George Entwhistle's Dutch Uncle

The Dutch have a nice saying.  In its slightly sanitised version, it goes, "If my Aunty had a beard, she'd be my Uncle".  I have been reminded of this in the wake of the surprise resignation of BBC Director General George Entwhistle.

Amongst everyone else, his mother, and Uncle Tom Cobley, veteran presenter David Dimbleby has been putting himself about in the media on the subject of the Entwhistle resignation, appearing on the Today programme this morning and writing an article in the Torygraph.  I always thought of Dimbleby as an archetypal paternalistic Corporation Man, but apparently not.  "The trouble is", he writes, "that the BBC in recent years has throttled itself with its own bureaucracy . . . It is over managed and badly managed so that no one knows how or where decisions are taken . . . George was a product of that bureaucracy - had risen speaking its language - and that language was his downfall".

It's that last point which rings a bell.  If you have an organisation which dedicates itself to management speak, to becoming a blue-skies-thinking producer-choice best-practice human-resources kind of organisation, inevitably the people who rise to its top are the kind of people who thrive in that environment.  They must be willing not just to go along with all the balderdash - that's not enough - they must believe in it.  Entwhistle evidently believed, and that's one of the reasons why he got to be D-G.

But almost by definition someone who believes can't really lead, because leadership is often the antithesis of this touchy-feely let's-have-a-brainstorming-session-in-a-country-house-hotel way of management; and that's why, at the first sign of trouble, Entwhistle has been found out.

As Dimbleby says, Entwhistle shouldn't have resigned.  He should have pointed out that he didn't make the Newsnight programme, or put in place the regime under which it was made.  He should have pointed out that Newsnight staff were simply guilty of bad journalism.  He should have got the culprits into his office, locked the door, banged their heads together, given them the hairdryer and sent them out a quarter of an hour later mute and shattered with a boot up the backside.  Told to do better or else.

Had Entwhistle been this kind of person of course, he wouldn't have got the D-G's job.  "If my Aunty had a beard, she'd be my Uncle".  And there's the rub.  People who adhere to the Alex Ferguson school of management do not, I suspect, prosper at the BBC.  And of course had he actually done what I've suggested, the programme makers would have filed a complaint against him, resigned, sued for constructive dismissal and then been compensated handsomely.

And funnily enough, that's exactly what has happened to Entwhistle.  He has been given a year's salary - £450,000 - to cheer him on his way.

Just think of the programmes you could make with that.

Clive Dunn - meet Elliott Carter

Following the recent news that Elliott Carter has died aged 103, it's sad to hear Dad's Army actor Clive Dunn has today joined the composer beyond the Pearly Gates.

It won't surprise followers of this blog, if any, that I am not a fan of Carter's music.  Too much of it just sounded like a big racket to me, though I once heard Nicholas Daniel playing his Oboe Concerto, a late work which I thought was just about the best that high modernism could possibly be considering that it managed without triadic harmony, regular rhythm or recognisable repetition.  You couldn't hum it, but it was the best argument I've ever heard for the proposition that it was possible to write listenable squeaky gate music.  It made Boulez sound like an amateur.

The Guardian's obituarist noted that in mid-career Carter "made use of a highly systematised harmonic system, involving tables of all possible permutations of a given set of intervals.  Manipulating these systems involved immense labour and copious sheaves of preliminary sketches (well over a thousand pages for A Symphony of Three Orchestras)".

Reader, I must confess that I too once wasted time and trees in the same fashion.

"But from the 80s", the obit continues, "Carter increasingly composed free-style, by ear".

Hence the Oboe Concerto.  For me the moment of revelation came when I actually succeeded in getting one of my laboriously composed behemoths performed by a professional orchestra.  I returned from the first rehearsal devastated.  The small part of me which feared the result might be unlistenable was thumpingly vindicated.  Not long after when I began to write my first symphony I simply sat down at the piano and forced myself to write whatever came into my head.  I have never looked back.

To turn to another popular entertainer, Clive Dunn was made famous by his role as Corporal Jones in Dad's Army.  I can't think of any programme which has introduced more catch-phrases into the English language.  "Stupid boy Pike" was Captain Mainwaring, of course, and "We're all doomed" Private Frazer.  But "Don't panic!", "They don't like it up 'em!" and "Permission to speak" were all Corporal Jones.  Just thinking about them makes me laugh.

Clive Dunn also had a sideline as a singer.  If he and Elliott Carter should meet Upstairs, I like to think that Dunn will treat the composer to a rendition of his 1970 hit "Grandad".  Now that would be an event almost worth dying to witness.

Jimmy Savile and the BBC - believe in better

I feel slightly sorry for the BBC over all the shenanigans over Jimmy Savile.  After all, plenty of other organisations - hospitals, charities - fell for the cigar-toting kiddy-fiddler and facilitated his sordid gropings on their premises; but they aren't being lacerated in the public prints in quite the same way.

Having said that there is a case to answer, and whilst it may be true that nothing was known for certain about Savile's various exploitations, there was an easy way to make sure they didn't carry on - stop employing him.  It would have been good if that obvious way out had been taken, and that might end up being the BBC's biggest mistake.

It's hard to imagine any commercial organisation beating its breast via the hair shirt as the BBC is doing now.  Credit to it.  I suppose you could argue that the Corporation has an obligation to try and do the right thing that Sky, for example, wouldn't have, because we, the licence-fee payers, don't have any choice but to carry on funding it, paedophile employees or no, whereas if Murdoch and his men had done something similar we could always take our subs elsewhere.

Which brings me to the thing which must humiliate the BBC the most.  Of all the indignities forced on staff, there can be few more galling than the appointment to the chair of one of its Savile inquiries than a former head of Sky News.  It's come to something when someone who used to work for one of Rupert Murdoch's organisations is regarded as more trustworthy than one of the Corporation's own.

Believe in better?  Believe in bitter.

Andrew Mitchell cops it at last

A few weeks ago I pointed out how strange it was that the media wanted to us to judge Tory Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell's row with Downing Street Police in the light of the public service and self-sacrifice of the officers murdered in East Manchester. This at a time when news stories distinctly less flattering to the police were freely available for comparison, not the least being the revelation that the police lied repeatedly over the Hillsborough tragedy. Since then there have been others, for instance the unedifying spectacle of an officer recorded in the back of a police car telling a suspect, "You will always be a nigger".

However the press have finally got their man.  On the Radio 4 news tonight - Andrew Mitchell finally resigns.

The next story?  About a murder investigation abandoned because of a mistake by a police officer rendering crucial evidence inadmissable.

Yes, the police are corrupt, racist, incompetent, violent and dishonest.  Except when it comes to monstering the Chief Whip.  Then they are paragons of public service.

The bell tolls, but not just for the Guardian

A story in the Torygraph yesterday reports that senior figures at the Guardian "are seriously discussing a move to an entirely online operation".  It's well known that the Graun has been losing money hand over fist for years, and that the paper is only propped up by revenue from Auto Trader, but it was news to me that a situation which clearly couldn't go on indefinitely might be coming to an end sometime soon.

I am of course too grown up to believe everything I read in the Torygraph, and their story, which seems to have originated in a blog called More About Advertising, was swiftly rubbished by Graun media writer / stooge Roy Greenslade on the paper's website.  "The truth is", he wrote, " that the Guardian isn't about to do any such thing".

When you pick at this a little, it starts to come apart.  The Torygraph story said senior figures were "seriously discussing" closing the print edition, whereas Greenslade denied something rather different - he denied that the print edition was going to be closed.  He didn't deny they were discussing closing it.

A lawyer's point, you may say; but one of the things a law degree taught me is to read carefully what people write.  Moreover, as someone on the website commented, "the steps are like this:  it is impossible for us to do this; it is possible, but we are not going to consider doing it; we have considered doing it, but that doesn't mean we will do it; we always said we were going to do this".  It seems to me that at the moment the Graun is probably at the third stage.

I have been reading the Guardian for about thirty years.  The era during which I saw myself as a Guardian-reader in the technical sense probably began to fade at about the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.  It seemed obvious to me that the choice facing the Blair government then was not between one thing which was self-evidently bad (war) and another self-evidently good (no war), but between two things self-evidently bad - war on the one hand, and more Saddam Hussein on the other.  Not only was the real nature of this dilemma not reflected in the paper's comment (which was virulently against the invasion), but the self-righteous and self-congratulatory tone of its staff and readership as reflected in the paper seemed to me to show a total lack of awareness of its agonising nature.  That George W Bush was the architect of the scheme seemed to them enough, whereas to me this was an object lesson in the principle that just because you don't like the person making an argument that doesn't mean they are necessarily wrong.

This opened up a chink between the Graun and me which widened over the rest of the decade as it began to occur,  about 2004-5, that Gordon Brown's economic miracle was a chimera.  Our prosperity was based on unsustainable debt, I thought, Brown's public spending was unaffordable, and when the era of easy credit was over, we would have to start paying it back.  Blind to the mortal blow this struck at the heart of Social Democracy, the Graun was hailing Brown's skill and arguing that public spending should be higher still.

It didn't help that at this time the only columnists for whom reality seemed to have dawned were the great Frank Field and the paper's economics correspondent, Larry Elliott.  However the paper kept Elliott well away from the leader page, where economic matters were dealt with by Martin Kettle and Adity Chakrabortty, the latter a thorough clown whom I have spent some time rubbishing on this blog. Elsewhere Polly Toynbee railed against privilege, despite being levered into Oxbridge with one A Level by virtue of her father's contacts, and despite being very nicely off with a holiday home in Tuscany.

The paper endorsed the Lib Dems at the last election, outraging much of its readership and staff, and then threw its hands up in horror when the party, which any fool knows has quite a significant right-of-centre element, promptly joined forces with the Tories.

The Guardian shows very few signs of joining the real world five years on from the Credit Crunch.  Despite the economic virus sweeping through Europe in the form of the single currency, the double dip recession is all George Osborne's fault; whereas just a little more stimulus, borrowed from the evil money markets or taxed from the greedy fat cats, would set us back on the road to prosperity again.  Tax avoiders are wicked, except when it is Guardian Media Group itself which wants to use Channel Island tax provisions to acquire Emap.  Freedom of speech is an unalloyed good, just as long as you don't say anything the moderators on the paper's website don't like.

Nowhere in the Guardian's Weltanschauung is there the slightest flicker of acknowledgement that the spending supporting British living standards has to be earned, and if that spending is to continue, we have to compete on world markets.  That this notion carries overtones of a grocer's daughter from Grantham causes me as much distress as it does anyone else, but once again the fact that I didn't like Maggie Thatcher (and I didn't) does not (pace George W Bush) mean that she was wrong.

Funnily enough, we still get the Guardian delivered, and still read it at a mind-crushingly early hour of the morning with a cup of tea.  I could get another newspaper instead, but the Times is desperately boring, and if I suggested the Torygraph my wife would crush me like an insect.  So in the broader sense I am still a Guardian reader after all.  And while I can't suppress a touch of schadenfreude at the prospect of the loss of the liberal left's house magazine, part of me would die with it.  And the bell would not just be tolling for the Graun, but for the print media generally.  Anyone who loves newspapers, as I do, should be very wary of premature celebration.

Bring Up the Bodies wins the Booker

The replacement of Stella Rimington as chair of the Booker judges by Peter Stothard, editor of the TLS, has had predictable consequences.  Rimington's much derided "readability" has gone, and "literariness" has come storming back.  I'm glad about this, because I thought Bring Up the Bodies, which has taken this year's prize, a much better novel than Julian Barnes' 2011 winner, The Sense of An Ending.  I found Barnes' book very slight, crashing to the ground, like so many contemporary English novels, over some very basic plausibility hurdles.

I've written about both these books before, but am more convinced than ever that whilst Bring Up the Bodies is a tour de force, incorporating an ambiguous meshing of first and third person narrative styles that I have never encountered before, it tells us little about Thomas Cromwell, its protagonist.  Cromwell is clearly a ruthless fixer, but lacks the venality expected of ruthless fixers, and lacks any other qualities which might have explained why someone we find so sympathetic should be willing to skewer his enemies in such a cold-eyed manner.  There is an extent to which everyone is hard to pin down, and elusiveness is part of the human condition; but in Mantel's book Cromwell seems to me not so much elusive as hardly there at all.

As for her grasp of the period, all the detail is there, and it is never showy.  But neither does she seem to have understood that those people 500 years ago were, as well as being the same as we are, also utterly different.  Mantel has got the sameness, but that's all.

Lady Sybil and the Dead Parrot

Watching Downton Abbey on Sunday I was reminded that nothing ruins a story as much as the intrusion of the real world outside its confines.  We all know there's a puppet master outside the narrative, but woe betide the artiste that allows us to notice the strings being pulled.  It kills involvement at a stroke.  There's a Margaret Attwood novel, Alias Grace, where the author dangles two alternative versions of a story in front of us for - what seemed to me like - the last third of the book.  "For Heaven's sake", I wanted to shout at the author, "Make your flippin' mind up!"

At a rather less exalted level than the grumpy Canadian, on Downters the fragrant Jessica Brown Findlay, alias Lady Sybil, was misdiagnosed in pregnancy by snooty consultant Tim Pigott-Smith.  Piggot-Smith is no more appealing now than when he was a pervy flogger in Jewel in the Crown all those years ago, and I wonder whether his life has been ruined by association with the horrible characters he has to play.

Anyway, while Brown Findlay was croaking quite movingly of child-birth complications, behind it all lay another complication - she has had offers of work in LA.  I found it impossible to put this out of my mind.  Nothing confirms Downters descent into a posh soap than the realisation that Lady Sybil was being written out of the story.  Moreover, it wasn't even Julian Fellowes pulling the strings, but Brown Findlay's agent.

RIP Downters.  RIP Lady Sybil.  Not dead, just gone to Hollywood.