Greg Dyke: Inside Story. Greg Dyke
Читать онлайн.| Название | Greg Dyke: Inside Story |
|---|---|
| Автор произведения | Greg Dyke |
| Жанр | Биографии и Мемуары |
| Серия | |
| Издательство | Биографии и Мемуары |
| Год выпуска | 0 |
| isbn | 9780007385997 |
Greg Dyke: Inside Story
To Sue
And to Matthew, Christine, Alice, and Joe
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE Three Days in January
CHAPTER TWO The First Thirty Years
CHAPTER FIVE TVS and Back to LWT
CHAPTER SIX Running and Losing LWT
CHAPTER EIGHT The BBC Years (1)
CHAPTER NINE The BBC Years (2)
CHAPTER TEN Why Did They Cry? (Culture Change at the BBC)
CHAPTER ELEVEN Television and Sport
CHAPTER TWELVE Gilligan, Kelly, and Hutton
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Why Hutton Was Wrong
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Some Final Thoughts
A Collective Failure? by Greg Dyke
A Day in the Life of Greg Dyke
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From the reviews of Inside Story:
CHAPTER ONE Three Days in January
As I left home on the morning of Tuesday 27 January 2004, I had no idea that within thirty-six hours my career as Director-General of the BBC would be over. I didn’t even see it as a remote possibility that I would be fired by a board of BBC Governors behaving like frightened rabbits caught in the headlights – a board unnerved by a combination of the resignation of their Chairman, Lord Hutton’s infamous report, and the prospect of the revenge the Government might seek to take against the BBC.
Of course very few people knew then that Lord Hutton’s report, due to be published the following day, would so damn the BBC and would so totally exonerate the Government of any mistakes or wrongdoing. It was our view that the BBC had made some mistakes and was likely to be criticized but that the Government would deservedly suffer at least as much. Nor could anyone have known that within forty-eight hours the acting Chairman of the BBC would do lasting damage to the BBC’s reputation at home and abroad by issuing the most grovelling of apologies to a vitriolic Government.
And who could possibly have foreseen that thousands of BBC employees, in all parts of the United Kingdom, would have taken to the streets to support me, or that they would have clubbed together to pay for a full-page advertisement in the Daily Telegraph backing me and challenging the Governors to defend the independence of the BBC? And how could anyone have known on that Tuesday morning that by the end of the week Lord Hutton’s report would have been so comprehensively ridiculed by media and public alike, its findings dismissed as a crude whitewash of the Government and yet another example of Number Ten spin?
Nevertheless, as I left home that morning I certainly knew that it was going to be a lively week.
With the publication of the Hutton Report imminent, the photographers and reporters were already camped outside my house in Twickenham, so even the most innocent of passers-by would have known that something was up. My partner Sue was away in Suffolk for the week, real evidence that we didn’t expect a major crisis: if we had, then there was no way she would have gone. Only Joe and I were there that morning. Joe was sixteen at the time, the youngest of our four children and the only one at home. He was used to journalists and camera crews turning up outside our house and we both smiled when we saw them there that morning.
Our house backs onto nine acres of parkland that we share with forty or so other houses. This gives us numerous choices for getting in and out, making it virtually impossible for any reporter, photographer, or camera crew to catch me. We saw avoiding them as a game that we had been playing, on and off, for the four years I’d been Director-General. On some occasions Joe or my daughter Alice, who in January was away building a school in Africa, used to take pity on them and would tell them that I’d already left, but the journalists never believed them. Joe, Alice, and I quite enjoyed the game. Sue, on the other hand, hated these people intruding into our privacy in this way.
Because I had