Why Did Tim Davie Resign?

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Speaker 2 Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde.

Speaker 1 And me, Richard Osman. Hello, Marina.
Hello, Richard. How are you? I'm very well.
Lovely to see you.

Speaker 2 Well, Richard, we were going to be talking about some other matters today, but news has broken on a Sunday.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Tim Davey, Director General of the BBC, has resigned, and Deborah Turness, who's the head of BBC News, has also resigned.

Speaker 1 God bless him for resigning just in time for us to do the podcast, though. Yes.
That I have to say, not everyone shows us the same respect.

Speaker 2 Same level of thought. Yes.
Mentioning no names, Claudia and Tess. We're going to handle that.

Speaker 2 But it can't all be that sort of froth, of course.

Speaker 1 We have to deal with some serious service journalism and for that reason we will also be covering all's fair the new legal drama documentary document starring kim kardashian and others that some people have said is the worst television program ever made we will discuss but we'll start shall we with these two resignations what's happening at the bbc can i frame it in this particular way there's the two former newspaper editors have come out david yelland he used to edit the sun he said essentially there has been a coup so tim davey has left deborah turness has left david yelland said there's been a coup by people who've influenced the BBC board and they forced these people out.

Speaker 1 However, Charles Moore, who was the editor of the Daily Telegraph, says there wasn't a coup.

Speaker 1 Now, between a former editor of The Sun and former editor of The Telegraph, you want them both to be wrong, but they can't both be wrong.

Speaker 2 It's the Argentina-West Germany final, you never knew you needed it.

Speaker 1 Exactly that.

Speaker 1 So, what has happened, and why do we think?

Speaker 2 As you say, two people have resigned from the only organisation in public life that people still resign from.

Speaker 2 Everyone else has to get sacked. And before we go on, by the way, I should say that my husband works at the BBC.
He works in distribution and business development, so nothing to do with editorial.

Speaker 2 I actually didn't talk to him about this item at all because he was not around last night. But I did

Speaker 2 talk to other people who I don't actually have to disclose. But by way of background, last week...
Is that what you call it?

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 2 by way of background, it emerged last week that Michael Prescott, who is an advisor to the BBC on editorial standards, a former advisor, that in October, he'd circulated a memo to the BBC board with serious concerns about impartiality that wasn't handled quickly.

Speaker 2 In fact, there was disagreement amongst the board, I know, about how to handle it. And somehow or other, this memo was leaked to the Telegraph, who ran with it last Tuesday.
I think it first came out.

Speaker 2 And there are three planks to

Speaker 2 its serious complaints about impartiality. And I'm just going to go through them because all of them will become relevant in the discussion.

Speaker 2 So the first and the most significant for these resignations was about a Panorama documentary, which was broadcast in the run-up to last year's presidential election, in which two moments of a Trump speech were spliced together to make it appear that he had followed one statement about his MAGA supporters going to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, by immediately telling them to fight like hell.

Speaker 2 So as we know, we all saw those scenes on the Capitol. And so it appeared much more directly.
that he had insight into the city.

Speaker 1 And those moments were, I think, 50 odd minutes apart.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, he's a guy who likes to make a long speech, Richard. So they resigned on Sunday.
Samir Shah has made an apology on Monday for the Panorama edit.

Speaker 2 And on Wednesday, Michael Prescott will appear before the DCMS Select Committee in Parliament to discuss his memo and other matters.

Speaker 1 And I saw some people saying that Samir Shah has not defended the corporation correctly as well. So whether that's another scalp that people want, it feels unlikely to me.

Speaker 1 It feels like Tim Davy and Deborah Turner.

Speaker 1 That is like Jonathan and Stephen both leaving the traitors at the same time. It feels like maybe

Speaker 1 the bloodlust has been sated. I started by saying that the former editor of The Sun had called this a coup.

Speaker 1 He talks about the BBC board and he says that the elements close to it have worked with hostile newspaper editors, a former PM, and enemies of public service broadcasting.

Speaker 1 So Michael Prescott, who is the guy who did this report, he has ties with Boris Johnson. Boris Johnson appointed him to advise Ofcom.

Speaker 1 Robbie Gibb, who is on the BBC board, was a former comms advisor to Theresa May.

Speaker 1 If you were on the side of people who suggested there is a coup, there is certainly a cader of people who've been in and around Boris Johnson, all of whom seem to be coalescing on this story.

Speaker 2 I do notice that people have said that.

Speaker 2 And I have to say that I think everybody has sort of become a citizen journalist over the last few, you know, decade and sits on social media and makes connections in a kind of you join the dots way.

Speaker 2 And I always feel like, no, I'm terribly sorry.

Speaker 2 sorry if you want to make that connection you must explicitly join the dots rather than just sort of say well there you go because that is a form of conspiracy there may be some a concerted effort here amongst these people there have also been concerted efforts on the other side before to defend people to do different things and I think it's probably really unhelpful to get into talking about this as some kind of coup some kind of like war anything like that then you're playing on their turf once it's a war it's something that you or they can win and it won't be you if you're the BBC.

Speaker 2 And I think that it's much more useful to talk about it in the terms I hope I tried to talk about it as an inflection point for some of these issues which have been bubbling and festering for a long time and not actually gripped.

Speaker 2 The second problem was an institutional problem he alleged with the suppressing of stories about the trans issue with gender critical views being stifled, negative stories or stories asking difficult questions not being offered as balance to stories which were much more positive.

Speaker 2 And the third problem is an institutional problem with the coverage of the war in Gaza by BBC Arabic. So there were three different things.

Speaker 2 The first of those is ultimately what forced the resignations.

Speaker 2 Trump and his White House have crowed over the resignations already. And I think his part in them is very, very significant.
What he has shown is that he is utterly willing to sue news organisations.

Speaker 2 He's sued CBS, ABC, New York Times, Wall Street Journal. Those are just a few of them.
ABC ended up having to settle for 15 million, CBS for 16 million.

Speaker 2 Now, that's under US libel laws, which are almost, in most people's view, non-existent.

Speaker 2 If he were to be a libel tourist, which I don't see why he wouldn't, you can see the nature of the man, if you came to London, he would sue the BBC and

Speaker 2 given our laws would probably win. So that, I think, was a really, really significant factor in seeing how this would play out.

Speaker 2 The other thing I would like to say before we go on, because I think it's extraordinary that we don't talk about this and the backdrop to all of this, I read this morning,

Speaker 2 it's the front page of every single newspaper. Everyone says it's an existential crisis.
Here are some facts, not alternative facts, as Donald Trump was saying, but actual facts.

Speaker 2 The BBC is the most trusted news organization in the entire world. This is a world where 70% of countries don't even have a free press.

Speaker 2 Its existence is the single and proven reason why we in this country do not have the damaging polarized news market that they have, say, in the United States of America.

Speaker 2 They have a huge polarized news market and a massive massive problem with distrust for all different news organisations because people are siloed into their different ones.

Speaker 2 No news organisation in the US gets more than 25% of people frequently consuming it. Now in the UK, more than 60% of the population frequently consume BBC news, okay?

Speaker 2 Primarily through the World Service, the BBC is the country's most recognised cultural export, okay?

Speaker 2 I mean, I think it's something quite good.

Speaker 2 That's quite good.

Speaker 2 But you don't hear that now because every single sort of senior politician has said this is a completely in crisis it's like a lot of people would like to have that sort of crisis i'd like to have the bbc crisis more than i'd like to have the crisis say at yeah news international now all of those things are incredibly precious okay and they are loathed by the bbc's enemies um and they're definitely worth fighting for more than ever in a atomized and polarized world but that's why it really matters when things are wrong and these are all mistakes

Speaker 2 these are all big mistakes and i think you've just got to say that you have to remember that this is an organisation beset by political enemies for all sorts of reasons.

Speaker 1 Yeah, outside and inside, by the way. And worst of all is BBC News.
I think Tim Davey said it's very difficult to run the BBC in the current febrile cultural climate.

Speaker 1 And I suspect there's a fairly febrile cultural climate within BBC News as well, less so within entertainment and what have you.

Speaker 1 So Tim Davey leaves, and ostensibly he's leaving, as you say, because of that Trump edit. And this was bought up earlier last week, and nobody apologised.

Speaker 1 And as you say, we're trying to work out why nobody made an immediate apology because that's the simple thing to do there. Because those things definitely happen.

Speaker 1 And, you know, the simple thing to do is you put a little white to one of them.

Speaker 2 Well, I thought that was really significant all of last week that they weren't.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 No one could come together to agree a line on that. Now, the last time I saw Tim Davey, it was at an event, I'd say a couple of months ago, and it was the height of all

Speaker 1 the Gaza stuff and Bob Villon and all these things. And Tim Davy

Speaker 1 is, if nothing else, very, very irrepressible and a very irrepressible defender of the BBC and will absolutely always go to bat and always on the front foot, always positive, always making the case for the sort of things that you were talking about.

Speaker 1 And the last time I saw him in the midst of all of that, for the first time ever, I thought, oh my God,

Speaker 1 there's something broken about you here.

Speaker 1 I feel like you have had enough. And this feels to me, because I think that his resignation was a surprise to people.

Speaker 1 It feels like he was waiting for the next open door to just go, I do not need to do this anymore. Somebody who could, you know,

Speaker 1 there's a lot of, you know, there's all sorts of people who work at the BBC, but he's someone who could get pretty much any job he wanted in any industry that he wanted. He's very good.

Speaker 1 He's very good at what he does.

Speaker 1 You might not want him to be the DG, but he is. definitively, his market value is very high.

Speaker 1 But he's got to wake up every morning and deal with these things like constantly, as you say, people from the inside, people from the outside, people calling him all sorts of names.

Speaker 1 And there comes a point where as a human being, you just think, well,

Speaker 1 why would I put myself through this all day, every day? And he's probably stayed at the BBC longer than he should have done.

Speaker 1 He's been there 20-odd years in various roles, but I think he is there because he believes this is the right thing to do. You know, he took it through, you know, the end of the last Tory government.

Speaker 1 He took it through Boris Johnson, who we'll talk about later because his pawprints are over this as well. But, you know, took it through his prime ministership and...

Speaker 1 essentially sailed it to where we are now. I think probably he just had enough.

Speaker 1 No one will ever like you if you're the DG and programme makers will never like the DG and you know every program maker I know says oh he used to be a Tory councillor and this that or the other and you just want to go you know what half the people in Britain are Tories you might just have to get used to that sort of thing and you know if you think that Tim Davey is your enemy and the enemy of broadcasting in Britain maybe you choose your enemies a little bit better so I think it's one of those things where he probably was the right person to lead the PBC into this next charter renewal the difficulty with the role is that you are two different roles one you have a business role yeah in which I think people widely think he's done very well at.

Speaker 2 And then you have the editor, the editor-in-chief role.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that is where all of the scandals in recent times have come from.

Speaker 2 But, you know, you know, whatever it is, Greg Wallace, the news, all of these news things, Bob Villen, these are sort of editorial roles.

Speaker 2 We will talk in a minute about runners and riders and why there maybe aren't any.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, who would want to do that job? I mean, literally, who would want to do it? It's like being England football manager. Everyone else can do it better than you.

Speaker 2 Everyone else can tell you how to do it and it's yeah you're and it always ends in failure yes well we'll come we'll let's come to that in a minute but I do think that Deborah Turners did want the BBC board to respond to this memo much more quickly and to respond last week but they couldn't agree and this sense of drift or whatever happened

Speaker 2 but I totally agree with you that it's one battle after another and eventually you don't want to have any more battles.

Speaker 2 One of the things Tim Davey mentioned in or alluded to in his resignation letter was the sort of fact of being a director general at this time.

Speaker 2 The role of the director general in the current era, every single mistake is yours.

Speaker 2 You don't get to stand up at the dispatch box like David Lamy to pick another example from last week and just say, oh, this is everyone else's fault. This is my predecessor's fault.

Speaker 2 This is, you know, playing on my opponents and really just go back to being potentially quite inept or whatever it is and waiting to be sacked, which is what, as I said, every single other person in public life does.

Speaker 2 No one resigns anymore except from people from the BBC. You've got to take it if you're Director General all the time.
Greg Wallace is your fault. Bob Villen's your fault.

Speaker 2 Now, this isn't the case in lots and lots of other companies.

Speaker 2 And there are some people who say, well, should he have appointed a deputy who was more front-facing in some different way or reconstituted that sort of senior thing so that you have someone who, so it's not, you're not always the lightning word for every single tiny bit.

Speaker 2 But when I hear people like Nigel Farage, who's obviously thrilled about this, saying, you know, this is an existential crisis for the BBC, brackets, the most trusted organization in the world, but okay.

Speaker 2 And saying, we need to get someone from business. And Richard Tice saying, we've got to get someone from business to clear all this out, okay? I was just saying, okay, you sweet summer child.

Speaker 2 Okay, you don't understand anything about your precious business, okay? Because the only people who cop this much flack in public life are either politicians or tech bosses, right? That's it.

Speaker 2 Politicians, it's a non-political role, so you'll have to discount those people. Tech bosses get paid literally billions for companies they effectively have ownership over.

Speaker 2 And they have shown that because of those two things, they don't actually have to care about any of the criticism they take and they're not going to do anything about it.

Speaker 2 You know, Tim Davey gets paid a lot. He gets paid £547,000 a year.
Okay.

Speaker 2 But in terms of like how much flack you get, and yes, it's a form of public service and it's a form of power and whatever. And I'm sure.

Speaker 2 But having to listen to Nigel Farage talk about you know, people in business, let me explain.

Speaker 2 If Nigel Farage is the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, as he keeps telling us he's going to be, there will be no BBC that will be acceptable for him, other than a dead BBC.

Speaker 2 Now, he is a politician. He is a leading politician.
He is a party leader who presents a nightly...

Speaker 2 We have to call it a current affairs shows because he knows it would be in breach of all sorts of off-commer rules if he presents a current affairs show, which is on a channel called GB News and contains news.

Speaker 2 He doesn't think that's a conflict of interest. I mean, I've heard enough from Mr.
Ethics. I have heard enough from Mr.
Ethics, but there is no BBC that will satisfy him.

Speaker 2 It's very interesting who is on, who is crowing about this. Donald Trump, we've got to listen to him crowing about it.

Speaker 2 Boris Johnson, when he let down the public trust, it took 57 ministers to resign over 36 hours before he finally accepted that maybe he wasn't the public servant he was telling everybody he was.

Speaker 2 So it's rather difficult having to take it from these type of people.

Speaker 1 And no one here has blinkers on. We're aware of waste in the BBC.
We're aware of issues in the BBC, problems in the BBC. We definitively are.

Speaker 2 I think all of these things are very, very serious breaches and are big problems and they do need to be dealt with. And the fact that incredibly senior people have gone

Speaker 2 is actually, it can and should be turned into a great inflection point to deal with a number of these issues.

Speaker 2 And if people within the BBC, some of whom will have been a drag on dealing with these issues, don't wake up and realize that this is a huge moment, then that is going to be a big problem.

Speaker 2 But that will require strong leadership. And it's quite, as you say, it is quite difficult.

Speaker 2 In the old days, every time a director general resigned, and you know, they resign quite often because, as I say, they're the only people who still resign,

Speaker 2 there would be immediate lists of runners and riders that really, you really thought, well, there's lots of different people.

Speaker 2 Now there are so few, and I think it's so significant that people are saying, what about Charlotte Moore?

Speaker 2 You know, Charlotte Moore was a former director of programme, she's brilliant, but she's left and she once applied for a director general job and Tim Davey got it that round.

Speaker 2 And I think that people, even when she left, felt, felt well maybe in a few years she'll come back and be director general because she was she's lots of people's hope but are you asking me whether I think she'll do it

Speaker 1 she's gone to a big drama company left bank and she's having the time for life because you know what it's she's not she's not being hounded every five seconds by the way every single person listening to this myself included we make mistakes all the time and these are serious mistakes but we all make mistakes and the whole point of any organization is how do you deal with mistakes how do you move on from mistakes how do you learn from mistakes and what have you if you are charlotte more if you're anyone who's left at a bbc look at lineker every time you see him now now.

Speaker 1 It's like he's walking on air because, like, you know, he can say what he wants, he can do what he wants, and you know, people are not, you know, firing at him all the time.

Speaker 2 But we should remember that public service must remain a kind of lodestar in

Speaker 2 our national life and that people should still want to put themselves forward for difficult public service.

Speaker 1 Who would you wouldn't want to do it? I agree with you. No reason to do it.
You know what? You wouldn't be a politician. You would not be director general of the BBC.

Speaker 1 You would not do any of these things. That's the true crisis.
Well poisoned.

Speaker 2 That is the true crisis. It is so much bigger than all of this, is that the idea of going into public service

Speaker 2 in any of these roles, and it doesn't mean on the kind of layers below where lots of people might still, and I think that the real serious crisis is that this morning, despite full spectrum coverage of this issue, there's like these half-hearted things like, maybe Charlotte Moore will come back and do it.

Speaker 2 My God, 10, 15, 20 years ago, you'd have had a list of 10 people.

Speaker 1 I mean, listen, Director General has always, they've always, as you say, resigned. Greg Dyke resigned over the Hutton Inquiry into David Kelly.

Speaker 1 So George Entwistle, who people might not know, but he was, Roger Mosey was talking this morning. He said the problem with Tim Davey is not a journalist.
You need a journalist in charge of the BBC.

Speaker 1 And it's like ever useful to have a journalist in charge of anything.

Speaker 1 And the last time they had a journalist in charge was George Entwistle, who'd come up through the ranks at the BBC, Newsnight, all that kind of stuff. And he lasted just under two months.

Speaker 1 And he had all the stuff about Savile and he had the Lord McAlpine stuff on news nights. So they got rid of him after two months.

Speaker 1 they get rid of everybody every prime minister wants to get rid of the director general of the BBC going back going all the way back you look at Alistair Milne

Speaker 1 well she did she brought in Marmaduke Hussey as the chairman of the BBC so they got rid of him you've got Churchill and Eden they both had run-ins with Ian Jacob I mean this is this is how far back all this stuff goes you know Wilson complained about Charles Curran he complained about Huey Green you know it's it's always the case that politicians on the left and on the right want to get rid of whoever

Speaker 2 is at the BBC. It is now.
Even so, it is nothing like it is now.

Speaker 2 I genuinely believe that the only comparable flack, as I say, is like being a tech boss. And every time, you know, we see Mark Zuckerberg saying, I'm not even going to bother saying sorry anymore.

Speaker 2 These people don't care. This must be an inflection point because it's happened, it's bad, and you might as well try and make some lemonade.

Speaker 1 What's your take on the BBC news?

Speaker 1 Because from my perspective,

Speaker 1 I come at almost everything from the world of entertainment and documentaries and these things.

Speaker 1 And the the bbc seems to be a fairly healthy place certainly you know creatively in terms of ratings in terms of personnel you know it seems to be on a i can't believe we're not talking about like last thursday this is the sadness you're not talking about last thursday night on bbc where you just had this unbelievable run of shows the new series of like you know celebrity race across the world that lovely hamza yassin show that's on the moment i mean they're they they are on a run of form and you know i think tim davey by and large has always let people just run things like charlotte more like kate phillips he just that's one of the things that he was good at.

Speaker 1 He just said, you're the program maker. I will sit here and take the flack, which felt like the job that he was doing almost non-stop until now where it's got too much for him.

Speaker 1 But BBC News seems to be the thing where the real issues come up. Greg Wallace is an issue, but that's an HR issue at any company you're at.

Speaker 1 You know, there are always going to be those things, especially when you've got, you know, hundreds of suppliers and, you know, just hundreds and hundreds of hours of content.

Speaker 1 But BBC News, there constantly seems to be this suggestion of some sort of institutional bias from one side or the other.

Speaker 2 And some kind of different siege mentalities and

Speaker 2 internal and sometimes, you know, aggressive siege mentalities from different groups.

Speaker 2 I would say that in the case of the Trump edit, I mean, really, it's extraordinary that it's got all the way up to the very top and those people have gone because really you should just say to the people who made the program, you're not making any more programmes.

Speaker 2 You can't do that.

Speaker 2 But because nothing was done about that, in the end it got to such a pitch that the people who are going are the two most significant people. I certainly think that

Speaker 2 in terms of people's perception of how the gender debate has been covered, I think that there is definitely, you know, there are suggestions that there's a desk that people had to run stories through and that they weren't allowed to run gender-critical stories in any way.

Speaker 2 Absolutely, people are furious when they see male rapists described as women simply because of what they claim is their gender identity. Now they're within the prison system.

Speaker 1 There was this issue with Martine Croxall where she refused to say pregnant people. She said pregnant women with an eye roll and I think that has an awful lot of sympathy from an awful lot of people.

Speaker 2 Yes. The BPC remains an organization better capable of lacerating itself and beating itself up publicly

Speaker 2 than anyone else in the world.

Speaker 2 And it's sort of extraordinary that, I mean, it's really interesting watching the American reaction to this. Obviously, they didn't have the same type of news organising.

Speaker 2 As I say, this is a precious treasure and I agree that this is a big deal.

Speaker 1 That's the point. This has to be held to a much standard.

Speaker 2 This has to be held to higher standards than any of their news that everyone hates and is polarised and what have you.

Speaker 2 Of course, it sort of sticks in the craw that Nigel Farage is willing to appear on Fox News all day long, even though he knows very well what those presenters did on January the 6th.

Speaker 1 And by the way, it's okay to do all that. You can be a hypocrite because he has a certain political view which he wants to prevail.
We just have to take it as what it is.

Speaker 1 We have to, that's the job, that's what he is doing. He wants to dismantle all of this stuff.
That's what he wants to do. So, he just

Speaker 1 there's no point pretending that something isn't happening that is happening or something or the other way around. That's what's happening.

Speaker 1 If there's a culture war, it's the war against culture and it's the war against the BBC and all of that stuff. That's what he's doing.
He's allowed to, people are absolutely allowed to support him.

Speaker 1 He's allowed to do it in whatever way he wants. Other people are allowed to fight back and disagree with him.
And, you know,

Speaker 1 that's what we're doing here. We're just saying it's in plain sight now those people are pointing at

Speaker 1 a coup and again there's a you can always point to these things but Michael Prescott himself was the chief political correspondent of the Sunday Times and I think the political editor of the Sunday Times Robbie Gibb who was Theresa May's press secretary he's on the board at the BBC so there's a there are people in high places at the BBC who

Speaker 1 were you a conspiracy theorist you think well that I could see why you might team together and do things so that's the that's is the case against I think it's much more complicated than that

Speaker 1 Would you agree?

Speaker 2 I certainly would. And if you were on the other side, I would say that people will say, oh, look at this, there's a sort of leftist conspiracy at the BBC.

Speaker 2 And they can point to cherry-pick all sorts of different other things. And they may have a case

Speaker 2 with some of those artists.

Speaker 1 Funnily enough, Charles Moore, the former editor of the Daily Telegraph, he said there's a metropolitan left bias at the BBC. And by the way,

Speaker 1 I'm sure there is.

Speaker 1 There's both. As I say, that's always been the case, is people arguing both ways.
And you can argue both ways. All want really

Speaker 1 is to have this incredible organization at the heart of our culture making great comedy, great documentary, making television that people care about and television that makes us a better country and a better place.

Speaker 1 There are people who don't want that.

Speaker 2 And being the most trusted news brand in the world and that is something worth hanging on to. And I do think there is no other organization like it.
It's so interesting.

Speaker 2 You just go into so many parallel worlds when you're looking at the reaction to this because there'll be people, there are people like Nigel Farage saying, this is an existential crisis.

Speaker 2 I can't, you know, we've been saying for so long it's completely rotten. And there's a whole other group of people saying, well, all they've done is serve me Nigel Farage, the BBC, for how long?

Speaker 2 So you think, or there's people who are saying the BBC is completely biased towards Israel. And then there are other people saying the BBC have taken anything Hamas says as gospel.

Speaker 2 And there are these just complete parallel worlds even within this argument.

Speaker 2 And there is no other organisation in the world like that where all of those realities are perceived to be definitely true by different groups of people.

Speaker 2 So, nonetheless, despite all of that, I think it's very unhelpful to get caught up in these kind of conspiracy things. You can cherry-pick all sorts of these things.

Speaker 2 The fact is that these were mistakes, and they are, in probably all cases, indicative of larger problems that do need to be gripped.

Speaker 1 It's also worth just keeping our eyes open as to what's happening and why, who's happy about it, who's not happy about it, and where we go next.

Speaker 2 And acknowledging that the true crisis, I'm afraid, is in public service and that why would anyone wish to go into it and fewer and fewer people of high caliber do.

Speaker 2 Well I think that this is why now they're talking about the next director general having a sort of journalistic background in some way.

Speaker 2 I always used to think that the Archbishop of Canterbury, you'd have an atheist and then like a gibbering idiot who actually believed it, then an atheist and a gibbering idiot who actually believed it.

Speaker 2 That was the one-on-one off principle also applied to quality of Ridley Scott movies.

Speaker 2 But in this case, with director generals, generals, they're always course correcting as to how the last one went.

Speaker 1 So you're always dressing for yesterday's weather.

Speaker 2 Yeah. In this case, I think people are thinking that Tim Davey did absolutely brilliantly on positioning the BBC in terms of business and the future and all those sorts of things.

Speaker 2 But in terms of as an editorial role, the fact is, it is such an enormous role to do both of those things. That's crazy.

Speaker 2 To be the only person that it's always you in front of the cameras, it's always you on the stage, it's always you at the podium and it's always your fault, whatever happens, I think is very difficult.

Speaker 2 And I wonder whether the next person will think I want to empower maybe more senior people to be a bit more front-facing in that way because I think otherwise it is really very, very difficult to exist in this era, which all of these resignation letters made clear that this era is something particular.

Speaker 1 If you're an actual business person then the first thing to do would be you would gut it for parts and sell off loads of it and then not worry about public service broadcasting and

Speaker 1 line your own pockets. Speaking around I talked to all the people who, as you say, five years ago, ten years ago, would have been on the list who would do it, and nobody seems interested.

Speaker 1 I mean, maybe Alex Mahon from Channel 4, because she's left Channel 4, but I don't know why she would want to do it. She's out in business now, but she'd understand the political side of it.

Speaker 1 She understands how to run an organisation. If you're any of the big creative,

Speaker 1 any of the big dogs, and I don't mean Jonathan and Stephen, but if you're any of those people... How about Joe Marla?

Speaker 2 Marla for DG.

Speaker 1 I do think it's a good idea.

Speaker 1 He resigned in a good way to resign. Resigning over the Trump thing is good because

Speaker 1 he's not besmirched by that in any way. There's a million things he could have resigned over that, you know, would have delayed his return to lucrative work elsewhere.

Speaker 1 But if you're resigning over Trump, I think everyone.

Speaker 2 And you would hope it would head off the possibility of legal action against the BBC, which would be incredibly damaging.

Speaker 2 Now that that flighty froth is dealt with, shall we go into a break ahead of discussing Kim Kardashian's new drama? Yeah.

Speaker 2 this episode is brought to you by Sky and Sky's new original film Nuremberg in cinemas Friday, the 14th of November.

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Speaker 1 Welcome back, everyone. Lovely to have you back.
We've done the BBC and the Director General. Now for the program that's been described as the worst program ever made.

Speaker 1 It's on Disney Plus.

Speaker 2 Not the BBC.

Speaker 1 It stars Kim Kardashian, not Tim Davey. And it's called All's Fair.
The worst programme ever made, Marina. Discuss.

Speaker 2 Well, okay, this is one of 387 Ryan Murphy shows currently available via Disney Plus or on Hulu or whatever.

Speaker 2 And anyway, we actually have done a bonus series on Ryan Murphy, which delves deep into this complex man,

Speaker 2 I think is the euphemism. And

Speaker 2 All's Fair, right? It's described as Kim Kardashian's show.

Speaker 2 It also, it's not actually Kim Kardashian's show, really, because it also has an unbelievable roster of talent.

Speaker 2 Not to not put her in acting talent, although I do think it helps to be able to move your face. Naomi Watts, Glenn Close, Tayana Taylor, Sarah Paulson, and Nisi Nash.

Speaker 2 Now, all of their names are hysterical. They play divorce laws.

Speaker 2 It's an all-female divorce law team. They're all extremely rich and live in Los Angeles.

Speaker 2 And everyone is wearing gloves all the time, which I'm going to come back to just in the hope hope that I might have worked out why that's significant. But they're all wearing gloves all of the time.

Speaker 1 And so far, by the way, it sounds amazing.

Speaker 2 But it is genuinely terrible. It has, it's got, the reason we're talking about it particularly is because it's rare that something gets a zero-star review.
But that was not, it's only zero-star.

Speaker 2 It was, when it started out, I think it was on sort of 0%

Speaker 1 on Metacritic. It is now, things have got a lot better.
It's now 6%. Yeah, I mean, on Rotten Tomatoes.

Speaker 2 I've been screaming up the Rotten Tomatoes chart on 6%.

Speaker 2 It does contain some of the just genuinely genuinely appalling lines like, let's put the team in teamwork.

Speaker 1 Team is already in teamwork. Yeah.
It's

Speaker 1 where that comes from. Yeah.
It's like saying, let's put the team in teamwork and the work. So like as a team, we work together.

Speaker 2 I'm calling it teamwork. That would have been great because that would have blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1 A demo of Raw Life is doing that. Is that okay? Oh, I forgot to say she's wearing gloves.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's the absolute apotheosis of tell don't show.

Speaker 2 Everyone is telling you all the time, like, how I'm aware that she's rich, but then we have to have a close-up of her Birkin handbag on her car seat as she drives down the bottom of the city.

Speaker 1 It is so fore, there's a Gucci handbag in a later scene that is so foregrounded, you can barely make out anything else in the screen.

Speaker 2 But having said that, it is, and despite all of these terrible reviews, it is Hulu's most watched scripted show debut in three years. So jokes on you, cultural police.

Speaker 1 I mean, is it though? But is

Speaker 1 Because I mean,

Speaker 1 what's it up again? Firstly, what's it up against? Secondly, you know, its first episode is the most watched for three years on Hulu. Is the second episode and the third episode? We shall find out.

Speaker 1 Just to give some of the reviews, The Guardian called it fascinatingly, incomprehensibly, existentially terrible. The Telegraph called it a crime against television.
It is. The idea is brilliant.

Speaker 1 Right? These three

Speaker 1 female divorce lawyers who leave one of the sort of, you know, like a blue chip company, set up their own. The idea of the incredible, you know, they are ultra-rich.
That's fun.

Speaker 1 It's fun to see how they live. You know, it's about these three women, it's about their personal lives.
You've got different cases each week, but everything about it is

Speaker 1 off.

Speaker 1 I would say you don't. The cases themselves are unconvincing.
They're too easily solved. I mean, you know, there's...

Speaker 2 What were you expecting? A cinema verte look into the New York, the LA divorce.

Speaker 1 Well, Ryan Murphy has made some great TV.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but less and less. The trouble is he's diluting it more and more with this.
That's the trouble.

Speaker 1 But if you look at the writers on it, so John Robin Bates is one of the writers on this, okay? A couple of things I know about John Robin Bates is he's been nominated for a Pulitzer twice.

Speaker 1 His scripts on the West Wing were the ones that Aaron Sorkin said, that's the one I had to do least to.

Speaker 1 I could just shoot it as was these scripts. So this guy is no idiot.
Ryan Murphy is no idiot.

Speaker 2 Los is good at acting as well, but not in this.

Speaker 1 But isn't it fascinating? Because I think they're going for something which is a very, very high camp, which is a very, very unapologetic, different form of television.

Speaker 2 I don't think they meant to go for it. I think it turned out so bad.

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 2 yes, that they

Speaker 1 were.

Speaker 1 But you can, you can, you know, I'm listening to the lines as they come out.

Speaker 1 The scripts are wiped clean.

Speaker 1 You know, the scripts are, they're not trying to delve too deeply into into anything, they're trying to be all surface and all gloss, and then presumably, as the series goes on, sort of go, however, there is more going on.

Speaker 2 Speaking of people who are just

Speaker 2 good people who should have known, but I was so depressed to see that Tayana Taylor in it, who in one battle after another is absolutely like the absolute star of the first section of the film as the sort of revolutionary girlfriend, and now is playing some junior lawyer who's just a sort of side piece.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I genuinely think at the moment, although it's, you know, it's got great ratings for Hulu Richard, I would say that Ryan Murphy has been the brown finger to this.

Speaker 2 Everything he's touched in this has turned to shit.

Speaker 2 I really do think everybody in this is dreadful.

Speaker 1 It's fascinating to work out why it's so bad.

Speaker 2 Why it is so bad with so many good people involved. But also the attempts to which they've, the lengths to which they've gone to make it a show for our era, which is it's going to go viral.

Speaker 2 So it's, you're going to get all these other articles, like there will be so many articles about like gloves are having a moment. It would be like Claudia on Traitors.
And now this.

Speaker 2 Now, normally you need three for a trend piece, but I have to say, there are so many gloves in this that you're just going to get all of those things.

Speaker 2 So you get all of this kind of side stuff where people will write about your show, even if it's to say it's bad.

Speaker 2 As Kim said in what she did a post the other day saying, you know, are you watching the most critically acclaimed show of the year? Because it's a joke and it doesn't really matter.

Speaker 2 And so there's all of that. In terms of the actual aesthetic, I would say it's really interesting.

Speaker 2 In the same way that we talked a lot about The Real Housewives and how that franchise like took these fictional worlds and dragged them back into the real world or a version of the real world, a sort of augmented and managed reality and became the sort of biggest show on the internet.

Speaker 2 It's like, as we said, like 80% of traffic at any one point on the internet is gifs and reaction shots from those shows which are used to gloss our entire culture, political and otherwise.

Speaker 2 This show, show you've heard of straight to video straight to tvd as they used to call it this is straight to gif okay this show every single thing that happens on this show is designed to be put after you know the next government shut down or the next it's just designed to be a reaction gif for everything so all the lines and all the everything it's now taken the housewives and just kind of bumped them back into the realm of almost fiction but you know i'm looking at kim kardashian and this and she's got a crappy husband right she looks just like kim kardashian Kardashian and everything.

Speaker 2 She's got all the same bags. She's driving up to a house.
No, she's driving up to a house that I think she'd think is slightly below her standards, even though it's a nice house there, isn't it?

Speaker 2 The way that these shows will make money and the way they'll get audience and the way that the Kardashians make money is off the female gaze.

Speaker 2 So this is women will tune in and watch this and love to hate it, but it will be clipped for every possible reaction.

Speaker 2 You're going to be seeing reaction gifts from this.

Speaker 1 It doesn't seem to love women, this show particularly.

Speaker 2 For a show that's literally all about women, this demeans women in every possible way, but I'm pretends it doesn't.

Speaker 2 So there's that. It's obviously executive produced by her momager, Christiana.
By the way,

Speaker 1 I find it amazing that it's bad because it's got so many exec producers. You'd think it would be great.
Ryan Murphy, Kim Kardashian, Glenn Close, these are all exec producers.

Speaker 1 Sarah Paulson, Naomi Watts, Nisi Nash, John Robin Bates, Joe Bacon, Jamie Pacino, Lynn Green, Richard Levine, Anthony Hemingway, I'm still going.

Speaker 1 Chris Jenna, Alexis Martin, Woodall, Eric Cofton, Scott Robertson, 16 executive producers. That's almost a record.
That's almost a series of the traitors. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then that's not before you get to the co-executive producers. I saw in one of the press releases it said that

Speaker 1 Chris Jenna has committed to exec produce.

Speaker 1 Oh, she's committed to exec producer. That's like me committing to having a nap.
You're just like, I've committed to not doing anything at all, but you paying me some money. Okay, yeah.

Speaker 1 Do you know what? I am actually going to, for once in my life, I'm actually going to commit.

Speaker 1 i will actually sign that uh so presumably i don't have to do anything you're just gonna yeah you just send me that yeah you've got my you've got my account details oh do you know people call me commitment phobic but look at me look at me now commit to exec produce there's a lot of executive producers there

Speaker 1 and the whole thing feels like it's been a lot of ryan murphy stuff is packaged and he does some great stuff but it feels like they've kind of gone look it's it's kim so we need to can we get some heavyweights here and you go well let's get near me watson i'll be amazing to get glenn close well look look, Glenn, I'll do it, but she has to be an ex-exe producer, and you have to bring her in for X, Y, Z.

Speaker 1 It feels like everyone kind of trusts, you know, he's still got money in the bank, Ryan Murphy, in terms of reputation, because he's done some extraordinary things and, you know, made a lot of successes.

Speaker 1 So people will still take a call from Ryan Murphy and still say yes to something. So he can get this amazing cast together.

Speaker 1 But yeah, when they got there, it feels like no one was really in charge of making it good. It could be brilliant.
The aesthetic is almost right.

Speaker 1 The script is wrong. As you say, it's all tell don't show all of it all the way through.
It's this is who I am. This is this is how you know you know show us.
Show us, show us, show us.

Speaker 1 Did it achieve what it wants?

Speaker 2 Because it achieves it by this.

Speaker 1 I don't know if it does achieve what it wants.

Speaker 2 Anything just now needs to be, can it be clipped down, cut down into reaction?

Speaker 1 But it needs to be funnier. It just, the script is funny.

Speaker 2 But it will be once it's applied to events in real life as a gif.

Speaker 2 That's how it will, this thing will exist.

Speaker 1 But you can have that and also make it brilliant. If that's the aesthetic you're going for, you can do that but still have a great script.

Speaker 1 The stuff in between the GIFs could also, because it's just as easy, it takes just as long to write a funny, clever script as it does to write a dumb, stupid script. What?

Speaker 1 It's the same amount of script. It's almost ridiculous.

Speaker 2 No, it's not. It doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 Because you just get people who are good at it. Of course it's not.

Speaker 2 I mean, some of those are quite good, but

Speaker 2 they come up with this.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but it's not.

Speaker 2 So they must have found it hard unless the brief changed halfway through.

Speaker 1 But what I'm saying is this would have taken them a long time to write.

Speaker 1 Just to write this level of inanity and to write to this sort of aesthetic that someone's trying to get at, I bet was an incredibly painful and long process.

Speaker 1 Well, if you take someone like John Robin Bates and Aaron Sorghin says to him, write this episode, right? He can do that and I bet that takes him.

Speaker 1 I bet his best ever episode of The West Wing took him the same amount of time as an episode of this. I bet it took the same amount of time.
It's just he was allowed to be good.

Speaker 2 That's interesting. Okay.

Speaker 2 Can I just say that did you see all the girls turned out from All's Fair to a certain event this weekend, which i just have to talk about oh what was it it was chris jenner's 70th birthday on saturday night which she held at jeff bezos and lauren sanchez's house in beverley hills catnip for you yeah i know well you know she's had this new facelift chris jenner that we're all supposed to talk about like it's the first actually important artwork of the early 20th century 21st century so that facelift was on show can i just because i was crying with laughter at the hysterical guest list can i just read this out to you

Speaker 2 martha stewart snoop dog vin Diesel, Bill Gates, Adele, Various Hiltons, Sia, Will I Am, Oprah and Gail, obviously, Mariah Carey, Babyface, Mark Zuckerberg, Justin Bieber, Prince Harry and Megan.

Speaker 2 What surprised me about this party, which I thought was very, to slightly bring it back to Wars Fair, that kind of like, it's just going to be so route one, is that they all had to get out onto the street, these people.

Speaker 2 So all of the arrivals are people who hadn't realised they'd have to arrive on the street and fight through all the paparazzi who are outside.

Speaker 2 And then I was thinking, I mean, Jeff Basil, he must have in-and-out gates, right? For wherever this place in LA that he lives.

Speaker 2 And you know, my thoughts on the houses in Los Angeles, but otherwise, Beverly Hills is even more of a sort of cultural failure than I'd imagined. So then I looked it up.

Speaker 2 He lives in Jack Warner's house, okay, which was built in the 1930s. It's basically got an internal road system.
Any of those people could have been dropped at the front door.

Speaker 2 So this is all by design. Yeah, of course.
This is the thing about all of these things. They want it to look like that all the time.

Speaker 2 They want it, I mean, as you say, it costs a lot of money to look that cheap, as it were. They want it to look bad.
And I think that is the designated aesthetic.

Speaker 2 I don't think that Ryan Murphy would admit for one second that this didn't come off in the way that he'd wanted it to be.

Speaker 2 I'm sure lots of people who worked on the show are just like, let's get through this. But I don't think he, for one second, would admit it in the same way that this is a good idea.

Speaker 1 My point is you can have every single bit of that, but also make it better. It's just stick a couple of actual proper jokes in there.
I mean, that's easily done.

Speaker 1 It can be pithy, it can be short, the reactions reactions can be exactly what you want, but just make it funnier, make it a little bit more real, make the cases a bit more real, make the characters not more sympathetic, but make them more rounded.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's really simple little fixes.

Speaker 2 Yeah, any episode of Royal Housewives is better and has had more thought go into it.

Speaker 1 Can I say something controversial? Yeah.

Speaker 1 When the three of them who set up these businesses are sitting around the table, Nisi Nash, Naomi Watts, and Kim Kardashian, and they're chatting, there's a terrible scene right at the beginning where we see them 10 years ago and then we we saw it 10 years and they go what's been your favorite case we've done in the last 10 years and then they each explain a case as if the others weren't there and they go oh yes no we know sorry we're all it's our company we work together so we know you don't need to explain to us who that was um you go well i had this client yeah we know we all had that client anyway terrible scene if you were to say to me as i come down from mars you said of these three

Speaker 1 actors nisi nash kim kardashian and naomi watts one of these people is not an actor the other two two are multi-award-winning actors. I would have said that Naomi Watts was the non-actor.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's what I mean.

Speaker 1 Brownfinger. But I didn't mind Kim Kardashian's performance.
I think it's perfectly, you know, she's been sagged off and called wooden and all this stuff.

Speaker 1 I think her performance, see, her performance, I agree, is exactly what Ryan Murphy. would have wanted.
She gives exactly the performance she is hired.

Speaker 2 It's the same performance that she gives in every episode of Keeping Up in the Kardashians.

Speaker 2 It's the same

Speaker 2 all the Kardashians as it is now.

Speaker 2 This is the same.

Speaker 1 I thought she was absolutely fine. I think Naomi Watts doing her British accent and really, again, one projects, really looking like she doesn't want to be there.
Yeah. And really just almost like...

Speaker 2 Even if you've got to keep all the clothes.

Speaker 1 When you can see when.

Speaker 2 You can keep the haunting clape.

Speaker 2 But it's still very hard for me to do this job.

Speaker 1 There's a couple of scenes later on where she fly solo and you go, oh, okay, yes, you can act. She's sort of going, oh man, I'll just be me now.
But when she's sitting in that...

Speaker 1 awful, awful boardroom that looks like AI generated,

Speaker 1 you're just like, oh my god, this is, I mean, there's no way you've won an Academy Award. I mean, it's an impossibility.
Is it worth watching?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's kind of like you can watch one episode of it. I don't think a lot of people could get all the way through because nothing changes.

Speaker 1 We watched the first one and I have to say I had a perfectly enjoyable time watching it because there's lots to think about while you're watching it and that you can really, really have an opinion about it.

Speaker 1 The absolute

Speaker 1 the only thing in television is do you then watch the second one? And I mean, is there a point when you can just watch the GIFs? You know, would you.

Speaker 2 I'll just watch the like. I noticed that Halle Berry was supposed to be in it, but had a scheduling conflict.
Yeah, I have actually come up.

Speaker 2 And I feel I will have a scheduling conflict come up for all of the further episodes of this show. But, you know, I'm sure I'll enjoy the GIFs every time they're

Speaker 2 next time we hear who the new director general is, we'll see a GIF from that show of Kim Kardashian going, well, how about that?

Speaker 2 On take 39 and saying, well, how about that with a glass of champagne?

Speaker 1 Taking off a glove. Yeah.
Any Any recommendations this week? Not all's fair.

Speaker 2 Not all, although, you know, dive in and see if you enjoy it.

Speaker 2 I,

Speaker 2 having really struggled to find anything to watch at the cinema for the last month, went and saw Bugonia, which I really liked, which is directed by Jurgis Lanthemus and written by Will Tracy and stars Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons.

Speaker 2 And it is really weird, funny, just it's it's different. Um, and I really enjoyed it.
So he's the same guy who directed Poor Things, Favourite, all sorts of things like that.

Speaker 2 And this is actually a remake of a South Korean film, but

Speaker 2 it's definitely a bit different.

Speaker 1 I saw an onion headline, which was Yorgos Lanthemos reckons he's about three movies away from hanging out with Emma Stone outside work.

Speaker 2 She is brilliant. I will watch her in absolutely anything.
She is mesmerising. I think she's fantastic.

Speaker 1 Very much a podcast of two halves today. Thank you so much

Speaker 1 for anyone who both of those halves fitted within

Speaker 1 your realm of interest because you're my spiritual twin in that case yeah exactly um we will be back on thursday with a question and answer i'm gutted we don't have like a a bonus celebrity traitors episode this week i'm it's i'm it's just it's really quite good though that it's not long at all to wait for for the regular one for the regular one um so i'm i'm very much looking forward to that

Speaker 1 so many messages this week from people who've been uh saying do you think i should do celebrity traitors what about doing celebrity traitors and there's there's some there's some um there's some very good names.

Speaker 1 By the way, our Q ⁇ A next week is going to be with Kate Phillips, who's the BBC's Chief Content Officer. So she's in charge of everything that goes on at the BBC.

Speaker 1 She's behind Celebrity Traitors, all that kind of stuff. If you've got any questions about the BBC's output,

Speaker 1 she's done everything and she's very, very, very smart.

Speaker 1 And anything you want to know about any of your favourite shows on the BBC or anything you just want to know about broadcasting in general, do send your questions to Kate.

Speaker 1 That's the restasentertainment at goalhanger.com for your questions, and we will put them to her. But we will be back for a QA episode on Thursday.

Speaker 1 We also have the second part of our history of MTV for our members as well.

Speaker 2 It's going even wilder on that one.

Speaker 2 And you can join at the restaurantsentertainment.com for bonus episodes, ad-free listening. Otherwise, we will see you all on Thursday.

Speaker 1 We will see you all on Thursday, unless Marina is appointed DG before then.

Speaker 2 This episode was brought to you by our good friends at Sky.

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