There were only two radio reviewers who ever ruffled the feathers of senior management within the BBC. In terms of ratings, the BBC has radio pretty much its own way; neither the competition, which is negligible, nor critical comment is liable to sway a BBC radio mandarin if he firmly believes that (to take an example) You and Yours is groundbreaking investigative journalism in the Reithian tradition. The hard economics of television does not apply — and, you have to say, that with some exceptions, including the one quoted above, BBC Radio is not noticeably worse off for this lack of externally imposed rigour. All the better for it, in fact.
So, while criticism could always be shrugged off, there were a couple of pundits who were able to raise the temperature within Broadcasting House (and later White City). These were Michael Vestey of The Spectator and Gillian Reynolds of the Daily Telegraph. In both cases, I suspect, the BBC executives got hot under the collar because they thought the acute observations of these two journalists were, more often than not, dead right. Gillian Reynolds clearly knows her subject and loves the medium and, what’s more, writes very well indeed; she is passionate about radio and its refusal to pander to the lowest common denominator.
Michael Vestey had all that, too, but something more besides — he had worked for the corporation for more than a quarter of a century and had come, in an almost affectionate way, to utterly and completely loathe it. I don’t mean that he loathed everything the BBC produced, or everybody who worked for the institution; he had untrammelled respect for the reporter out in the field, the producer crafting a programme and so on. No, he loathed what he saw as its corporate stupidity, its inverted pyramid of talentless middle managers and ever expanding legion of deathly accountants, its flaccid, thoughtless, self-flagellating, institutionalised left-liberalism, its craven attitude towards political authority and concomitant arrogance towards the people who paid the licence fee, i.e. the listeners. And he wrote about this in The Spectator every week for the ten years after he left the BBC, aggrieved and weary, until his untimely death at 61 last weekend. In return, you have to say, the BBC loathed him too.
I did not know him very well while I was at the BBC, but I knew of him. He was spoken of in darkened cadences. Yes, it was agreed, he was a fine and possibly brilliant reporter; he had served the corporation well since 1970, reporting from South Africa and Chile (during the Falklands war). He could do that increasingly rare thing — craft a beautiful radio feature, full of sounds and voices, an incalculably time-consuming and un-cost-effective form of journalism. And again — an increasingly rare occurrence — he was wholly literate, well read, articulate, informed. His scripts not only made sense and told people stuff they didn’t already know, but they also had rhythm and were easy on the ear. However he was also something known as ‘old school’. He spoke that awful thing, RP. He was definitely white. He was, towards the end, getting on a bit, you know? He was rarely bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. He didn’t like filing from somewhere until he knew what the story was, until he understood himself what it was that he was telling the audience. He could be curmudgeonly when presented with the unreasonable demands of a producer or editor. He was, people suggested, terribly louche. And worst of all he was quite unconscionably, irredeemably, implacably right-wing.
The BBC had very few right-wing journalists when I joined it in 1989. It has scarcely more now. I have no objection to left-wing points of view and still consider myself of the Left, sort of; but it is that suffocating, moronic, politically-correct, anti-liberal leftism at the BBC which both revolted Michael and, in the end, did for him. The standpoint which insists not that alternative views may be mistaken, even though held in good faith, but are clearly, objectively wrong — no argument — and therefore cannot possibly be countenanced.
Michael rocked the boat, first and foremost, on Europe. He had this suspicion, back in the early 1990s, that the EU was heading towards a federal superstate, regardless of what the politicians might be telling us, and that monetary union and greater powers ceded to Brussels were per se a bad thing. Pretty much everyone believes this now — Vestey, and a handful of others within the BBC, were absolutely right. But at the time his view was regarded as quite outrageous, the snarling voice of the little-Englander, petty-minded, far right.
For eight years he worked as a reporter on the excellent but historically extremely left-of-centre late-evening current affairs programme, The World Tonight. In some senses it was a position to which he was ideally suited; The World Tonight at least allowed room for thought and discussion and was pitched well above mid-market. But when he told them he wished to go to Denmark to cover the vote on monetary union, he was predictably derided. Why would anybody be interested in a plebiscite in an obscure part of Scandinavia, especially when we know what the result is going to be? But Michael Vestey suspected that the rest of Europe did not necessarily share the BBC’s conviction that the EU was per se a good thing. He went — and scooped the corporation when the Danes did as he suspected they would and voted a resolute ‘No’. That Danish vote was, in a way, the first indication that the progression to a federal European superstate would be met with the opposition of ordinary voters. To an extent, it changed even the way the BBC reported Europe, although not quite as much as it should have done.
Michael left the BBC in 1996, a little dis-illusioned, a little bored and certainly weary. He wrote a humorous novel, which he published himself, that subjected the BBC — and his nemesis, the appalling John Birt — to a bloody good kicking. And he took up his duties at The Spectator, where each week he told us about radio, all the while enraging his former bosses with his clear understanding of why certain programmes were failures, a standpoint built upon his knowledge of the corporation and what went on within it. His was a voice which championed an old-fashioned view of journalism, of a trade which challenged the established shibboleths and did not much care whom it offended along the way. A voice replete with both intelligence and elegance.
He retains an awful lot of respect and affection among the workers at the BBC, those who knew him, and here at The Spectator. On a personal note, I wish I had known him better. But in the corporate centre at the BBC tonight, I don’t suppose they’ll be handing out the black armbands.
Michael Vestey’s last radio review, page 46.
