Will the last middle-aged presenter to leave the BBC please turn out the lights?
(Photo by Simone Padovani/Awakening/Getty Images)
Jenni Murray and Jane Garvey are leaving Woman’s Hour, Sue Barker (along with team captains Phil Tufnell and Matt Dawson) is leaving A Question of Sport, and Carrie Gracey, Norman Smith, Simon Gompertz and John Pienaar are leaving BBC News. Last September, John Humphrys left Radio 4’s Today programme and the year before David Dimbleby left BBC 1’s Question Time.
What do they have in common? Three things. They were all superb at their jobs. Professional, impartial, popular. These were not here today, gone tomorrow personalities. They had been around for years. Jenni Murray started presenting Woman’s Hour in 1987, the same year Humphrys started presenting the Today programme. Sue Barker has presented A Question of Sport for over twenty years and Dimbleby chaired Question Time for almost 25 years.
It’s not just the presenters. A Question of Sport has had a complete clear out. Both team captains, Matt Dawson and Phil Tufnell have gone as well. On Sky Sports, three of the four panellists on their Saturday football coverage, Phil Thompson, Charlie Nicholas and Matt le Tissier, have gone.
Second, they are all of a certain age. Dimbleby was 80 when he left Question Time, Humphrys was 76 when he left Today, Jenni Murray is 70, Jane Garvey is 56, Sue Barker is 64, Carrie Gracey, Norman Smith, John Pienaar and Simon Gompertz are all either side of 60. Jane Garvey is the youngest. The sports panellists are all between their mid-40s and mid-60s.
Finally, apart from Pienaar, they are all white. Thirteen out of fourteen is unlikely to be a coincidence. There is presumably a move by the BBC to make its presenters and reporters more representative of the nation and the timing is unlikely to be accidental. The move to more diversity has been painfully slow. But things have started to change in the last couple of years and this has accelerated this summer.
More diversity among presenters of flagship programmes like Question Time, A Question of Sport, Today and Woman’s Hour is long overdue. More women are welcome, more presenters and reporters of colour can only be a good thing. BBC News presenters like George Alagiah, Reeta Chakrabarti, Lukwesa Burak and Clive Myrie are first-rate, Mishal Husain is one of the best interviewers on the Today programme and Peter White (You and Yours) and Gary O’Donoghue (one of the BBC reporters from Washington), both blind, are superb models for future generations of broadcasters with disabilities.
What’s curious, though, is how little diversity there is among BBC executives and the people who wield the power. Every Director-General in the history of the BBC has been white and male (and gentile). Twenty-four of the 25 Chairmen (sic) of the BBC have been male and 25 were white. Of the 57 key figures in the BBC, one is disabled. As Grant Feller has argued elsewhere, this is true of the press as well. There is too little diversity at the top, among newspaper owners but also among editors and top journalists.
There is another curious gap in the new diversity at the BBC. What about ageism? For years the BBC has been getting rid of producers in their 50s and 60s. One of the great joys of my time in BBC’s Music and Arts was working with producers like Mike Dibb, who created Ways of Seeing with John Berger more than 20 years before I met him in the 1990s, and the late Julia Cave, who had worked on the legendary series, The Great War, in the early 1960s. There was so much to learn from these experienced figures.
It is no coincidence that so many of these reporters and presenters leaving the BBC over the past few weeks are in their sixties. The new appointment at Woman’s Hour is Emma Barnett. At 35, she is half Jenni Murray’s age and more than twenty years younger than Jane Garvey. Did these experienced presenters and reporters want to leave or were they pushed? If they wanted to leave, why did they? Was there something about the new culture at the BBC that they couldn’t wait to get away from?
In recent weeks “diversity” has become a kind of code for Black. Not Asian, not people over sixty and not disabled. Why is this? I can see why it might be felt that David Dimbleby (Charterhouse and Christ Church) and John Simpson (St. Paul’s and Magdalene) are a little white and posh for today’s BBC. But diversity should not mean ageism or continuing to exclude the disabled. If it means anything, diversity must be broader and more inclusive.
