A bonfire of ridiculous job titles at the BBC

It’s not often that people earn praise before they have actually turned up for a new job. But Tony Hall, the BBC’s incoming director-general, has already played a blinder while still sitting in the Royal Opera House.

He deserves high marks for getting rid of the ridiculous job titles that the BBC delights in.

In future the director of radio will be in charge of ‘radio’ rather than ‘Audio and Music, and the director of television will in future be director of television rather than head of the vacuous ‘Vision’.

Someone probably got a bonus for coming up with such technologically correct circumlocutions.

When the Lord Hall actually comes to work at the BBC on April 2 he should have a quick hunt for other silly titles and watch out in future for giving important strategy documents risible names such as Delivering Quality First.

Hall also deserves praise for removing Helen Boaden from her job as director of BBC News. Given the depths of her failings in the Savile/Newsnight fiasco her position, in other than the short term, was completely untenable.

It is equally wise, however, not to discard her and she will be a worthy successor in charge of radio in the tradition of Jenny Abramsky. Boaden, after all, is a former controller of Radio 4 and an award-winning radio journalist. It may be a sideways move but it is a creative sideways move.

Giving Tim Davie, the acting director general the task of guiding the BBC’s global strategy in addition to being chief executive of BBC Worldwide is also a smart move.

Hall also deserves praise for bringing in new people from outside.

The occasional eyebrow has been raised about the decision to appoint James Purnell, a former Labour Culture Secretary, to the new post of director of strategy and digital. The title is a tad fancy but he will be in charge of replacing – wait for it – the current Future Media, Policy and Strategy, Marketing and Audiences and Public Affairs and Communication divisions. A virtual bonfire of divisional titles and overlaps.

The real reason why the Purnell appointment has raised an eyebrow or two is obviously the political dimension.

Apart from being in the lovely expansive Culture office with its splendid art in Cockspur Street, it was Purnell who led the one-man putsch against Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Unfortunately no-one followed him over the barricades and as a result his political career was over.

But Tony deserves an “A” grade for such an appointment. Roll forward a couple of years or so to the next general election and on to the renegotiation of the next BBC Royal Charter to run from 2016.

The Liberal Democrat party is facing electoral collapse and the Conservatives are close to being unelectable, even though Labour is handicapped by choosing the wrong Miliband to lead the party.

Then its not such a bad thing to have a former Labour Cabinet Minister to lead BBC strategy – something that is well up there with traditional BBC future planning.

Purnell, alone, is not enough to re-acquaint the BBC with the normal world.

“I want to bring in people from outside the BBC and combine them with the best people from within,” Hall told staff in an email earlier this month about how he wanted to define public service broadcasting for the next decade.

He said “people,” and not just “person”.

It would be a move forward if Hall manages to recruit James Harding, the recently departed editor of The Times, as has been reported. There have allegedly been conversations about Harding becoming deputy director general or director of news.

Hall should realise that it is impossible for any one person, however competent, to stay in touch with everything that a vast organisation such as the BBC does 24-hours a day.

A deputy director-general doing his or her job properly could have avoided the worst of the Newsnight scandals.

Harding, whom Murdoch foolishly eased out of The Times for the usual capricious reasons, would make an excellent news trouble-shooter for Hall whether his title is deputy-director general or not.

The last thing that Hall could get premature praise for – though it is almost certainly beyond his gift – is to try to ensure that there is full publication of the raw material of the Pollard inquiry. We have already seen Pollard’s damning conclusions on the missing Newsnight programme on Savile and why BBC Television – or Vision as it was at the time – went ahead with fulsome tributes to Jimmy Savile when Newsnight was investigating.

Lord Patten, chairman of the BBC Trust, has promised to publish what will almost certainly be revealing interviews with those who gave evidence to Nick Pollard, the former head of Sky News.

Pollard is not alone in wondering just how much will be redacted, or censored, before publication.

If BBC executives have been libelled, or traduced unfairly, that is one thing. The suspicion will be that there will be many blacked out lines in the documents that will be produced, probably at the end of this week.

It will be outrageous if the BBC chairman promises to publish such documents and they are then censored merely to spare the blushes of the BBC in one of the most embarrassing Corporation episodes of recent times.

As Kevin Marsh, former editor of the Today programme wrote this week, it was important that the BBC publish as much of the evidence to the Pollard as possible.

“I don’t say this to damage the BBC or even embarrass it. Quite the opposite. Thirty years in the BBC taught me an important truth: the more open and transparent it is, and the more readily it admits it is not perfect, the public trusts it.”

Tony Hall could get a perfect A for his pre-arrival activity if he were to pick up the phone and persuade Lord Patten of the wisdom of such an approach – for the long-term.