Birt’s successor, Greg Dyke, struggles to repair the damage and to eliminate all traces of “Birtism,” but in fact the BBC of the 21st century is a less happy and less confident organization than the BBC that flourished in the great days of Directors General Hugh Carleton Green and Ian Trethowan.

John Birt received an engineering degree from Oxford University, joined Granada Television and then London Weekend television and is partly credited with the success of LWT’s political program “Weekend World.” Birt’s name first came to public attention when he coauthored an article in the Times that suggested that the treatment of politics on television created a “bias against understanding,” and that political broadcasting needed to change.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, long critical of the BBC and its director general Alasdair Milne, appointed the right-wing former editor of the Sunday Times, Marmaduke Hussey, as chairman of the BBC. Hussey fired Milne and in 1987 employed Birt as head of news, with the understanding that Birt would replace the interim director general, Michael Checkland, in due course. For 60 years the chairmen of the BBC had not interfered with BBC management; it was argued that constitutionally, their role was to represent the interests of the public, not to manage. Hussey ignored tradition, and worked closely with Birt to remove most of the top management. Hussey and Birt used the U.S. management consultants McKinsey to introduce vast and ultimately wastefully bureaucratic plans like “producer choice,” and fired or gave early retirement to all who objected. The average age of BBC employees fell from 40 to 28; almost the entire cadre of seasoned producers and directors were removed.

In defense of Birt, it was claimed that the BBC was too large and too expensive when Birt became director general in 1993. In 1996 Birt reorganized the BBC into six divisions. BBC Broadcast scheduled channels and commission services, BBC Production developed BBC in-house radio and television, and BBC News was responsible for an integrated national and international news organization. BBC Worldwide was responsible for generating commercial income at home and abroad, and for the World Service. BBC Resources provided the facilities and expertise to serve and support BBC program-makers. And the BBC Corporate Center provided strategic services. Key executives like Jenny Abramsky, director of BBC Radio and Music, considered the changes disastrous; the money, and therefore the power, had been transferred to the broadcast division, and producers in the vast new production division (which included both radio and television) were mere suppliers, competing with the independent sector for work within the BBC. Suddenly BBC producers and their departments were forced to declare war on each other as they battled for commissions in order to keep their jobs. Departmental priorities were eroded; science producers could suggest programs on religion and vice versa. All producers felt undervalued and some felt they were being treated with contempt; radio producers suffered more than most. As cost cutting was the purpose of this whole vast reorganization, program editors were dismissed and production teams amalgamated. With many producers on short-term contracts, they abandoned adventurous new ideas, relying instead on the formulaic programming that could guarantee their jobs for the next six months. Their desperation to earn commissions led departments, especially in radio, to submit a host of underdeveloped ideas for every available slot, rather than concentrate on producing two or three quality proposals. One head of radio claimed that each producer in the drama department spent an average of 14 weeks of the year working up proposals, 90 percent of which were never commissioned.

Birt’s introduction of “producer choice,” while controversial, made BBC producers more financially accountable. His vision of the BBC as a 21st-century “in formation provider” was promising; he foresaw scores of new cable channels for many offshoots of BBC programming, a digital future similar to that envisaged by the AOL-Time Warner or Disney-ABC conglomerates. However, the BBC is not a truly commercial organization; its principal income came from its license fee, not commercial operations.

Little of Birt’s BBC structure survived his departure. The new director general, Greg Dyke, was appointed in the year 2000 and dismantled and reorganized most of Birt’s bureaucracy. Birt’s concept of “bi-media” was swept away, and radio and television news were reinstated as separate production departments. Dyke believed that collaboration, not destructive internal competition, was needed to make a creative organization like the BBC thrive.