Electric Trainer

Viral whinging at the BBC

At this time of year it's customary to look back and reflect on life while gazing into the middle distance (or into the bottom of a glass of mulled wine). But today I found myself nipping back about 15 years.

I was transported by a fascinating - if depressing - article in the Guardian describing BBC staff moaning about Mark Thompson, the DG.

The bit that caught my eye was the fact that staff are using the compulsory "Safeguarding Trust" seminars as an opportunity to do the moaning.

Years ago, somewhere around the Jurassic era, all BBC staff had to attend compulsory seminars about the new BBC internal market - part of John Birt's Producer Choice revolution. Everyone was going to be a business unit and would sell their expertise to everyone else, even if they were sitting in the same office.

We all know how that ended in tears, but back then, being a naive young thing, I trolled along to these events looking forward to finding out about the brave new world and sharing views with my BBC colleagues.

I came away two hours later feeling like all my optimism had been sucked out of me. The seminar had become a conduit for all the bile that people were feeling about the new BBC, and the new DG in particular. I came from a relatively happy part of the BBC, and had never heard anything like it.

That was in the 1990s. I suppose nowadays we'd call is something like 'viral whinging'.

It looks as if "Safeguarding Trust" has been acting as a similar conduit for all the discontent that's been building up in the BBC over the last couple of years.

This is a shame, as there's nothing inherently wrong with examining the best way to keep an audience's trust.

So is it a problem? Well I suspect it might be for the sanity of BBC staff at the moment. Being forced to go on a seminar about trust when you'd rather be safeguarding your own job (or department) must feel like re-pointing the walls of Jericho - nice to have but ultimately a waste of everyone's time.

I see that the Guardian suggests senior staff are joining in the moaning and not passing back the bad news to Mr Thompson. That happened with Producer Choice as well.

I suspect the difference this time is that Mark Thompson doesn't realise how unpopular he is. John Birt was well aware and didn't care.

Business advice for thesps and other freelances

I'm always on the look out for places that support one-person businesses and freelances. Working for yourself is hard enough so all tips and tricks are very welcome.

I was asked to supply some blurb for The Stage the other day, and their Dear John section is a wonderful font of wisdom.

Check it out.

Approximately the size of Wales

It's not easy to come up with quick and easy comparisons that make it clear how big, small, expensive, or devastating an issue might be.  It's something we often talk about during media training sessions.

Traditionally, burning trees in the Amazon are 'roughly the size of Wales', or perhaps 'twice the size of Belgium'. A satellite is usually 'the size of a freezer' or weighs 'as much as a London bus'.

These are brave - and probably doomed - stabs at the tricky task of grabbing the audience's attention.

Yesterday two politicians used two different arresting analogies on BBC Radio 5 Live while describing prison policies. They caught my attention because they were both arresting and meaningless.

The first comment was:

"There are twice as many people in prison than there are in the Royal Navy."

The second:

"It costs more to keep someone in prison than to send them to Eton."

I haven't got a clue how accurate these comparison are, but they are interesting because they have no relation to each other.

There is no meaningful link between the Royal Navy and prisons, so the comparison quickly breaks down.

The Eton comment was presumably used to show both Eton and the prison system in a bad light. At least that was the effect it had on me.

These phrases just made me want to find out how many people are in the Navy and (more intriguingly) how much does is cost to send someone to Eton. The fact that I haven't got a clue about either of these figures underlines the weakness of the analogies.

At least I know the size of Wales. I used to live there.

Keeping track of invoices - the low tech way

There are any number of software providers who will sell you some clever widget that will alert you to outstanding payments. Personally, I prefer something simpler and much more low tech - a whiteboard.

I'm not talking about anything huge - just a small version. Mine leans up against the wall just to the right of my computer screen.

It's so handy that every time I send an invoice I simply pick up the whiteboard and add the number, the client, the amount and the date. When I get paid I just cross out that line. When I get to the bottom of the board I rub everything out and start again at the top.

See if you can spot it:

It's disarmingly simple and means I never lose sight of payments I should have received.
As for getting paid on time...that'll be the subject of another posting.

Trust and the broadcaster's dilemma

In amongst all the very public soul searching by broadcasters in recent weeks I've been looking into my own dark past, trying to remember whether I might have misled any of my audience.

Of course I no longer broadcast for the BBC, but in the spirit of the age I thought I'd better check myself out.

One incident does spring to mind...

About a million years ago I was a breakfast show presenter on BBC Radio York. I remember meeting a fan of the programme who claimed I "wasn't as tall as I sounded".

Should I turn myself in?

BBC and the royal scoop that wasn't

The BBC has described this week's royal row as regrettable "human error". The interesting question is which human made the error.

It looks like the mistake may have been compounded by the fact that the offending clips of the Queen definitely not stomping away from a photo shoot where compiled by the company that's making the documentary, and not the BBC itself.

Much has been made in the press of the BBC needing to put its house in order. This may be the BBC's responsibility, but it becomes much more difficult when production is outsourced.

I meet many freelances working in independent production who have to flit from job to job and know that they are only as good as their last position. There is no security and very little concept of training and development.

It doesn't make you a bad person, but the pressures to stay ahead of the pack are enormous. Central tennets of public service broadcasting are often not uppermost in the mind.

Contrast that with the rigour with which the BBC trains its journalists and the tonnage of bricks that would come down on any staffer who mislead the viewers in such a high profile way.

But the juggernaut of outsourcing rumbles on. In such a competitive media world I suspect this week's human error won't be the last.

Alan Johnston Freed!

It's rare to wake up to the Radio 4 news and be overjoyed at the first words you hear. The end of Alan Johnston's ordeal is good news in anybody's book.

Cynics will argue that any Brit who works in Gaza is asking to be kidnapped. But that misses the point. The respect shown towards Alan Johnston by Palestinians as well as others around the world demonstrates that professionalism and calm impartiality are a tremendously powerful force.

It will be interesting to see whether the international attitude to Hamas changes as a result of its role in Alan Johnston's release. Nothing will happen quickly, but this could be a catalyst.

Fascinating too to hear his abductors described in reports as one of Gaza's 'criminal clan'. That echoes (co-incidentally I suspect) the change in terminology from the Brown government following last week's incidents in London and Glasgow.

Suddenly it feels like we're trying to tackle common criminals rather than wage a war on some kind of -ism. Personally I feel more comfortable with the new approach.

Top tip 2 - We all hate filing

One of the reason people hate filing so much is that they'd rather be doing something more exciting.  Unfortunately if you run your own business and have an office at home you can't avoid it.

The trick is to make the filing so easy that you can't put it off. Don't use filing cabinets for the stuff you need to deal with every day. A filing system that relies on unlocking filing cabinets is doomed to fail; all you will do is put the stuff in a pile on any clear surface - and leave it there.

So have a little shelf within arm's reach and keep things like invoices, receipts and current project files nice and handy.

Another good tip is to touch any piece of paper only once. Never put it in an 'in tray' to deal with later. Just put it straight away in the place that it belongs. If you're not sure where it belongs it probably needs to go in the shredder.

Any more filing tips? I'd love to hear them.

On winning awards

I was delighted to read that the Guardian student media awards are to have a broadcast category once again. It's a little reported fact that there always used to be one. I know, as I won it in 1981 with a programme I'd made for University Radio York. It always struck me as odd when the student radio award was dropped a few years later.

I agree with Paddy O'Connell that it's a good thing to win. I have no doubt the award helped me get my first job at the BBC, even though the winning entry was just a bit of radio fluff about a trip down the Roman sewers of York. (It may have been full of shit, but it was classy archaeological shit.)

My main memory of the win was receiving a plaque from the Guardian's James Cameron. I was just proud to be in the same room as this legendary correspondent, and here he was shaking my hand and congratulating me. It made me feel the world was mine for the taking.

Not sure I've lived up to that dream , but I still have happy memories of the experience.

Princess Diana, Channel 4, and user-generated content

This week's fascinating documentary about the role (or lack of it) of the paparazzi in Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed's deaths may have been painful for their families, but it didn't deserve some of the more hysterical reactions in the press.

More interesting was the fact that it seems to have split the TV industry down the middle. 53% of respondents in a Broadcast magazine poll say they thought that Channel 4 was wrong to show the programme without cuts.

I'm at a bit of a loss to know where the cuts could have been made, given how carefully the programme was treading. Presumably the poll was used as a protest vote against a channel that seems to be fast running out of friends.

Meanwhile did you notice how none of the 'ordinary' passers-by in that Paris tunnel didn't just whip out their camera-phones? Oh, hang on. Perhaps that's because they weren't invented then.

It makes you wonder what the reaction of the French police would have been if the professional paps had been joined by some citizen journalists. Would they have been rounded up too? Possibly. Would videos of the crash have been on YouTube within an instant? Certainly.