This New Noise by Charlotte Higgins

Author:Charlotte Higgins [Charlotte Higgins]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783350735
Publisher: Guardian Faber Publishing
Published: 2015-08-18T04:00:00+00:00

And he didn’t mention the tweets? ‘No, because it seemed to me improbable that the director general of the BBC didn’t know about something that everyone else was talking about.’ Was Entwistle the right appointment? ‘There was no reason for supposing that he would find the heat of Savile led to a sort of meltdown.’

Had he ever felt direct pressure from the government? Almost none, he said. ‘But nothing had prepared me for the ubiquity of hostility in the press. When you have a newspaper saying that the latest script for Sherlock showed that the BBC is a left-wing conspiracy, you clutch at the air in desperation. When you see newspapers which have reported the infamy of the BBC five or six times as much as they’ve reported what President Assad is getting up to in Syria, then it makes you scream.’

How hard was it to run the BBC? ‘Ten times more difficult than I thought it would be,’ he said. ‘I agreed to do it because I think it’s a great national institution, it’s an important part of our culture, because I have a romantic attachment to the things that the BBC has done at its best.’

I couldn’t help wondering – especially in retrospect, after his heart problems became a matter of public record – just how far the difficulties of chairing the BBC Trust had worn him down. He had taken on the role through a romantic attachment to the societal virtues of the BBC, not, I felt, through any desire to take up arms in a cultural war zone. He was genial and gung-ho when we met, and occupied his large leather swivel chair with the full-bodied confidence of a tycoon. But all the while we spoke I could not stop summoning up his face as he stood next to the resigning Entwistle. In the film – mercilessly viewable on the BBC website – he chewed his lip distractedly. He looked haggard, forlorn, and very much alone.

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