Interview: Jana Bennett, BBC director of television (Evening Standard)
By David Rowan
JANA Bennett has called the Evening Standard into Television Centre for a diplomatic telling-off. The BBC's second-most-powerful executive is troubled by suggestions in Tom Mangold's media column last week that BBC One's "slide downmarket" will cost her colleague Lorraine Heggessey her job as controller.
"Perhaps he was just responding to the fact that something he wanted to do didn't get commissioned," she says bluntly. The former Panorama reporter has evidently hit a raw nerve.
As director of television, Bennett has good reason to feel defensive. Last month, a Governmentcommissioned national survey found a "startling ... unanimity about the sense of decline in quality of BBC television".
The report, contributing to Lord Burns's review of the corporation's charter, identified concerns about repeats, "dumbing down" and "copycat" programming, with fingers mostly pointed at BBC One.
The reinvigorated governors, meanwhile, used this year's annual report to express their own worries over "perceptions that the quality of BBC television is declining". A governors' inquiry is already under way into BBC One's peaktime schedules.
"We're not going to jump to quick conclusions," explains Bennett, an elfish 48-year-old from New Hampshire who wraps infinitely rambling answers in a soft American accent.
Still, she has already decided that her friend Heggessey is safe until at least the end of next year. "I want her to be the longest-serving BBC One controller, and I think she does too," she says. "She absolutely loves her work and is doing a good job, and there's a lot more to do."
Far from "discarding" current affairs, she says, Heggessey has increased investigative budgets and scheduled serious journalism in primetime, such as tonight's Panorama alleging Olympic corruption. Rather than sliding downmarket, she has added "breadth and range" to genres ranging from drama to art - combining Rolf Harris's populism and Alan Yentob's more highbrow Imagine "as different ways of opening up windows".
"What we are trying to do with BBC One is increase the number of types of experiences," Bennett explains. "With drama, say, it's about not being dependent on one type, but also encouraging short series which can be more author driven, like The Canterbury Tales.
"What is true of drama is also true of current affairs and factual, where we've built on consumer journalism, like Watchdog, through to landmark series, like British Isles: A Natural History. Compare the schedules of BBC One with a few years ago, and you'll find there is more variety than ever."
THE autumn highlights, announced last week, suggest an uneasy reliance on the sort of "event" programming that tends to infuriate broadsheet critics - from a " nailbiting" national spelling bee to the "Fat Nation" challenge and Rolf 's live "paintathon". Does Bennett worry that the governors themselves have decided to "assess" BBC One's peaktime schedules, amid wider concerns about perceived decline?
"If you read their review of BBC One in the annual report," she says, "it points to quite a lot of good things, such as increasing reach, the arts ... " Yes, but it also questions why the channel drops innovative programmes "when initially faced with disappointing ratings".
"The governors' job is to be on the case of management," she replies. "It's right that they are prepared to say things clearly and to direct attention to things, whether we agree or not. We should look to increase the perception of quality programming. But you do that by sticking with the right number of things, while killing things off at the right time to make way for new ones."
Ratings, she insists, are only one of a "basket" of measures of success. "We are not driven by overnight ratings nearly as much as people say. What we want is for people to appreciate what they see." Measurement of programme "reach" matters greatly, she says, as do surveys of "memorability" and audience approval.
Yet here again BBC One is looking damaged. Executives were concerned in April when approval ratings reportedly fell to an alltime low. Bennett's explanation? It was merely a "seasonal" decline that has since been corrected.
Equally convenient is her spin on public concerns identified in Lord Burns's survey: audiences often assign programmes to the wrong channels, she says, so their criticisms probably relate to " television in general" rather than the BBC specifically. She clearly learned a few tricks up at Oxford from her music-scene friend, Tony Blair.
After university, where she read PPE, she took a graduate degree at the London School of Economics, co-editing a journal of international relations before joining the BBC as a news trainee in 1978. She has stayed ever since - apart from a three-year gap running the US Learning Channel - making her name launching series such as Walking With Dinosaurs, The Human Body and Animal Hospital.
She is married to Richard Clemmow, former head of BBC TV News, and they have two children.
As for her expertise in international diplomacy, that must have come in useful when Mark Thompson arrived earlier this year as director-general.
Only last year, Bennett publicly rubbished his strategy, when he was her predecessor as director of television, as "a mistake". Under Thompson, she declared, BBC One "took its eye off the ball" by neglecting the arts, and he was "frankly too blunt" in designating channels for particular genres.
Now that he is back as her boss, how well are they getting on?
"Mark and I absolutely have a good relationship, and he agrees with my strategy," she begins, launching into an extended and uninterruptible detour taking in factual programming, comedy, and BBC Three's raison d'être.
WHEN she took her present job in 2002, Bennett admitted that her " toughest challenge of all" was Saturday night entertainment on BBC One. Yet, with Johnny Vaughan's latest vehicle bombing, even the governors recently acknowledged that entertainment "continues to be a challenge".
Why can't she and Heggessey get it right? "It's starting to turn a corner," she insists, citing Strictly Come Dancing as "a funny, sincere, cross-generational show" that has a key role to play.
Would she have wanted Big Brother? "I don't feel that, in its current evil guise, Big Brother has enough content or purpose to be on the BBC," she says. "It's a great format that's lost its purpose - it's not to me a huge curiosity factor whether people are bonking under a table or on top of it."
What about that other Channel 4 hit, Wife Swap? "The first series, yes," she says. But now? "Your treatment of people matters. There is a nasty route you can go down - people might watch it, but I wonder what they feel about the experience. For me, whose side you are on is important. With [BBC One's] What Not to Wear, you end up with a transformative experience on behalf of the ordinary citizen. What I like is television that invests in humanism, so you come away with something more than shock value."
(Evening Standard, August 4 2004)
JANA Bennett has called the Evening Standard into Television Centre for a diplomatic telling-off. The BBC's second-most-powerful executive is troubled by suggestions in Tom Mangold's media column last week that BBC One's "slide downmarket" will cost her colleague Lorraine Heggessey her job as controller.
"Perhaps he was just responding to the fact that something he wanted to do didn't get commissioned," she says bluntly. The former Panorama reporter has evidently hit a raw nerve.
As director of television, Bennett has good reason to feel defensive. Last month, a Governmentcommissioned national survey found a "startling ... unanimity about the sense of decline in quality of BBC television".
The report, contributing to Lord Burns's review of the corporation's charter, identified concerns about repeats, "dumbing down" and "copycat" programming, with fingers mostly pointed at BBC One.
The reinvigorated governors, meanwhile, used this year's annual report to express their own worries over "perceptions that the quality of BBC television is declining". A governors' inquiry is already under way into BBC One's peaktime schedules.
"We're not going to jump to quick conclusions," explains Bennett, an elfish 48-year-old from New Hampshire who wraps infinitely rambling answers in a soft American accent.
Still, she has already decided that her friend Heggessey is safe until at least the end of next year. "I want her to be the longest-serving BBC One controller, and I think she does too," she says. "She absolutely loves her work and is doing a good job, and there's a lot more to do."
Far from "discarding" current affairs, she says, Heggessey has increased investigative budgets and scheduled serious journalism in primetime, such as tonight's Panorama alleging Olympic corruption. Rather than sliding downmarket, she has added "breadth and range" to genres ranging from drama to art - combining Rolf Harris's populism and Alan Yentob's more highbrow Imagine "as different ways of opening up windows".
"What we are trying to do with BBC One is increase the number of types of experiences," Bennett explains. "With drama, say, it's about not being dependent on one type, but also encouraging short series which can be more author driven, like The Canterbury Tales.
"What is true of drama is also true of current affairs and factual, where we've built on consumer journalism, like Watchdog, through to landmark series, like British Isles: A Natural History. Compare the schedules of BBC One with a few years ago, and you'll find there is more variety than ever."
THE autumn highlights, announced last week, suggest an uneasy reliance on the sort of "event" programming that tends to infuriate broadsheet critics - from a " nailbiting" national spelling bee to the "Fat Nation" challenge and Rolf 's live "paintathon". Does Bennett worry that the governors themselves have decided to "assess" BBC One's peaktime schedules, amid wider concerns about perceived decline?
"If you read their review of BBC One in the annual report," she says, "it points to quite a lot of good things, such as increasing reach, the arts ... " Yes, but it also questions why the channel drops innovative programmes "when initially faced with disappointing ratings".
"The governors' job is to be on the case of management," she replies. "It's right that they are prepared to say things clearly and to direct attention to things, whether we agree or not. We should look to increase the perception of quality programming. But you do that by sticking with the right number of things, while killing things off at the right time to make way for new ones."
Ratings, she insists, are only one of a "basket" of measures of success. "We are not driven by overnight ratings nearly as much as people say. What we want is for people to appreciate what they see." Measurement of programme "reach" matters greatly, she says, as do surveys of "memorability" and audience approval.
Yet here again BBC One is looking damaged. Executives were concerned in April when approval ratings reportedly fell to an alltime low. Bennett's explanation? It was merely a "seasonal" decline that has since been corrected.
Equally convenient is her spin on public concerns identified in Lord Burns's survey: audiences often assign programmes to the wrong channels, she says, so their criticisms probably relate to " television in general" rather than the BBC specifically. She clearly learned a few tricks up at Oxford from her music-scene friend, Tony Blair.
After university, where she read PPE, she took a graduate degree at the London School of Economics, co-editing a journal of international relations before joining the BBC as a news trainee in 1978. She has stayed ever since - apart from a three-year gap running the US Learning Channel - making her name launching series such as Walking With Dinosaurs, The Human Body and Animal Hospital.
She is married to Richard Clemmow, former head of BBC TV News, and they have two children.
As for her expertise in international diplomacy, that must have come in useful when Mark Thompson arrived earlier this year as director-general.
Only last year, Bennett publicly rubbished his strategy, when he was her predecessor as director of television, as "a mistake". Under Thompson, she declared, BBC One "took its eye off the ball" by neglecting the arts, and he was "frankly too blunt" in designating channels for particular genres.
Now that he is back as her boss, how well are they getting on?
"Mark and I absolutely have a good relationship, and he agrees with my strategy," she begins, launching into an extended and uninterruptible detour taking in factual programming, comedy, and BBC Three's raison d'être.
WHEN she took her present job in 2002, Bennett admitted that her " toughest challenge of all" was Saturday night entertainment on BBC One. Yet, with Johnny Vaughan's latest vehicle bombing, even the governors recently acknowledged that entertainment "continues to be a challenge".
Why can't she and Heggessey get it right? "It's starting to turn a corner," she insists, citing Strictly Come Dancing as "a funny, sincere, cross-generational show" that has a key role to play.
Would she have wanted Big Brother? "I don't feel that, in its current evil guise, Big Brother has enough content or purpose to be on the BBC," she says. "It's a great format that's lost its purpose - it's not to me a huge curiosity factor whether people are bonking under a table or on top of it."
What about that other Channel 4 hit, Wife Swap? "The first series, yes," she says. But now? "Your treatment of people matters. There is a nasty route you can go down - people might watch it, but I wonder what they feel about the experience. For me, whose side you are on is important. With [BBC One's] What Not to Wear, you end up with a transformative experience on behalf of the ordinary citizen. What I like is television that invests in humanism, so you come away with something more than shock value."
(Evening Standard, August 4 2004)
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