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Sir John Birt |
John Birt, Baron Birt (born 10 December 1944), was an influential if controversial figure in British broadcasting. He was Director-General of the BBC from 1992 to 2000.
After a highly successful career in commercial television, first at Granada and then at LWT, Birt was brought in as deputy director-general of the BBC in 1987 for his current affairs expertise. The forced departure of Director-General Alasdair Milne following pressure from the Thatcher government1 required someone at the top, preferably from outside the corporation, with editorial and production experience: Milne had been summarily replaced by Michael Checkland, an accountant.
Birt was credited with re-structuring the BBC in accordance with Conservative Party privatisation policies, but in the face of much internal opposition. His supporters insist he saved the corporation from possible government sell-off, and properly equipped it to face the digital age. Birt later became an adviser to the Blair government.
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John Birt was born in Liverpool to a Catholic father, a manager at the Firestone tyre company, and a Protestant mother. He was raised as a Roman Catholic. Birt was educated at St Mary's College, Liverpool and St Catherine's College, Oxford, where he got a third-class degree in engineering.
From 1966 to 1971 Birt was at Granada Television. He devised the magazine programme Nice Time and, as a researcher at World in Action, staged in July 1967 a melodramatic post-trial encounter between Mick Jagger and senior figures in the British establishment. Jagger, just released following drugs charges, descended from a helicopter to discuss on the lawn matters of the day with, among others, the editor of The Times and the Bishop of Woolwich.
Birt in 1969 became joint editor of World in Action with Gus McDonald, a former Trotskyist, later himself to become a government minister and a member of the House of Lords. Birt later moved to LWT, where he was founding editor of the current affairs programme Weekend World. He became head of current affairs at LWT and, later, controller of features and current affairs. In the mid-1970s he took a break from LWT to produce David Frost's interviews with disgraced former US President Richard Nixon. Birt returned to LWT as director of programmes in 1982. During this period he revived the career of his old friend, the Liverpool singer Cilla Black, who in due course became the highest paid female performer on UK television.
Birt formed a close working relationship with his boss at LWT, Michael Grade, which would later go sour when both worked at the BBC. 2
While deputy director-general under Michael Checkland, a former accountant, Birt also served as the BBC's director of news and current affairs. Then and subsequently, in the wake of the Thatcher government's bitter spats with Milne, he became the most hands-on editor-in-chief in the corporation's history.
With the then Weekend World presenter Peter Jay, Birt had in 1974 contributed to The Times a series of three much-discussed articles on the topic of television journalism. Most television news and current affairs contained, they argued, a "bias against understanding": mere pictures had taken precedence over analysis. They advocated instead what became known as "a mission to explain." The model was Weekend World.
In accordance with this thesis and, no doubt, with Milne's earlier agonies in mind, makers of news and documentary programmes were required to outline their finished product in writing before setting out with the cameras. The news correspondent Kate Adie considered such methods were at odds with the "obligation to report". 3 Fred Emery a former presenter of Panorama, a direct rival to Weekend World and thus a prime test-bed for the new supervised approach, said it gave rise to "a certain blandness".
Birt's promotion to Director-General in 1992 caused immediate controversy. On top of all the internal opposition, it was then revealed that, though Director-General, Birt was being employed on a freelance consultancy basis in order to write off numerous personal expenses against tax, including "secretarial services" from his wife. While perfectly acceptable in the private sector, such practices were considered unacceptable in a Director-General of the BBC. Under political and public pressure, Birt became a BBC employee. He had to sell his shares in LWT, part of his final salary settlement with the company. When in 1994 LWT was bought by Granada, Birt lost out on a windfall of what would have been several million pounds.
Consistent with Conservative Party policy, Birt introduced a "virtual internal market" at the BBC. Individual departments were required to charge each other for services, and even to compete against each other for contracts. Under what was called the "Producer Choice" initiative, programme producers were required to use outside suppliers if they were cheaper. Faced with high rental fees from the BBC's record library, producers for a time found it cheaper to buy records from local record shops. In-house facilities were closed or stood idle as a result, it was alleged, of "creative accounting" methods. Apparently unprofitable departments, including the Radiophonic Workshop, were suddenly axed after decades of service. Shortly before his death, Dennis Potter, Britain's foremost television playwright, labeled Birt a "croak-voiced Dalek". The allusion stuck. Birt's use of impenetrable jargon became known as "Birtspeak", a phenomenon regularly mocked to this day in the satirical magazine Private Eye, complete with miniature Dalek caricature of the man himself.
Birt's changes were partially dismantled by his successors Greg Dyke, himself sacked following pressure from the Blair government, and Mark Thompson.
Birt's defenders include the prominent journalists John Lloyd and Polly Toynbee. It has been argued that without his reforms and his ability to accommodate the Thatcher government, 4 the renewal of the BBC's operating charter in the 1990s was in jeopardy. Birt was responsible for modernisation of much BBC output, including the removal from BBC Radio 1 of veteran disk jockeys such as Dave Lee Travis and Simon Bates. Radio 1 re-branded itself as more youth-oriented, but the station's audience total declined nonetheless.
Birt invested heavily in digital broadcasting and sought government approval to direct licence fee money into the new internet service bbc.co.uk. Such ventures were at the time criticised by some as being to the detriment of the BBC's core programming. John Tusa, a former boss of the BBC World Service said, "You have to love an organisation in order to reform it."
In 1998 BBC programme makers were ordered to refrain from any mention of the private life of the cabinet minister Peter Mandelson. In a live interview on BBC TV"s Newsnight the journalist and former Conservative MP Matthew Parris had identified Mandelson as a fellow homosexual. Mandelson, a former editor of Weekend World, and Birt had been colleagues at LWT. There was press speculation that Birt himself had initiated the directive.
Birt was awarded a knighthood, and in 1999 a life peerage. He took his seat in the House of Lords in March 2000 as a crossbencher.
In 20015 Tony Blair appointed Birt as his personal advisor, for what was termed "Blue Skies thinking"6; it is thought his long-standing friendship with Peter Mandelson had a role in his appointment.7 His role in government has been controversial, since as a special advisor, rather than a civil servant, he is not formally obliged to face questions from House of Commons Select committees. In October 2002 an uproar was created when it emerged that the government had specifically asked him not to appear in front of the transport select committee, at a time when he was in charge of long-term transport strategy. Earlier that year, a paper of Birt's had proposed a second network of motorways operated as tolls to counter the problems of traffic congestion.8 In parallel, he has subsequently become a part-time consultant with McKinsey & Company, which some see as a conflict of interest with his government involvement. In December 2005 he quit his role as advisor to Tony Blair to join private equity firm Terra Firma, "for personal reasons".
Since February 2004, Birt has been on the board of PayPal.
The Financial Times reported at the beginning of July 2005 that Birt's office ceiling at No 10 Downing Street had fallen in. No one was injured.9
Returning to his earlier career on 26 August 2005, Birt delivered his second MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival. Partly a review of his professional life as a broadcaster, he also criticised the "tabloidisation" of intellectual concerns. More importantly, he argued that Channel Four should receive financial help, in order to preserve "public service broadcasting", which was taken as advocacy of the BBC sharing its licence fee with Channel Four. He also mentioned that his long standing feud with Michael Grade had been resolved, but the speech as a whole was not admired by many figures in the industry. 10
In 2006, Lord Birt joined the consulting firm Capgemini. He will advise the firm, with a focus on its consulting services in the public sector and telecom, media and entertainment.11
He is currently working with Infinis, the UK's largest independent generator of renewable power from landfill gas.
John Birt's first wife was the American-born Jane Lake. They met in 1963, whilst she was an art student at Oxford. The couple married in Washington, D.C. in 1965, and have two children, Eliza and Yahya (formerly Jonathan) Birt.
In April 2005, Birt admitted a twelve-month affair with Eithne Wallis, a divorced mother of three and a former head of the National Probation Service.12. The divorce cost him just £1,500, after he also admitted adultery in his court papers.
Birt and Wallis' marriage took place on 16 December 2006 at Islington Register Office. It was attended by neither set of children, and cost just the registrar's fees of £103.50, plus £30 to post the notice of marriage. A reception was held after the ceremony at the fashionable London St John restaurant in Smithfield13, attended by, among others, the politician Peter Mandelson and Trevor Philips, chairman of the Commission for Equalities and Human Rights, both former colleagues at LWT. The bridegroom's speech paid tribute to his new wife's efficiency in her post at the Probation Service.citation needed
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| Preceded by Michael Checkland 1987–1992 |
Director-General of the BBC 1992–2000 |
Succeeded by Greg Dyke 2000–2004 |
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