BBC 1 Controller Resigns Over Queen Fiasco

Philip M. Stone October 8, 2007

The controller of the BBC’s primary terrestrial channel, BBC1, has resigned as heads begin to roll over Buckingham Palace’s fury at the public broadcaster showing the media a trailer for a documentary that edited video out of context and embarrassed the Queen.

How serious an incident  was it? Take the Daily Telegraph’s lead paragraph, “On July 11 BBC 1 controller Peter Fincham stood up a press conference and libeled Her Majesty the Queen.” In the UK, for a public broadcaster it doesn’t get much worse than that!

The documentary about one year of the Queen’s life showed the monarch walking briskly in a hall clad in her robes of state. A voiceover explained she had just stomped out of a portrait photography shoot with American Annie Leibovitz because she was angry at being asked to remove her stately robes.  Annoyed she might have been, but she didn’t stomp out, in fact the video was actually of her walking to the shoot, not from it.

Fincham’s boss is said to be holding onto her job by a thread – the question there being what did she know and when did she know. Also gone is the creative director of RDF Media, the independent company that made the film, who admitted he incorrectly edited the footage. The BBC reportedly made clear if he stayed then the company could expect no further BBC commissions and that would really put a crimp in its business.

While the actual trailer was an embarrassment in itself what is even worse for the BBC is that, according to an internal BBC investigation, top executives had learned later that evening that the trailer was wrong, but instead of issuing an immediate mea culpa that could catch the morning newspapers they decided to wait until the next morning to see if there was much of a fuss. Big mistake, especially since this was happening at a time when the BBC was undergoing other “trust” issues and really just did not need this.

But even given all of this, few people thought the popular Fincham would have to go, a reprimand perhaps, but not falling on his sword. But it turns out he was one of those who decided against the mea culpa and to wait to see if there was any fall out, and that was considered an unforgiveable mistake. He should, according to the internal investigation, have referred the matter higher to very senior BBC officials, the inference being they would have been smart enough to smell danger and would have issued an immediate apology and admittance to the error.

He did pass the information along to his boss,  Jana Bennett, but she disputes that she was told the trailer itself was false, and she thought the problem was how Fincham introduced the clip to the media, and since that hasn’t been really clarified she apparently stays put.

“Although I take some comfort from Will Wyatt’s (writer of the internal report) conclusion that no-one consciously set out to defame or misrepresent the Queen in respect of the BBC’s preparation for the BBC One launch (of the program), the fact is that serious mistakes were made which put misleading information about the Queen into the public domain,” said Mark Thompson, the BBC director general.

He announced measures to close the barn door after the horse had escaped -- ranging from appointing senior executives to monitor standards, to ensuring that serious incidents are quickly referred to senior executives. (One might have thought Controller of BBC1 was high enough, but since he made the wrong decision the director-general has basically opened the floodgates for executives to push decision-making to the next highest level in times of doubt so they can cover themselves. There are all sorts of management books out there that say executives should be made to make decisions and not send them higher but when it comes to embarrassing the Queen it seems there are exceptions.)

As for the program itself, Buckingham Palace has apparently demanded that the BBC not show it at all, and negotiations have been taking place since July with no final decision yet.

One cause of the problem was that the film was produced and edited by an independent company and the Wyatt Report has severely criticized the BBC for not recognizing “that a series with unprecedented access to the royal household had the potential to blow up in the BBC’s face.” And blow up it did. The Queen, we are told, was not amused.

Fincham’s resignation did not meet with unanimous approval although it was understood a senior executive had to take the blame. TheTelegraph’s TV editor took aim at the BBC’s director-general. “It is disastrous for the BBC to lose a man of Fincham’s talents and experience…. For Thompson to allow him to go is yet another hysterical reaction from the DG’s (director-general) office to the BBC’s summer of crises.”

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