BBC chairman faces hard days at the office following gaffe

Six months into the job and Gavyn Davies is in hot water, writes James Harding

Gavyn  Davies knows about divided loyalties. The BBC chairman is a lifelong fan of Southampton FC but, when pressed, he admits he has a season ticket to watch Arsenal at Highbury. He goes there mainly to accompany his daughter, he explains.

This week, Mr Davies suggested the BBC should also diversify its loyalties. The Corporation should pay less heed to the "white, middle-class, middle-aged and well-educated" people who complain the BBC is "dumbing down" and pour a bit more of its energies into entertaining "the Asian teenager on the streets of Leicester".

It was Mr Davies' first gaffe since taking over as BBC chairman six months ago. White, middle-class England asked whether being well-educated invalidated its criticisms. Asian teenagers wondered whether Mr Davies was suggesting they were not educated enough to appreciate intellectual fare.

Inside the BBC, the Goldman Sachs economist, who was appointed chairman last September, suddenly found himself being compared with David Brent, the self-regarding, gaffe- prone manager played by Ricky Gervais in Mr Davies's favourite programme, The Office.

Mr Davies is annoyed with himself. He wishes he had been clear that it was "the minority elite" of naggers who should have less clout. And his comments about Asian teenagers were not intended to be condescending but to encourage the BBC to provide "imaginative and quality" programming to all parts of its potential audience.

"What I have been trying to say is that a broadcasting company that is funded by everyone equally needs to think very carefully if it is under-serving parts of the population."

Mr Davies' remarks point to a tension at the BBC and a contradiction in the role of its chairman. The BBC is state-owned and funded by the 23 million British homes with television that are required to pay the annual £109 sterling (€175) annual licence fee. The BBC has lofty ideals - to inform, educate and entertain the nation. But its day-to-day behaviour is dictated by its wish to preserve public support for the licence fee.

This means providing populist programming to ensure mass support and high-minded programmes to satisfy the political elite that ultimately decides on BBC's future funding.

Sir Christopher Bland, the former BBC chairman and now chairman of BT Group, says that without EastEnders, the soap opera that does so much to make BBC 1 the nation's most popular television channel, it would be hard to justify the licence fee that makes Radio 3 and Radio 4 possible. "You have to have the reach of popular broadcasting," he says, adding that, of course, "it should be quality BBC broadcasting".

Mr Greg Dyke, the most commercially minded director-general in the history of the BBC, has made popular broadcasting his priority, pushing to put BBC 1 ahead of ITV in the ratings. But Mr David Liddiment, ITV's director of channels, says this involves abandoning BBC's traditional role as the country's leading cultural institution.

"The BBC is ducking its responsibilities. The BBC should be better than anyone else. It should put creativity first. It should be ambitious," says Mr Liddiment. It should not be chasing ratings by "seeing what ITV has done before, nicking it and copying it".

Executives across commercial television get infuriated when the BBC trots out its public service broadcasting triumphs, such as Blue Planet, the David Attenborough series on the underwater world, and the special evening on the National Health Service. The programmes that have pushed up the ratings are an extra show a week of EastEnders and a year-round diet of Holby City and Casualty hospital dramas.

Cynics suspect, as the BBC moves nearer the crucial political process of renegotiating the royal charter that provides the legal basis for the licence fee, Mr Dyke will place more arts programmes and documentaries on the main channels. But, judging from the spring schedule for BBC 1, intellectual programming has been pushed on to the new digital channel, BBC 4.

A second problem for Mr Davies is that his comments have reopened debate on an aspect of the BBC that he has worked hard to legitimise: the BBC governance structure. In his speech, he seemed to want to dismiss critics of the BBC. As a result, the BBC chairman, supposedly champion of the British television viewer within the corporation, looked as though he had been taken hostage by the BBC within just six months.

"Davies does not know a damn thing about broadcasting," said a rival commercial broadcaster executive. "Dyke is running rings around him . . . He looks frightened of criticism, frightened of accountability."

Mr Davies says some criticism of BBC dumbing down is "troubling and needed to be taken seriously". But other aspects of it are malicious and motivated by commercial self-interest. - (Financial Times Service)