Considering the BBC is one of the best-funded communications companies in the world, its upper management has no excuse for some of the dreadful crimes it has commited against the English language. Take the ongoing project to take 16 per cent off the organisation’s running costs by cutting thousands of jobs. Now they could hardly call it “slash and burn” but “delivering quality first”? Really?
First impressions are that the new BBC director general, George Entwistle, will be delivering more of the same spiel. Following his first address to all his staff, I for one was left scratching my head as to what he was going on about. Here was what he had to say about the journalism side of the BBC operation:
The progress news and sport have made in testing the boundaries of our existing content forms suggest to me that genre structures pool expertise and challenge conventional thinking to the right degree.
Where is a BBC management-speak phrase book when you need one?
Now, I realise that Entwistle probably doesn’t write this stuff himself but you would think that somewhere in the BBC’s vast PR operation there was someone trained in the art of putting one word in front of another.
The next day, Entwistle told John Hymphrys on the Today programme that one of his core aims was to increase creativity by 20 per cent. Isn’t that a bit like saying everyone needs to have 13 per cent more fun and come up with programmes that are 7 per cent edgier and 14 per cent more original?
Fingers crossed news reporters don’t take the demand to be more creative too literally. Because not mentioning any names, that didn’t turn out too well for the BBC once before.
Dominic Ponsford is the editor of Press Gazette.
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