Roger Bunce
Does anyone remember what the Cobham Sub-Committees were all about? Apparently there were 12 of them. I’ve found I letter I wrote to Management in March 1990, in which I complain about them, but I don’t remember them at all. (N.B. the 12 Cobham Sub-Committees should not be confused with the equally pointless 15 ‘Taskforce’ Committees of 1991!) To quote from my letter:
"… The news that one Management committee could think of nothing better than to set up another twelve sub-committees (none of them involving the Staff), has done nothing to dispel our prejudices about a top heavy, underemployed bureaucracy. . .
…Four of the Cobham sub-committees are currently looking into ways of reducing programme-making costs. None of them is looking into ways of reducing management and administration costs.
Another committee is encouraging Programme Makers to be more aware of “sound management skills”. No one is encouraging Managers to be more aware of, and more relevant to, programme-making skills.
Yet another committee is examining ways of charging management overheads to programme budgets. None of them is examining ways of reducing those overheads…."
The Last of these would, of course, become a key feature of Producer Choice.
Chris Booth
Perhaps I can shed a little light on the Cobham ‘affair’.
I was designated by Roger Waugh, who was Head of Post Production (or whatever we were called at the time), to serve on the sub committee looking at LE costing.
Our Chairman was Roger Mackay (Head of Programme Planning Group, Leslie Arnold (Head of Finance Planning). Colin Gilbert (Head of Comedy Unit, Scotland), Alan Jones (Head of television Design, Mike Jones (Head of Studio Management), Nick Scott (Senior Manager, Costing Service – who was secretary), Anne Somers (Head of Comedy Unit, Scotland), Janet Street Porter (Head of youth Programmes),and Harry Waterson (Production consultant).
Terms of reference were: “To evaluate how the costs of making Light Entertainment Programmes can be reduced by 15% while retaining the quality, range and quantity of our output”.
The meetings, if my memory serves me right, ran from January 25th 1991 to April 3rd. I was there, a humble Editing Manager, to make sure that Post Production weren’t getting the blame for cost over-runs!
There seemed to me a lot of Janet Street Porter led ideas that using outside facilities would be a great money saver…
We had a quite few people appearing at our formal sessions:-
Stan Appel (“Blankety Blank”), David Taylor (“Every Second Counts”), John King (“Telly Addicts”), Jim Moir (Head of Light Entertainment”"), John Bishop (Head of Variety), Gary Mallen (Production Manager “Russ Abbot Show”), Tony James (Manager Variety), Peter Estall (Producer “Wogan”), Mike Pearce (Production manager “Wogan”), Robin Nash (Head of Comedy), David Lilley (Manager Comedy), Jennie Betts (Planning Organiser Studios & Servicing), Paul Muntin (Designer), Jonathan Powell (C.BBC-1) and Louise Westaway from Louise Westaway Production Accountancy Services.
There was a 25 page report at the end (from which I am quoting).
I tend to agree with Roger that the outcome of this was beginning of ‘Producer Choice’.
Roger Bunce
It’s good to hear from a genuine eye witness. Interesting, too, that the people who really knew what they were talking about, Stan Appel, David Taylor, Jimmy Moir, etc., were allowed to address the committee but not to be members.
If this was 1991, then it is more likely to had been one of the 15 ‘Taskforce’ Committees, than the 12 Cobham Sub-Committees, which were going before my letter of March 1990. Janet Street-Porter was certainly involved in the ‘Taskforces’. (I’m quoting from ‘Fuzzy Monsters’ here. I have no first-hand knowledge of such things. They never asked me to sit on any committees!)
Albert Barber
Producer choice came about in my view because the main body of staff were passive about costing.
Some producers wanted total control outside the left hand – right hand system of real money and notional money system.
There were some areas that we producers had little control and with cuts being required it was more important to have control of our outgoings. For instance we were getting charged for transport at a higher rate in real cash terms than if we rang up and ordered it ourselves. This put pressure on what was a pretty good system though.
Meetings were called and at one that I attended with the manager of children’s programmes John Lloyd at which I stood up and said that it would destroy the supply departments who would end up being more expensive than if we went outside using an all cash system.
The existing system of using staff that we were paying for anyway and an internal use of facilities seemed to me an ideal one which worked. I’m not an accountant but better use of money allocated in this way is how each small units work today and scaled up could work better now if the millions made by production companies today would have been changed to a better way of restructuring the BBC.
The producer choice style prop department ended up charging more for a broom than it cost to buy one. This inevitably happened with the gramophone library, design, studios etc making them fold. I was told I had been a producer too long and had to embrace change.
It still angers me that only a few production staff stood up and defended my position. At a similar meeting in Northern Ireland towards the end of producer choice no one showed any stand against the suggested regime that we all know was to bring the BBC to the position it is in now. Many outside companies saw ways of making profit and I fear that unless there is a concerted lobby many greedy eyes will see a break up of the BBC and scrapping of the licence fee a way of making money. Already there is a threat to the smaller production companies by bigger ones including some big American companies eager to swallow our national identity through our national broadcasting. On a recent trip to Callifornia, no one seems to be interested in so called normal TV and streaming of Netflix and the like is preferred. News channels are parochial, adverts proliferate and standards lower. However the BBC is seen as quality, entertainment and information. Think that sounds familiar? Or is that Reith turning in his grave?
Ian Hillson
I remember at one of those meetings in a TVC studio to explain how producer choice would work, and how said producer would have all his money to spend as he wished on BBC facilities or external ones….
A producer stands up and asks the panel "So if I don’t wish to spend it on an office at TVC, then I can go down the Bush and rent a cheap room and a phone line and save some money on my overheads….?"
Of course not!
Bernard Newnham
Though it was cheaper to rent a meeting room at QPR than TC, so people would, leaving the TC rooms empty. All very silly.
Albert Barber
There was a strange deal whereby we were charged more to rent a phone in the office per year than to buy one in Argos; and keep it permanently.
This seemed odd since the BBC had a good rate for phone lines but it had to go through an outside company, can’t remember the name. I mentioned it to the Manger and was told I couldn’t do what I suggested.
Someone else said it was a brown envelope deal now we were using an outside company…, this could be part of the mythology and gossip that grew out of Producer Choice whereby departments were trying to keep Producers using the various internal facilities.
Ian Hillson
It was Siemens: they then bought the Beeb’s IT unit, BBC Technology, in 2004 – and were subsequently entrusted (?) with implementing DMI, something they quickly bought themselves out of, realising the magnitude of the task.
Alec Bray
A sideline to Siemens and Ian’s comment – “… [Siemens] bought the Beeb’s IT unit, BBC Technology…”
Having said “Goodbye” to TC and the Beeb in May 1967, I found myself in the last years of my working life going back to TC (and what used to be BBC Technology but was by this time part of Siemens).
At this time I worked for Telelogic, a Swedish firm headquartered in California. We specialised in software development tools, and my area was configuration and change management, using a product variously called “Continuus”, “Continuus Synergy”, “Synergy” (until Telelogic was taken over by IBM).
On my first visit I had to go to the offices on the east side of Wood Lane, opposite TC and overlooking the White City underground station. These offices had Siemens’ notices about the place, but “Ariel” was scattered everywhere. My job was to install the Configuration management product on the software development machines. I was never fully up to speed about the nature of the software but basically it was a way of streaming news footage and editing and distributing it around to users. That make sense?
The initial development had taken place by BBC America, and BBC America had selected Synergy as the configuration management tool to use with the development. Siemens in the UK were going to work on the development in parallel so they HAD to use the same configuration management tool to keep everything in step. We had something called “Distributed Change and Configuration Management” or DCM, which allowed changes to be made at either centre of development and the results shared in a controlled way.
So I roll up to the site, ready to install. It was going to be tricky, because the Synergy product usually used Informix as the backend database, but we gave users the option to use Oracle if they wished (although this was a more difficult – er no – a more “interesting” install) and of course the BBC – Siemens – wanted to use Oracle on Sun Solaris servers (again, a more interesting install), But there was no server! No Oracle!
Turned out that, in spite of all the pre-installation material that we had sent out, Siemens thought that I was going to install Solaris and then install Oracle and then install our product. Eventually the team leader realised his error, and said that he would have to get a Unix expert up from somewhere down around the Bush, Some time later, this guy arrived and I chatted with him about what was needed in terms of the Unix Server and Oracle. So away I went to return another day.
On the second visit, it was to install Synergy on the server. For one reason or another, installation on Unix and Oracle usually took about a day – creating tables spaces etc – and during time I chatted to the team leader (I’ve binned my day-books so can’t say names or dates). This chap was an expert in Oracle (which is why Oracle was used) and was very good at Oracle, Unix and basic configuration management – I felt reassured that the installation was in good hands. Once set up, it would normally run OK.
There was this slight complication in that the guys in BBC America and those at White City were to use DCM so that the newer of any version of source files would be made available to the other team under controlled conditions, but this usually worked fine.
A year or so later I got a call to revisit Siemens at White City. “.. Synergy is dreadful too, it doesn’t work, it is broken, it is slow… “ – and so on. Off I trot. Well, the first thing is that the team leader who knew all about Oracle and all about Unix (Solaris) had left – and none of the others knew or cared about Oracle or knew or cared about Solaris, and didn’t want to use Synergy anyway. Also, the development group in BBC America who had started the whole thing anyway had passed the whole shebang over to the UK, and the UK team wanted to use a rival (free) configuration management product called Subversion.
I looked at their database. It was an absolute mess. Long story short, the DCM transfers had been totally mismanaged and stuff was corrupt.
After discussion, we decided that what I would try to do was (over a period of visits) to recover the database, give some training to the guys and then let them decide how to continue. So over about 6 visits or so, I got the Synergy database in a reasonable state – so that the last stuff done could be retrieved if necessary – chatted to them about Synergy and Subversion and so on. During this time they moved offices INTO Television Centre, so in my last couple of visits I was back in TC! But what a state the place was in. Offices on the floor I was working on were just dumping grounds, it looked as if no one was taking care of any of the spaces, dirty, dingy and demoralising (even then).
Eventually the team decided that they were going to use free Subversion instead of Synergy, but they did pay me something of a compliment. This was on the lines of “… We absolutely loathed Synergy but you have shown us how it could work and how good it could be. We have changed our opinion of it…”
I would be interested to know what happened to this development!
