Michael Grade is one of the great figures of British broadcasting. I remember the cheers echoing around the BBC when it was announced that he was returning to the corporation as its chairman in 2004. His long career in broadcasting was a welcome shield against the tinkering bureaucrats that governments normally consider for these kinds of top public roles. Grade also felt like ‘one of ours’ when, in 2022, he was given the chair at Ofcom. He was a practitioner who believed in the power of public broadcasting, and he thought that the best thing for programme makers was to make programmes rather than fret about regulation.
Now that Grade has stepped down at the end of his term, we are getting Grade Unleashed. He has given a series of interviews about what he thinks of British media and the tasks of the regulator, and there is no sign of any waning of energy at the age of 83. He is a man of genuine charm. But his departing assessment of the state of the industry – when asked by The House magazine how hopeful he was about the future of British TV he gave a score of 2 out of 10 – underlines that being a regulator was probably one of the less illustrious of his roles.
A colleague once said that the best way to understand Grade was to think of him as a supreme talent agent. He was the son of an agent, and his uncles were impresarios. That puts him, at his happiest, into a certain time and culture. A friend who worked with him at ITV said that:
It is beyond one man to be able to turn back the tide
Really, he doesn’t think there’s any problem that wouldn’t be solved if you could bring back Mike and Bernie Winters to a primetime Saturday night show.
That may be why well-placed industry observers are unimpressed by his analysis of the media now. ‘He’s just wrong,’ says one former BBC senior executive, ‘and Ofcom was a post too far.’
Grade’s verdict on the BBC, whether you love it or hate it, is puzzling. He says the corporation is too big and cuts should be made to allow a lower licence fee, and yet worries about the UK losing public service media – of which the BBC is the most significant part. He adds that he doesn’t see a feasible alternative to the licence fee at precisely the time that the fee is looking like Monty Python’s parrot with its feet pointing towards the sky. There are no signs of a plan to preserve public broadcasting.
Grade is also unconvincing about Ofcom’s approach to GB News. I agree with him that GB News has a right to exist, and I have often criticised the BBC for not doing enough about voters’ concerns around immigration, crime and other issues seen as being on the right of the spectrum. GB News has found an audience, but if it wants to take its place alongside Sky and the BBC as a news channel, it has to be regulated to the same standard – and it simply hasn’t been. The operating code is clear:
News, in whatever form, must be reported with due accuracy and presented with due impartiality.
Yet Ofcom’s muddled definition about the difference between ‘news’ and ‘current affairs’ allows a nightly Nigel Farage programme followed by Jacob Rees-Mogg. This policy would allow the BBC to book Zack Polanski to present Newsnight.
It matters because we are in a world of misinformation, and the facts become more important than ever. We should encourage news channels to have the widest possible range of views but also hold them to truth and impartiality across their schedules.
Where I have more sympathy with Grade is on the issue that he says motivated him most to go to Ofcom: online safety and the efforts of successive governments to hold back the excesses of big tech. We must kindly say that this is work in progress, and it is a conundrum facing all democratic societies. But an adviser on regulatory matters doubts that Ofcom was the right organisation to lead the UK’s fight: ‘Ofcom is an economic regulator with some public service broadcast duties,’ she says, ‘and it should never have been given the whole of the media waterfront.’
Nobody doubts Grade’s instincts here, but they think it’s his organisation and the government which have failed. When I canvassed opinions in the media industry, the single word ‘slow’ came up repeatedly – or ‘fantastically slow’ if you want two.
The truth is that it is beyond one man to be able to turn back the tide. Michael Grade represents an analogue broadcasting world that brought delight and information to millions, and he has tried hard to keep those values in the harsher digital present. But it will need tougher action by governments and regulators worldwide to put the tech giants in their place and keep our national broadcasters and our democracy secure.
Comments