, these, I remember when somebody phoned me, when somebody, Jenny Abramsky, phoned me up about Savill. And, you know, it felt to me like the first crisis I'd seen in which it was the BBC versus the public actually. So they haven't all they haven't all been, they haven't, they may have been anguishing, but not always the right, you know, Netflix is about to make a programme about Marion, about the people that exposed Savill really, I mean, they're cutting out Liz, but I mean, you know, the BBC treated the two people who'd revealed that story best, just appallingly. So I mean, it's, you know, the anguish, yeah, okay, I mean, you know, the anguish isn't always spent in the right places. Past stories are multi-headed hydro, but Mark, for us, um... Well, for better or worse, I was in between having left the BBC the first time and rejoined at the second. I mean, I know a lot of the characters and however you look at it, it was a monumental stain on the BBC. And I mean, Savill's pedophilia before we go any further. And, you know, George Entwistle, the least likely person to be guilty of any moral crime in his personal behaviour, ends up losing his job over the mishandling of the journalism. And whatever, and actually Pat probably does know more than I do about it, but whatever, clearly the journalism was mishandled and a terrible price was paid for by the BBC in terms of public trust and quite understandably. So the BBC then went through a period of, you know, profound self-examination and external invigilation, which has produced a current set of guidelines and we'll see where that gets us to, but I have no reason to believe that they weren't put in with good faith and aren't having had some kind of an effect. Yeah, compare that to other environments at the moment where where you could have had a third-party investigation and a report. I mean, that's the thing about the BBC. People resign. People lose their jobs if they get this stuff wrong and you lose the faith of the public. The BBC is very quick that, you know, deputy heads roll, but heads roll as well at the BBC. And then the BBC uniquely comes in and invites, I mean, on Sabah, it was Nick Pollard wasn't it, from Sky to come in and just lay the organisation bare to the world. I mean, that is a unique BBC cleansing process. And I think it's worth pointing out that a lot of the documentation of these episodes in history, these recent episodes in history is there online. I mean, you want to find out about Sabah, you go to the BBC and you can download Dane Janet Smith's report. You can download Nick Pollard's report into what went wrong with the journalism at the time and so on. So it's sort of this accountability is really very, very striking, again, compared with other broadcasting institutions. We've got some questions in and I wanted to just people dive in. We've got one from Jamie Medhurst in Aberystwyth and he asks, which is another, I think, either a wonderful opportunity and or a can of worms. It's a complicated issue, you know, given that the BBC is being British, as it were, how does it reflect and how should it reflect better? And how is it going to relate to increasingly devolved nations? Wales is feeling very positive about the BBC. So is Scotland, but what's that to the centre? So how, what, Nick, that other tension, Jamie, who's brilliant, maybe himself, how does the BBC deal with that? So I'm an unexacted credit producer based in Wales, and I was wife of Dar, Jamie. I think what the BBC, I mean, some of you have been to Wales, been to Scotland, been to Northern Ireland. What the BBC has started to do is take those programmes which they were uniquely broadcasting within the nation and broadcasting them on the network and they need actually to do more of that. In fact, they could go further and let the nations commissioning things, commission directly into network television. At the moment, they have a dual tick system where somebody in the centre and somebody in the nations, but are really confident where they're doing it, will be safe to the nations. Right, Wales, you've got eight weeks, brings you to eight o'clock, off you go. That way, because what wasn't happening, you weren't seeing the nations reflected back into the rest of the UK. So that is one change. They're on that path, they started to do it, but in my book, they need to go further and they need to be bolder and they need to simplify it. That's really interesting and practical. It does pose problems for what is the BBC. I mean, British news feels to me a very problematic thing at the moment. Anybody do know you're smiling? No, I'm smiling because I'm smiling at the fact that it is a problematic thing, but as Pat just said and alluded to, it is about reflecting everybody back to themselves and not just in their silos. So we'll reflect you back to yourself over here, but in the mainstream we'll only reflect back what we think is mainstream and interesting. So I think it is about, like you say, like with the Stephen McQueen films, putting them on BBC One, making them accessible to all. Some people won't want to watch, but some people will watch and then they'll be enlightened and they'll have a new view of the BBC. But I do think, for me, one of the one of the biggest sea changes will be true diversity in leadership. You know, the day a report came out, there's in journalism across the piece and I'm just using journalism, that's why it was my space, but there's 45% women in terms of the field of journalism, but in leadership that falls to 28%. So we do need more reflective leadership teams because they make more reflective decisions. When I make a decision about what I think a white woman or a black man might like, not that we're homogenous groups because no one is a monolith, but my understanding is much less. And so when we have more women, women's stories are reflected better. When we have more people of color, their stories are reflected better. You know, in all of my time working in different newsrooms, I never really came across many Eastern Europeans working in newsrooms. I never really came across many people from different kinds of Chinese people working in newsrooms. It was tend to be the same kind of racial groups, although some of them much smaller, and that comes across in how we tell stories, it comes across in who we decide to face our stories. So black people get to face stories about black people, but you know, black people go to the dentist too, they have a doctor, they have a GP. So how do we make that story multifaceted? We have everyone at the decision-making table and that makes a massive difference. I'm prompted to think that just after the Second World War, almost the entire BBC was Eastern Europe, but they were just called things like Mike, or George, thinking of George Fisher. Anyway, there was a moment when the BBC was basically Eastern Europe. That's basically what it was. Thank you very much. Any other, I mean, I think there are real problems about, you know, that the nations are pulling, you know, Mark Drayford is the hero of Wales, and Nicola Sturgeon is the heroine of Scotland. I just, just something to add here, I mean, throughout the BBC's history, you get a sense in which the BBC, I mean, the BBC has a sort of internal contradiction in that it's attracted to the idea of, as it were, nation building and consensus and sort of unity and so on. It doesn't, I mean, you can see some of this discussion very early on in the 1920s, and if you think about, for instance, Wreaths and the Committee for Spoken English, which imposes, if you like, a kind of standardised Southern English as a sort of both in terms of pronunciation and accent and so on, a kind of bulldozing over, you know, regional accents and so on. But Wreaths' justification was a kind of equality of access. In other words, in his mind, it was, well, we need to make sure that no one is disadvantaged and everyone would be able to get on, get a job at the end of the 20s and the early 30s. This was important if they could speak properly. And of course, there was a very clear definition as far as he was concerned about what speaking properly was. But, you know, this sense of which the BBC sometimes papers over-differences. And you can see this actually, you know, in the 1950s with some of its coverage and some of its thinking about programs for immigrants. It was about assimilation, right? Yeah. It was about how do we make you more British? And on sort of pre-existing terms of what that meant. It wasn't, it was uncomfortable with the idea of cultural difference. And so the BBC in a sense has always, you know, at that stage, it was a slow starter with grappling with difference. I'll just say, in 1994, I was a reporter for BBC Newsroom Southeast and I got put into an Elocution lesson. So that thing didn't die out. It didn't work. It didn't work, thankfully. That was the, that was, so it was still around in the 90s. Claude Green has asked a slightly pickier question, I think, really interesting. Does it matter that the BBC is leaching talent? That's what he's really asking, you know, so Paul, Mer, Eddie Mer, you know, Andrew Marr. But it's pretty, it's pretty big. Yeah. Does it matter that the BBC is leaching talent? Let me have a go at that. Yes. Yeah. I mean, virtually all of those names, people I know and I admire a great deal. But the BBC, above all, is a talent organization. And it has these other attributes. It's owned by all of us. It's accountable to all of us. It's powerful. It's big. It's all of this sort of stuff. But the BBC is talent or nothing. It will be able to survive off its brand history for a while. But in the end, if it doesn't get a host of extremely good people, and now comes a tricky bit of the argument, very often to work at a discount. Not always. But if you can't get those people, then the alchemy goes. And that may be the biggest threat of all that comes out of something we've not talked about, and is very often talked about, which is the squeezing real-term funding on the BBC. So 30% over the last 10 years. So the BBC should not pay and pretty well never does pay the same as most of its broadcasting competitors for its senior talent. And of course, its disclosure requirements are different to the disclosure requirements of ITV and Sky and GB News for all that matter. And Gary Linnaker earns a lot of money, and Gary Linnaker is seriously good. And Gary Linnaker, if you, I don't know his BT paycheck, and it's none of my business, but I suspect that per hour he gets paid a heck of a lot less for doing stuff that he does on the BBC. And some of these people have gone because they require new challenges in their life. Andrew Ma will be a rather good example. Obviously, I'm actually completely a phenomenal broadcaster. And some of these people may have gone either because of that and because they're getting quite a lot more money. And these are people who are amourable, who have done 15, 20, 25 years for the BBC, but who in the final analysis get more elsewhere. The public resents it, the politicians capitalise on the resentment and not apply it. And from time to time, the BBC makes mistakes. Jonathan Ross pays too much. It was a bad contraction that happened because it was way out of line with whatever rational explanation could be made to the public about it. But on the whole, the BBC is not top dollar payer. It's top dollar for its talent. And then we come to the behind the scenes talent. The BBC has to have enough of a spectrum of creative possibilities for people like, well, all the people here. And it's 25 year olds who walk in from whatever background they are to want to do their best stuff for the BBC because they're working with other people who do their best stuff for the BBC and talent begets talent. And what really worries me about the funding squeeze is that fewer talented people will feel that they can afford to or want to come to the BBC, not only because they're getting paid, not as much as they might do elsewhere, but because they're just not enough creative possibilities. And that's death by strangulation and slow asphyxiation. And I really, really resent it. Can I just have a very, very quick, there's another question that's come in, just very quick. I mean, you know, what's going to happen, you know, we haven't talked about the funding, the BBC has been absolutely slaughtered. On the funding, you know, and we'll, as we go forward is going to be more sorted because of inflation. What's going to happen to the orchestras? Very quick answer. Is that the end of the BBC orchestra? Well, how many plans have there been? I mean, David, how many plans have there been? How many different headlines have we lived through where the BBC, somebody in the BBC comes up with an idea of snacking an orchestra. But suddenly the whole of Northern Ireland stroke Wales, stroke the BBC, the symphony goes, it's very, very hard thing to do, but there comes a point where it's just going to have to happen. And if the funding squeeze continues, I don't know how many things can be made to be sacrosanct to the BBC, not everything. I think we've got to sort of finalise that. You can't have everything and not pay for it, even though the BBC is the major source of funding round. And even so actually size, size matters actually, the capacity of the BBC to kind of invest the reservoir of talent, the cultural capital it can kind of contain, its ability to take the long term view rather than short term gain. You know, these are all things that at various points in history have come together. D-day, you know, the pulling together of engineering talent, reporting talent, presenting talent, managerial talent and so on. You know, the capacity to report extensively in Ukraine, the capacity to actually create BBC online, these have come through size, right, at the heft of the BBC in a very literal sense. So a small BBC is not just about it sort of, as it were, disappearing and moving to the margins. It's a fundamental threat to its ability to do big, great things that cost money. Well, Peter Ogburn has a rather trenching video out on social media at the moment. One of the things he talks about with the current administration in Downing Street is the attack on institutions. Yeah, the BBC is one of those great institutions which has institutional value and the diminishment of the institution is the thing we should be worried about. I think I'd have to wrap up there. I think that's that would have been another fascinating discussion. The fact that it's the best resistance to authoritarian anything is well made people and well made people have to have pleasure and delight and joy. And the BBC has always kind of understood joy at its best, as well as the facts, you know, joy and facts. So I'd like to thank our absolutely spectacularly interesting team we could have gone on for their time. I'd like to thank the audience for coming. I'd like to remind you that the news exhibition will startle you. It's got 16th century witches beside extraordinary modern things and amazing oral stuff. It's a really good thing for a grandchild's half term. Can I, I couldn't, couldn't recommend and you can have a good ice cream in the front. I'd like to thank the British Library in itself, the place where so many of us have thought so many of us, you know, we thought the thoughts that make thinking exciting. And I'd like to thank our panel again for a really interesting discussion. And I think we have to, it behoves us all to do something to support as well as criticise and develop an institution. So it's there to be, to stand on our side, not anybody else's side for the next century. So thank you all very much for a wonderful discussion and thank you to the audience and good night.