Right Royal Blunder For Beeb!
26.11.2007
Now I am not an avid fan of the Royals but tonight I think it may well be worth tuning into BBC One's long awaited programme 'Monarchy - The Royal Family At Work' at 8.30 pm tonight.
This is a candid insight into the Queen's duties over the course of a year, opening with Palace preparations for a state visit to the US to mark the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown landings in Virginia. A reception for British-based Americans is also organised, and a private dinner for prominent US expats at Buckingham Palace, along with the now-controversial photo session with Annie Leibovitz.
Jana Bennett, now crowned the most powerful woman in British television, survived the furore over the manipulation of film of the Queen. In her first interview since the affair, she tells Ian Burrell why it was not her fault.
The most powerful woman in British television, with creative and leadership responsibility for all the corporation's channels, has had the year of nightmares. She has seen the sullying of such virtuous BBC brands as Blue Peter and Comic Relief, tainted by the sin of viewer deceit, and she has had to implement the deepest of cuts on her staff. More, she has had to bid farewell to Peter Fincham, the controller of her flagship channel, who departed over the shambles that has become known as "Crowngate", an affair that shocked those within and without the corporation and prompted the author of an independent inquiry to castigate Bennett, 51, for her "lack of curiosity" in acting to limit the damage caused to the reputation of the BBC.
The sequence at the centre of the affair, manipulated for a promotional film to show the Queen huffily stomping out of the photo-shoot, will form part of tonight's first episode of the newly-titled five-part series Monarchy: The Royal Family At Work. Bennett now describes it thus: "What I will say is that the photo shoot is completed and the whole shoot is from beginning to end done fully and professionally and obviously that's a very different story from the one that was regrettably originally edited. But this shows the thing, the exchange, properly and shows there's a mixture of quite a lot of good humour."
So "done fully", "professionally" and with elements of "good humour". Yet on the evening of 11 July, when news organisations were up and running with the storm-out story, Bennett was told by Fincham during a 20-minute telephone call that there was a problem but failed to grasp its potential impact. A draft statement prepared by the BBC, Buckingham Palace and the production company responsible for the distortion, RDF, was emailed to Bennett but she did not see it.
No correction was issued until the following day and even then Bennett appeared unaware of the extent of the deception, believing there merely to have been a "compression" of material.
In his report into the affair last month, Will Wyatt, himself a former senior BBC executive, wrote of Bennett that "given the information she did have, she displayed a lack of curiosity in not getting to the bottom of what exactly the BBC was apologising to the Queen for."
He added: "No one at any level in the Vision or Marketing Communications and Audiences department seemed to spot that a series with unprecedented access to the royal household had the potential to explode in the BBC's face."
Fincham's departure, as soon as the report was published, prompted headlines such as "BBC's top woman faces growing pressure to quit over 'Crowngate'" and "Critics calls for more heads in BBC 'Crowngate'". So did Bennett consider her position? "There wasn't ...the big discussion ...Peter Fincham took a view, took responsibility. He made those decisions and that was really the end of that. I think he took responsibility because he was BBC1 controller and saw this as something very much within his responsibilities. He was a fantastic colleague but that subject of me didn't come up."
So she didn't even contemplate the issue, even after those headlines? "Peter took his decision and took it very rapidly so it wasn't a material question." Clearly, Bennett felt that she had the backing of the director general Mark Thompson, a long-standing colleague. Nonetheless, she was sufficiently aware of the gravity of the matter not to consider Fincham's departure surprising. "I wasn't particularly surprised, no. Because, as I said, he saw that this was something very much in his orbit. This was a big launch and the events have been looked at in great detail by many different commentators but I don't think it was subject to lots of group discussion and I don't think such a decision would be anyway."
Bennett has brought in experienced producer Denys Blakeway to supervise the "specially-composed team" making the revised Monarchy. "They can look at any material they like but they have basically taken the rough cuts and are working to bring them to what you might call fine cuts," she says.
The Palace has been kept closely informed of progress of a film that was formerly called simply The Queen. "We have editorial control and are absolutely responsible for delivering this as a high-quality project, but we've made sure that they are aware of what we are doing because this has a bit of a history, obviously, and it is something we all want to be proud of. The whole point is to show not just Her Majesty but the monarchy at work, which is also why we re-titled it."
Bennett accepts that 2007 has been a "year of going through gauntlets and that's not just me individually but for the industry". Though she expresses doubt that the press industry would stand up to the same scrutiny of standards, she accepts that "there may be things to be learned from [print] journalists when it comes to things like corrections pages" and that the television industry has learned that "it's really important for the audience and contributors of any sort to be dealt with fairly". Nonetheless, her overriding message is that "it's really important to not sit and dwell on [past problems] but to move ahead".
