Jana Bennett, The Guardian

Monday, September 10, 2007

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'It's not great to have people arguing in public': The BBC's No 3, Jana Bennett, raps Paxman's knuckles and talks about the corporation's imminent budget cuts. By James Silver

When the first instalment of this interview took place, Wimbledon was in full flow, Gordon Brown had been PM for just seven days and the words "RDF", "the Queen" and "walks out in a huff" had yet to be heard in the same sentence.

Jana Bennett was in business-as-usual mode as she was about to reach her first 100 days as director of BBC Vision - a newly created mega-division designed to place the corporation at the forefront of the multi-platform digital age. Then "events" got in the way, after BBC1 controller Peter Fincham "misrepresented the Queen" at his channel's autumn launch.

The storm over the affair fizzled out into more general, industry-wide soul-searching, while the corporation awaits the findings of an inquiry by former executive Will Wyatt. However, over the past fortnight, a fresh row erupted when two of its most respected broadcasters lashed out about the likely impact of looming across-the-board cuts - described by some as "salami-slicing" - made necessary by a lower-than-expected licence-fee settlement.

While delivering the MacTaggart lecture at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival, Newsnight anchor Jeremy Paxman said the programme's future was in jeopardy if the latest round of cuts were implemented. A week later Today's John Humphrys told the Independent that "if continuing to fund channels like BBC3 and BBC4 means the price to pay is that there must be damaging cuts to key programmes, then I don't believe that is a price worth paying".

Bennett is quick to defend her channels, but she also issues a gentle though unmistakeable admonishment to the star broadcasters. "Obviously it's not great to have people arguing in public," she says, "but it's inevitable that, at a time when you're having to work out where to invest your resources, you'll get passionate voices arguing their corners and not taking a wider perspective about all the different audiences the BBC has to serve.

"The discussion about what we think the BBC needs to do, with the licence fee being what it is, does involve efficiencies and productivity as well as reprioritisation. All that is part of the set of discussions with both the executive and the BBC Trust, and it's heading for quite a clear resolution over the next few weeks."

Does she agree with the suggestion made by unnamed Vision executives that the veteran newsmen are guilty of abusing their privileged positions? Her response is diplomatic. "They are not management and it's not surprising there are different passionately held views at the BBC." What does she think of their views? A pause. "Well, I don't think they're particularly rounded."

Bennett - who is tipped by many to become the first woman to lead the BBC - has a reputation for being hard to pin down. Her conversation is peppered with indecipherable buzzwords and phrases such as "three-dimensional scheduling", "For Me content", "evergreen value" programming and "Big TV", which doesn't refer to anything you can buy at Dixons.

Officially the third most powerful person at the corporation, overseeing a programming budget of £1.4bn, Bennett has a vast empire. She is in overall charge of all of the BBC's domestic television channels as well as overseeing content on UKTV and BBC America. She heads up commissioning within the BBC's new genre-led groups - Fiction, Knowledge, Children and Entertainment - on top of all inhouse TV and multimedia "content creation". And as if that is not enough, she runs Operations, which includes production modernisation, rights and commercial, as well as business development. When she gets home at night she must need to lie down in a darkened room with a wet flannel over her face.

The need for that darkened room must have been particularly acute in the wake of "Crowngate". When asked about the episode, Bennett will only say: "It's hard to comment right now because Will [Wyatt] is still in the process of seeing people and writing his report. The aftermath will in many ways be determined by his inquiry." What does she make of the charge levelled by some that the corporation over-reacted to the incident, thus deepening the atmosphere of crisis? "I wouldn't make that judgment at all," she replies.

Crowngate was not Bennett's first headache of the summer. The incident came hot on the heels of a decision by Ofcom to fine the BBC £50,000 - the first such fine in its history - for "serious management failings" that had led to Blue Peter viewers being deceived over the misuse of premium-rate phonelines.

Bennett - who conducted an internal review of the affair in which she found "serious errors of judgment" by Blue Peter and Saturday Kitchen, but "no evidence of systematic abuse or failure" overall - says: "We've accepted this is a serious case, although we did regret Ofcom found it necessary to impose a fine, but we accept they have the right to do so. I'm pleased Ofcom recognised our intentions in running [the Blue Peter] competition were genuine, and that we have taken a lot of steps to minimise the chance of similar mistakes being made in the future."

Later this month at a Royal Television Society event, Bennett will preview a major strategy document, amounting to a "statement of purpose" for the next generation of BBC programmes. "Some might think it a little bit Reithian for our market-driven times, but it is an important part of the story for broadcasting - and by broadcasting I mean the web as well as TV - over the next decade."

(The Guardian September 10th 2006)

Posted by James Silver - On Monday, September 10, 2007

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