Acclaiming the departing BBC manager Danny Cohen as one of TV’s distinguished talents” in Saturday’s Guardian was kind,but using the phrase “whose credits include” with a list of excellent programmes is misleading nonsense. Everything we enjoy on television is not created by an elite at the top of the industry, but by the teams of people who actually make the programmes: the make-up artists, or electricians,researchers, sound-recordists, or camera operators,actors, runners, and set-designers,directors, writers etc.
At the BBC Danny enforced his belief that what these people needed were more and more layers of management in the form of commissioners to micro-manage them. This layer of office-dwellers he deemed so important that their names now appear in the credits of all BBC TV programmes (apart from the news). The result is a regime characterised at its worst by self-serving, and wasteful and intellect-numbingly unnecessary supervision,which undermines the creative independence and confidence of the programme-makers who actually make the shows we treasure. The bureaucratic over-management of the creative process has reached Orwellian proportions and there is currently a destructive climate of frustration and dread in television production.
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Source: theguardian.com