Too often, moving talent around appears to be treated as a way of demonstrating dynamism. It allows a newly installed executive to look decisive, and it costs little in budgetary terms. What it can cost, however, is trust, loyalty, audience connection and the goodwill of the very people upon whom the BBC\u2019s public identity depends.<\/p>\n
That is because the BBC has never fully come to terms with what it actually is. For all its complexity, it remains at heart a talent organisation. It is built on the shoulders of individuals whose voices, faces, judgments, rhythms and quirks become familiar to millions.<\/p>\n
Audiences do not form relationships with management structures, strategy documents or internal memos. They form relationships with people. And those people are not standard employees. They are performers, communicators, broadcasters, interpreters of mood, tone and public feeling.<\/p>\n
They are often mavericks, sometimes difficult, usually sensitive, frequently edgy, and almost always operating under levels of scrutiny that most of the members of the organisation around them would find intolerable if it were applied to their own daily work.<\/p>\n
That difference matters. You can tell whether on-air talent has had a good day at work because you can hear it or see it for yourself. Their failures are public, their triumphs are public, and the judgment upon them is immediate. The teams who support them are often excellent, but they are not exposed to that same relentless test. It follows, surely, that people doing this kind of work require a different kind of management. Not mollycoddling, not a free pass for bad behaviour, but a more intelligent, more structured and more informed kind of stewardship.<\/p>\n
That has long been my view, and it is not a theory formed from the cheap seats. My first BBC Network contract came as Barry Norman\u2019s reporter, and from there I went on to work alongside a range of remarkable BBC talent, including Anne Gregg, Anne Robinson, Jeremy Vine, Angela Rippon (and, indeed, Huw Edwards).<\/p>\n
I spent years as on-air talent myself, albeit without quite the star wattage of some of those names, and I came to understand at close quarters the peculiar demands of the job: the scrutiny, the pressure, the emotional wear and tear, the often blurred line between the public role and the private self, and the way in which talent can flourish brilliantly in the right environment or fray in the wrong one.<\/p>\n