Sir John Tusa on Broadcasting

In defence of Radio 4: Thompson's 'targets' are missing the point

Mark Thompson, the BBC's director-general, doesn't sit around twiddling his fingers. A fortnight ago, he was the visionary and revolutionary, redefining the BBC's entire approach to the transmission of its programmes - sorry, that should read "to the delivery of its content". As he did so, he challenged - or even appeared to write off - old-style radio and television networks as mere "linear programming", the ones where you listen to one thing after another at a time when a controller decides you should. In its place, Thompson lauded the vision - or the necessity - of replacing linear programming with "on-demand distribution through a variety of platforms". Audiences increasingly listen to what they want, when they want, on whichever technological medium makes the programming available.

Last week Thompson was telling his controllers of the old-style linear radio programmes how they needed to shape up to improve those very channel formats for which there is - apparently - no long-term future. Is this a contradiction?

I doubt it. Thompson is more than capable of handling strategic vision and tactical adaptation at the same time. Even if - a big if - conventional radio channels based on linear programming do become less important over time, there is a huge existing audience that needs to be given the best possible programming now. That is what Thompson addressed last week.

But were the targets Thompson set for Radio 4's controller, Mark Damazer, the right ones? It's worth saying that the BBC's one-time neurotic twitch over Radio 4's "middle England" success seems to have subsided. It was the previous controller of Radio 4, James Boyle, who castigated Radio 4 for "super-serving the middle classes". Since then, under first Helen Boaden and now Mark Damazer, the network has concentrated on something more important than a pseudo-Marxist way of categorising its output. Radio 4 has committed itself to intelligence - not the excessively rarefied kind which has to be the stuff of the academic world, but the kind that presents ideas, knowledge and information at a serious level of comprehensibility.

Radio 4 has now been set the objective of responding more quickly to news and current events. More quickly still? More quickly than it already does through Today, The World at One, PM, the Six O'Clock News, and The World Tonight? It seems an odd objective to set when the BBC already has a totally reactive radio news station in Radio Five Live. If Radio Five Live delivers "breaking news", surely a more appropriate objective to set Radio 4 would be to strengthen still further its commitment to its own vision - "thinking news".

Such an approach would put - as the network usually does - a commitment to accuracy, scrutiny, and understanding at the top of its objectives. They would and should be more highly rated than the requirement to be reactive. "Reaction" by itself is fundamentally unthinking - even unserious - and it carries with it the sense of knee-jerk response to events, where response or reaction takes priority over thought. How can speed of response in itself be an absolute ideal?

In another odd-sounding objective for the network, they are told to make a "reactive topical drama strand". What has The Archers been doing for the past half-century, and doing it hugely successfully, mirroring the shifts of rural life and tying them in with recognisable human dramas. Of course, David Hare's Stuff Happens, a brilliant "reactive drama" about the US and the invasion of Iraq, showed what the genre can deliver. But to set "generating greater impact" and being reactive as objectives for drama has an over-prescriptive ring to it, one unlikely to produce the only kind of drama worth worrying about, great drama. Would a new Pinter count as providing "greater impact" in the terms set by the new objective? I doubt it.

Underlying it all is the increasingly fashionable wish to be "more topical". This means that a subject should be addressed only if it is recognisably part of today's or, at a push, this week's agenda. Yet some of the more successful evolutionary changes in Radio 4 programming have come from a shift away from the directly topical; Paddy O'Connell's sly wit on Sunday morning's Broadcasting House; Eddie Mair's calculated irreverence on the rejuvenated PM; Today's highly entertaining branching out into arts, philosophical and environmental discussions in the last half hour. Such broadcasting and broadcasters demonstrate that those who move beyond the reactive, past the topical, deliver greater impact - and delight.

There is a further explanation for the imposition of this somewhat odd set of objectives on Radio 4. Given its overall quality - apart from a number of household names who are audibly creaking in their studio chairs with complacency and comfort - Mark Thompson had to say something had to get better. But perhaps even he doesn't believe that change will come from the objectives so rigidly set out.

What's the collective noun for BBC DGs?

For years, they glowered at BBC governors, directors and broadcasters of all kinds from the wood-panelled walls of the Broadcasting House Council Chamber - the great and the not so good who have become director-general of the BBC. There was Lord Reith, staring, defying disagreement. There was Hugh Greene, hands in pocket. Now Greg Dyke has joined the gallery and all are rehung in chronological order in the south atrium of the media centre at White City.

The new work was duly celebrated last week by an extraordinary gathering of the BBC's recent past chairmen, DGs, MDs, controllers. Greg Dyke revealed that he had agreed to be painted by the war artist, John Keane, only after intense pressure by Mark Thompson. "I decided that the only reason Mark wanted me to be painted was that if the tradition wasn't continued, he wouldn't get painted either!" But Dyke's best line came when he looked round at the assembled company. There were Birt, Bland, Yentob in one cluster. There were Checkland, Fox, Cotton in a separate one. "Extraordinary party, this," said Greg. "It looks like a meeting of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission". "I'm all for truth," observed one. "But reconciliation with that lot? Never!"

Sir John Tusa, managing director of the Barbican Centre, was managing director of BBC World Service from 1986 to 1992